Is It Bad To Have “Baggage”?

Why You Shouldn’t Fear Your “Baggage” 

There is nothing more frightening than imagining the traumatic experiences of someone you come into contact with, whether a friend or a relative. The idea that someone may have had a painful past scares us and often pushes us away.

A person who enters our circle of intimacy has all the chances to bring their positivity but also their problems, – and thus, we believe this person can – somehow parasitize our life. Why do we react this way? Is it out of pure selfishness? Is the baggage always bad?

First of all, we all have experiences that can be more or less painful. We manage to live in spite of this and very often it makes us stronger or at least deeper. The ability to sympathize with and understand others is often directly related to the quality and depth of our own experience. Sometimes people protect themselves from people with “baggage” because they do not know how to deal with such a new and unknown situation. Their lack of empathy is sometimes the result of a life that has not given them the opportunity to develop their inner world. However, compassion can be developed through gentleness and benevolence; it is not necessary to have had a negative emotional shock. It is simply necessary take advantage of an environment that has enhanced the emotional dimension of life and has not repressed it.

This explains why people befriend each other strongly when they have either had similar common experiences or when they have benefited from an environment that places the same level of importance on their emotional dimensions.

There is a problem, however, when this baggage becomes a burden. The problem arises when this baggage has never been emptied and the person has not been able to overcome the trauma they have suffered. In such cases, the person can become toxic to those around them, which is why people try to avoid it: they cannot solve the problems that the person must to face themselves.

A friendship consists of an exchange of positive interactions and a mutual respect for each other’s limits. When someone is haunted by their past, they cannot respect the conditions of a healthy friendship or love. That is why it is necessary to inspect one’s own life traumas and how one interacts with others. Do we allow our emotions and our past to interfere with our relationship with others?

It is not always easy to answer this question. Sometimes it is enough to ask or simply observe: are we scaring people away? If so, we have to question ourselves and try to solve what can make us unreachable.

Childhood wounds are never easy to overcome. Yet they must be healed, otherwise they will forever poison our relationship with the outside world. Our baggage is our history, if we have managed to get rid of it, we have managed to mature and grow beyond it. We cannot rebuild our past, so we should not surround ourselves with people who are not ready to accept what we have experienced  even though we have triumphed over it. A caterpillar can’t befriend a butterfly. The latter frightens them. There is a misunderstanding because they don’t have the same experience: one still needs to evolve…