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Step 12: Ditch Your Emotional Baggage
“The healing is in the feeling”
Nicholas de Castella, Keys to Emotional Mastery
That ever-growing stock of emotional baggage that you've been carrying around since childhood is like big red flashing neon sign over your head that says “Run away!!!” to the women you want to attract and “Come and get some more!!!” to damaged women with unhealed emotional baggage of their own.
The effects of your unprocessed emotional baggage are on dis- play for all to see, whether you acknowledge it or not. Sometimes we're the last people to notice that we even have anything there to process. Yet it's like a millstone around your neck, and a huge weight on your back which stops you from feeling good about yourself, having what you want in life, and ultimately getting the sort of relationships with women that you want.
Women have a sixth sense for this kind of thing. Even if they can't describe it exactly, they'll know that there's something go- ing on that makes them wary of you. The only way to hide this is to completely shut down emotionally; which is a tactic that many men often learn with the tacit approval of those around them. Our society often encourages men to shut their emotions down, and even many women fail to notice the inherent conflict in the notion of the “ideal” man being both invincible, and emotionally available all at the same time.
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Attempting to engage with a woman before we have dealt with the weighty emotional baggage that we all inevitably end up car- rying in life is like starting out by handing her a huge suitcase and saying “Here... how would you like to help me carry this?” We can whine about it all we want and blame women for not wanting to go near us with a barge pole, or we can accept that emotional baggage will repel women and is our responsibility to deal with.
If you don't deal with this, the wo- men that you attract will be carrying their own complementary baggage that you don't really want either. Chances are that if you get involved with a damaged woman you'll both end up even more damaged than when you started. Psychologists call this kind of relationship codepend- ency. Don't go there.
Now if you happen to think that you have never had any emotional bag- gage to deal with, I suspect it's just that you're so out of touch with your emotions that you can't see it. Nobody makes it out of childhood alive without some form of emotional injury that needs to be healed if we are to maximize our full potential. Us guys are typically so crap at getting in touch with our emotions that we've often got some work to do just to find out what the baggage is, let alone how to deal with it.
Often some life-crisis like a relationship breakdown, the onset of serious depression, major financial loss or a business failure is
What To Do
•Get in touch with your feelings •Broaden your
emotional vocabulary •Get some therapy •Watch Good Will
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necessary to wake us up to what we've been dragging around most of our lives. The upside of all this is that once we recognize that we are carrying some emotional baggage and begin to deal with it, the positive impact in our lives far exceeds what we ex- pected because we were underestimating just how badly it had been weighing us down before.
Women are attracted to guys who are capable of expressing emo- tion. This is why artists, musicians, writers, dancers and other professions which involve some form of emotional connection are so appealing to women. If you find that you never cry, never get angry, never feel joy, never experience ecstasy, never feel ex- cited or that any other normal emotion is not a natural part of your emotional repertoire, that's a great place to explore to start the healing process. Despite the bullshit you were taught at school, boys can, do, and should cry whenever it's appropriate; and that doesn't just mean at funerals, when your team wins the grand final, or at the birth of your children. If you find yourself restricted to these occasions only, it's a good hint that you've shut down emotionally and have a backlog of unprocessed pain to deal with like the ever-growing catchment of a dam on a river which is completely blocked. If you're a dribbling mess, de- pressed, anxious, alcoholic, gambling, or just generally unhappy much of the time, that's a hint for where you should start too. Chances are you could do with some emotional healing. There are a myriad of avenues for this available, all of which will in- volve enabling you to experience the full spectrum of emotions from the most pleasant to the most unpleasant. Do not avoid this step simply because you want to avoid experiencing unpleasant emotions; this is the very thing that causes the emotional bag- gage to accumulate in the first place. Emotional problems often
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manifest themselves in specific life problems such as addictions, gambling, alcoholism, smoking, and using recreational drugs or religion to avoid reality. There are specialist services for dealing with each of these and other specific problems which can help you get to the root cause of your buried emotional pain faster. There is often no clear dividing line between buried pain, with all it's troubling emotional consequences, and full-on mental health problems. They are different degrees of the same thing. Most people are deeply ashamed of the idea of seeking help with any kind of emotional or mental problem. If you feel this way, your buried shame is preventing you from being completely free and this is a symptom of the very problem which is keeping your unprocessed emotional issues buried. Reluctance to approach a psychologist, psychiatrist, counselor, doctor, life coach, minister or other professional to begin dealing with your emotional bag- gage because you're worried what other people would think if they find out is a strong hint that you need to go ahead and do- ing it anyway.
When I first saw a psychologist to deal with the deep emotional wounds that I carried from my childhood well into adulthood, I was petrified about other people finding out. I didn't even want to park my car in the car park of the office 10 miles from where I lived in case someone recognized it and worked out why I was there. It was several years before I told anyone other than the girlfriend who had dragged me there kicking and screaming, that I even went. My weekly visits to the psychologist were like a clandestine operation, conducted under the cover of darkness. Many of us are still carrying shame from our childhood, and this shame is exactly what will stop us from getting the help we need
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to deal with it. I wish I had started to deal with mine earlier; the sooner I started, the sooner I would have finished.
Us guys tend to bury our emotional baggage very deep, and of- ten it will bubble up unexpectedly in some area other than where we first encountered it, like our health, our finances, or our rela- tionships. Even once we think we've dealt with it, often there are other layers yet to discover, much like peeling an onion. Don't be discouraged if you have huge breakthroughs in therapy one minute and yet find stuff coming up again a day, week, month or year later. It's not that the previous attempts at healing didn't work; it's just that those attempts have got you closer to the core of your pain and now something else is exposed that you are in a place to deal with.
Bad shit happens in life sometimes. Unless we have ways to deal with emotional baggage on an ongoing basis we will keep accu- mulating it in the future. You can't just deal with it once and ex- pect to go the rest of your life without accumulating any more. Life is as painful, disappointing, depressing, discouraging and frustrating at times as it is joyous, wonderful, encouraging, fant- astic, inspiring and effortless at others.
You need a supportive environment around you which allows you to deal with emotional upsets as they occur so that the bag- gage doesn't regenerate. Meaningful relationships with other men are ideal for this; but sadly most friendships us guys tend to have with other men don't qualify since they lack emotional depth. Find yourself some male friends with whom you can re- late without censoring the painful or emotionally unpleasant parts of your experience of being a man. You will be surprised to find that other men go through exactly the same sort of stuff that
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you've been through and often are not dealing with it even half as well as you are.
Group situations like Alcoholics Anonymous or Gamblers An- onymous are often helpful, but beware the philosophy that says “Once an X, always an X”. Your job is to deal with the pain and move on so you can have a great life; not get stuck in some per- petual support group where you only hang around with other people who have the same problem that you once had. Have an exit strategy that gets you out of the
group once your buried pain has been revealed and healed, and into another social context with people who have what you want to move towards in life; not what you want to move away from.
Becoming a confident man will be a struggle unless you deal with your emotional baggage. So suck it in,
and get those tear ducts flowing. Be a man: pick up the phone, and book an appointment with some capable professional who you can relate to, and start to deal with your emotional baggage, and your buried pain.
Next we'll look at some specific emotions and how to master them.
What To Avoid
•Burying unpleasant emotions even deeper by avoiding them•Women with weighty emotional baggage of their own
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