Are You Carrying Extra Baggage?

Do you get tired of dealing with so much baggage? And does your boyfriend feel like a bellboy having to shoulder some of it? Carrying around or even just moving around baggage from place to place gets to be quite burdensome. And is it really fair that your loved one has to at times play the bellboy role? Let's go through your baggage and see what you really need.

Is there baggage that we need? Well sure. You don't gain emotional maturity by throwing all of your life experience through the window. No, you gain maturity by embracing your life experience, analyzing it, and deciding what is necessary for you to be you. The same experience that brought you heartache in your twenties will be a vantage point in your forties.

So, how do you tell what is important baggage and what is fodder? For starters, you have to be willing to open your baggage wide open… and often. You must be willing to part with anything that does not fit, is torn or stained, is broken or is more than a decade old. This includes emotional scars, old boyfriends who are now "friends with benefits", traumas of the heart, and anything anyone did to you prior to finishing high school.

The Age Test
The first test for keeping or throwing out baggage is the age test. Like shoulder pads that went out-of-style in the 80's, why would you carry around hurt and heart-debris from the same decade? OK. He cheated with his secretary who looked like Joan Jett. So what if the woman you caught him in bed with looked like Melanie Griffith in "Working Girl." That was two decades ago. The same rule that applies to fashion applies to emotional baggage... if the next generation has an obsession with it, get rid of it!

"Does it Motivate You" Test
If knowing he left you for a thinner woman is helping you to lose thirty pounds, then keep it! If the knowledge makes you tear into a Sarah Lee cheesecake while it's still frozen... both the treat and the baggage GOTTA GO! The thing to consider is whether the baggage is a helper or a hindrance. Rank it on a scale from negative five to positive five. A negative five means, "I'm stuck in the muck and cannot move forward" while a positive five means "I'm obsessed with improving my life." Anything that ranks a "zero" is probably not baggage. When looking at the issues that make up your baggage, it is important to consider how your current relationships are being affected - and not just romantically speaking.

If your mother never loved you and now you cannot get along with women... BIG ISSUE.

If your high school boyfriend cheated on you with the head cheerleader and now as a thirty year-old woman you refuse to let your man watch football… BIG ISSUE.

If you gain eighty pounds after seeing your boyfriend check out another woman… BIG ISSUE.

Needing to control every aspect of your boyfriend’s life… BIG ISSUE.

Medium-sized issues would be things like the occasional hack into your boyfriend’s email account or calling all of the female sounding names in his cell phone… and asking them if they know who you are. If something from your past is preventing you from making or keeping friends or establishing long-term relationship, then you might consider professional guidance to help you manage or get rid of excess baggage.

The bottom line for all men and women who find themselves with extra baggage that gets in the way of achieving success… Check it at the door. Hand it off to the bellboy and bid them both farewell. Also, if you find yourself in a relationship with someone who is not capable of shedding their baggage and you find yourself mucking about in their out-of-style, decades old stuff, well, you tell them… before you come in, CHECK IT AT THE DOOR!