Unpack Your Emotional Baggage

Burdened by unresolved feelings? You can lighten the load with a few helpful tools, says Ulrike Fach-Vierth

There are moments in our lives when we cease to understand ourselves. I experienced such a moment while playing a ball game with my dog. I had managed a good throw and Lotta was racing across the park when a man from dog control approached me. He asked to see my dog registration, and told me I wasn’t allowed to play here with Lotta. Straight away I realised this encounter was not going to be a friendly one. And indeed it wasn’t. But instead of displaying some degree of confidence and toughing things out, I imploded. There were tears; I started verbally abusing the man, was completely out of control, and afterwards had absolutely no explanation for my downright hysterical despair. Where had all these feelings suddenly come from? How was this total stranger able to unhinge me like this? And why did all my otherwise perfectly functional control mechanisms suddenly fail?

Feel every feeling

Years later, I found an answer in a book by bestselling author Vivian Dittmar. According to Vivian, when we experience difficult moments, we often don’t confront the emotions that accompany them head on. Instead these residual feelings end up in our emotional baggage along with all of our other suppressed feelings. “There, they wait for an opportunity to be re-felt so that the experience can be completed. If this opportunity arises, a load of feelings are activated,” says Vivian.

Rage or retreat