How to Free Yourself From Emotional Baggage After a Breakup

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When you carry hurt from a breakup, it can lower your self-esteem and make future relationships difficult. Communicating your emotions effectively and getting to the root of your emotional baggage can help you move forward. Work on your own self-awareness and make yourself a priority in order to be ready for a healthy, happy relationship.

Express Yourself

When a relationship ends, you may have emotions that have not yet been expressed. If you allow your emotions to go unexpressed, it can create emotional baggage, advises clinical psychologist Donna M. White in her PsychCentral.com article "Relationships: Breaking Up Without the Pain." Express your emotions in a healthy way, such as writing in a journal. You may try exercise in order to work through any emotions that may be aggressive in nature. This way you are doing something healthy for your body that is also healing. Expressing your emotions is important in resolving feelings after a breakup.

Get to the Root

One aspect of moving beyond relationship baggage is determining the cause of the baggage. It is possible your relationship with one or both of your parents created issues from childhood. Maybe you had your heart broken previously and have carried the hurt with you. Finding the source of your baggage is key in being able to move beyond it and be in a successful relationship. Confide in a trusted friend or seek out a counselor to help you determine the root of your issue.

Be True to You

When you carry emotional baggage you may feel fearful or defensive in a new relationship. Emotional issues keep you from accepting yourself as you are, says psychologist Lisa Firestone in her "Psychology Today" article "Becoming Your Real Self by Shedding the Baggage of Your Past." Emotional baggage can keep a person in a bad relationship or alone out of the fear of being rejected. Focus on being real with yourself and those around you. By working on yourself every day, you can shed the emotional weight you have carried.

Free Yourself of the Past

Getting rid of emotional baggage means not allowing past relationship issues to ruin any current or future relationships. If you were cheated on in the past, you should not punish any future partners with extreme jealousy or insecure behavior, advises licensed clinical social worker Rachel G. Baldino in her article "How to Stop Carrying Emotional Baggage from One Relationship to the Next" on the self-help website Sixwise.com. By projecting negative assumptions on potential partners, you are only setting yourself up for more heartbreak. Let go of what happened in past relationships and give any new partner a clean slate.