You tell me.... What comes to mind immediately? My guess is we all have an idea of what we bring to a relationship that is potentially problematic. Go from there...
ghostoffuffle To me, baggage is stuff you lug around with you that weighs you down. It might be fears and resentments and pain from past family or romantic relationships that you bring with you into new relationships. When someone moves into a new home, there is usually a lot of stuff to throw out or put in a garage sale. You don't want to or can't take everything with you. Unfortunately, psychologically we carry a lot of stuff with us from childhood, from schooldays, and so on: fears, attitudes, issues. We don't even know what it is until it gets in the way -- we overreact to something, we don't trust someone. The good baggage from childhood becomes our personality. The bad baggage from childhood gets in the way. It's called baggage because it's both heavy and enclosed -- like in a suitcase. It's not obvious what it is that we carry with us, but it might come out inappropriately when we feel stressed or threatened. In tng's example above, baggage can also be the children from a relationship that you bring to a new one. A good therapist can help you get some insight into the baggage you are carrying around and help you separate out the strands that you want to keep as part of your identity from the strands that you can discard. Sometimes it's hard to know which is which. If I have a preference that I want to cling to -- a preference for NO YELLING and DON'T THROW THINGS -- because I used to live with an asshole with yelled and threw things -- is that baggage for me to be irritated when my current husband raises his voice? I don't care - JUST DON'T YELL AT ME. On the other hand, if I once had a bad experience with swordfish and refused to eat it again because of the bad experience - that's baggage. Luckily, I'm over that mostly.
In a very literal way, baggage weighs you down, because you're carrying the stuff you need to survive. I think this analogy can work mentally as well. All the negativity that we may carry as baggage (hurt, abuse, mental illness, etc.) is stuff that can be drawn upon later in life to try to avoid repeating old mistakes. So, while baggage is heavy, there's no reason why it can't be useful.To me, baggage is stuff you lug around with you that weighs you down.
The girl who was so hurt in her first romantic encounter that she decides never to trust anyone with her heart again... that's baggage and is protecting her, but getting in the way of her other goal which is to be in a relationship.So, while baggage is heavy, there's no reason why it can't be useful.
Yes, and that's the dilemma. It can be useful to us and also get in the way. We packed those emotional things to protect ourselves. It's just that as we grow older, the things we needed to protect ourselves as a child might now be stopping us from achieving other goals. One example which I may have mentioned here before: the students in my classes who cannot get up to speak in class because they were humiliated when they were in elementary school. They decided early on to never be in a position to be humiliated again. While this may have protected them early on, it is just getting in their way now. That's baggage that no longer serves them.
Yes, but that's the importance of introspection. Why did I feel humiliated? What was it that hurt me so bad? Can I love again? Without these experiences, we couldn't answer these questions. The important thing is being able to ask them and to actually try hard to find some answers. A static life is one in which we never can grow. We all try to avoid hurt (and rightfully so), but without it, what could we ever learn about life?
Weird twist to the analogy, though: the heavier your emotional baggage, the longer you carry it.
I think lil's definition is the one that's more conventionally accepted- your personal "baggage" described above seems more like possibly the result of baggage rather than the baggage itself. But looking at it both ways: 1 (your way): problem as I see it is that the person least qualified to identify my most detrimental qualities vis a vis interpersonal relationships is me. Reason being, I have a skewed view of myself given that I have access to my inner monologue. So how I see myself doesn't necessarily align with how others see me, for better or worse. I might think I'm worse than I am, because I'm privy to all the negative thoughts that others have no access to. Likewise, others might recognize my less savory aspects long before I do. I have my own value system, and I rate my thoughts/interactions by that subjective value system; are the things I see as "bad" in myself actually the qualities most detrimental to my outside relationships? Example: from my perspective, my most worrisome qualities: temper, anxiety/depression, lack of follow-through. However, when I posed the question to my wife, she saw little of those qualities leaking out into the real world in a meaningful way. She said that my "baggage" (by your definition) had more to do with doubts re. self worth when it comes to my professional/creative legacy. I've been struggling for a long time with how to define myself as a productive member of society, and that ends up coloring my interactions and world views. This is so fundamental that it would have gone right over my head if it hadn't been pointed out to me. Another example: my two best friends from high school came up with a nickname for me a couple years ago: Scam. Because, they say, I'm always looking for the angle and fixing to turn things to my advantage. The name, and the circumstances under which they chose it for me, seems absurd. We were out on a drunken bender, I had to pee, and without telling anybody what I was doing or why, I walked right off the path, crawled over the patio of some downtown law office, hopped a hedge and let loose behind some trashcans. How is this evidence that I'm always looking for the advantage? I dunno. I see it as evidence that my bladder is small and I've been forced to make a habit of constantly mapping out every secret place I might be able to unleash in public. But they insist it's just a good allegory for how I am with life. Always scammin', man. Wouldn't have considered that without their input. But then, maybe the best scammer is the one that convinces himself he's not a scammer? 2 (lil's definition): I'm an occasional subscriber to the theory that we ALL carry baggage from childhood; be that your run-of-the-mill high school baggage or, if you're unlucky, deeper stuff from before, either from within the home or without. I had some household drama that I still carry with me, but I'm not going to pretend that I came from a broken home or anything. My home life was just fucked up enough to teach me some valuable lessons about stress and how you manage it around your kids; not fucked up enough to imprint on me and negatively influence the way I treat loved ones. As for high school, I'm pretty sure that no matter how popular you are, no matter how well-adjusted, you WILL come out of that shit show with some baggage. If for no other reason than we're a mess in high school on like a fundamental, physiological level and any halfway traumatic experience will gum up the works. Romantic stuff, particularly. Reading these comments reinforces this idea for me. Personally, I went through a series of weird relationships in high school. Some weird in all the old boring ways, one weird on a whole other level that sent ripples down the emotional line for years and years. Baggage for days. I've since then shed almost all of that baggage and good riddance, but it took some hard work, self-reflection and an ultimatum or two. Makes me think that maybe high schoolers should be banned from having relationships. Oh, they should have lots of sex, but they shouldn't get anywhere near relationship status, because who knows what love or caring is at that point. You're liable to do more long-term damage than good. (EDIT this might have been a shitty generalization. Input welcome.)
Then again, maybe this is just the onset of crotchety adulthood talking? I'd be interested to hear about this from the perspective of the high school kids around here.