Emotional baggage is an everyday expression that correlates with many varied but similar concepts within social sciences, self-help movements, and other fields: its general concern is with unresolved issues of an emotional nature, often with an implication that the emotional baggage is detrimental.
As a metaphorical image, it is that of carrying all the disappointments, wrongs, and
trauma of the past around with one in a heavy load.
Adult life
In adult life, emotional baggage comes to the fore in relationships in two main forms.
*First, there are the often negative expectations created by ''previous'' relationships, perhaps of an
abusive nature—a kind of bondage to the past that can contaminate new and potentially more positive interactions. This may be particularly apparent in a second marriage where, in
Virginia Satir
Virginia Satir (26 June 1916 – 10 September 1988) was an American author and psychotherapist,http://www.psychologistanywhereanytime.com/famous_psychologist_and_psychologists/psychologist_famous_virginia_satir.htm recognized for her approach t ...
's words, “shadows from the past are very real and must be dealt with by the new marital pair”.
*The second type of memories contributing to adult emotional baggage are recurrent bringing-up of the history of the ''current'' relationship, with the result that minor problems in the present become overwhelmed by negative currents from earlier times which cannot be resolved or set aside for good.
Childhood
Behind adult problems, however, there may be deeper forms of emotional baggage rooted in the experiences of childhood, but continuing to trouble personality and behaviour within the adult.
Men and women may be unable to leave the pain of childhood behind, and look to their partners to fix this, rather than to address more adult concerns.
Cultural and parental expectations, and patterns of behaviour drawn from the family of origin and still unconsciously carried around, will impact on a new marriage in ways neither partner may be aware of.
Similarly, as parents, both sexes may find their own childhood pasts hampering their efforts at more constructive child-rearing, whether they repeat, or seek to overcompensate for, parental patterns of the past.
Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy (also psychological therapy, talk therapy, or talking therapy) is the use of psychological methods, particularly when based on regular personal interaction, to help a person change behavior, increase happiness, and overcome prob ...
addresses such emotional baggage of the client under the rubric of
transference
Transference (german: Übertragung) is a phenomenon within psychotherapy in which the "feelings, attitudes, or desires" a person had about one thing are subconsciously projected onto the here-and-now Other. It usually concerns feelings from a ...
, exploring how early development can create an internalised 'working mode' through which all subsequent relationships are viewed; while the concept of
countertransference
Countertransference
is defined as redirection of a psychotherapist's feelings toward a client – or, more generally, as a therapist's emotional entanglement with a client.
Early formulations
The phenomenon of countertransference (german: G ...
on the therapist's part acknowledges that they too can bring their own emotional baggage into the analytic relationship.
[Pamela Thurschwell, ''Sigmund Freud'' (2009) p. 39]
See also
*
Backstory
A backstory, background story, back-story, or background is a set of events invented for a plot, presented as preceding and leading up to that plot. It is a literary device of a narrative history all chronologically earlier than the narrative of ...
*
Personal equation The term personal equation, in 19th- and early 20th-century science, referred to the idea that every individual observer had an inherent bias when it came to measurements and observations.
Astronomy
The term originated in astronomy, when it was d ...
*
Repetition compulsion
Repetition compulsion is the unconscious tendency of a person to repeat a traumatic event or its circumstances. This may take the form of symbolically or literally re-enacting the event, or putting oneself in situations where the event is likely ...
*
Self-fulfilling prophecy
A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that comes true at least in part as a result of a person's or group of persons' belief or expectation that said prediction would come true. This suggests that people's beliefs influence their actions. ...
References
{{Reflist
Further reading
* Patenaude A
Emotional Baggage: Unresolved Grief, Emotional Distress, Risk Perception, and Health Beliefs and Behaviors 2005*
Joseph LeDoux, 'Indelibility of Subcortical Emotional Memories', ''Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience'' (1989) vol 1 238-43
External links
Losing Your Emotional BaggageEmotional Freedom Technique Certification
Emotion
Emotional issues
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