See Yourself Series

Is your partner failing to meet your needs, not making you happy, are you drifting apart?

Are new relationships failing?

Maybe some of the cause of your problems is the amount of emotional baggage you are carrying that is impacting on your behaviour and your expectations.

How much emotional baggage are you carrying ?

Is emotional baggage impacting on a relationship, or stopping you making that new relationship successfully?

To make space in your life for a new relationship or to improve your current one, its time to start releasing anything you’ve been holding on to that is preventing you from experiencing true intimacy(baggage). Identifying those issues and working to eradicate them will bring you to a level of self-awareness that will give you insight, flexibility, and freedom, making you much more available for  satisfying relationships.  Heard the phrase  someone has “too much baggage” to be ready for a committed, connected relationship, its true. We have a set of beliefs about ourselves and others that we have gathered over the years many learned in childhood, these beliefs we use consciously and unconsciously to live our lives. The problem is that some of these truisms, beliefs …are negatives and some are actually untrue but we believe in them and they colour our actions and attitudes as we go about the daily grind.

Baggage isn’t always what we think it is. It isn’t necessarily our circumstances, our past, or even the issues we’re currently working with. Baggage is often just a lack of flexibility about accepting whatever is showing up in our life or someone else’s and therefore an inability to move forward.

We all have baggage. What’s important is recognizing our baggage and minimizing its effects on our relationships.

An underlying feeling of emptiness, loneliness, or longing is something many, if not most, of us have experienced at one time or another. No matter how rich our lives may be, with a satisfying career, material wealth, and plenty of friends, we may still be carrying around a low-level feeling that something important is missing. This can be made worse by negative thoughts about our lives.

The place many of us turn  to in order to address our feeling of incompleteness, is our  relationships.

Great you are saying, I find my other half ,my soul mate and everything will be hunky dorey. Maybe…but if all it takes is to find the significant other , why are so many relationships rocky? Is it that many of us have not  found the right fit, or is it the baggage that one or both of us is carrying that is impeding harmony.

Our  significant other can only offer us acknowledgment, encouragement, approval, acceptance, they cannot make us feel complete and whilst we have our baggage it will  never be enough to end our feelings of dissatisfaction of wanting.

Once we realize that a partner is not going to be the one to make us happy or give us everything we think we need to be complete, we’re likely to feel disappointed, discouraged, and maybe even resentful.

We often unknowingly drag a suitcase full of problems into a new relationship, drop them at our partner’s feet, and say, “Fix these for me!”The way out of this trap is to make a commitment to ‘being the one’ who will address your own issues,to be honest with yourself and look at the roots of your ideas, prejudices and behaviour. When you no longer need your partner’s validation, then any encouragement, love, or guidance your partner does offer you will be their very best, given freely and from a place of love. When validation is no longer the primary reason you’re in a relationship, you can explore, enjoy, and appreciate everything that relationship has to offer.

Samantha Beardon