Dealing with Baggage in a Relationship

Did you know that our core wounds consciously or unconsciously are influencing your love life? Many of us carry baggage into a relationship with us and it’s always there, hiding in the wings.

We all develop some form of coping mechanisms as a way to protect our core wounds however, many of those strategies are no longer serving us and in fact are screwing up our love life.

These core wounds typically fall into five categories:

Worthiness
Belonging
Prioritization
Trust
Safety

While these labels may not directly mirror your life themes, they reside deep within your subconscious, shaping your thoughts, words, choices, desires, and actions.

On some level, you may have realized that you have some unresolved issues or baggage that you’ve been carrying around from past relationships or even from your childhood that is causing you to feel blocked in your love life.

How to Heal from Baggage in a Relationship

A large part of what I do with my clients privately or in a group setting is to uncover the recurring patterns and behaviours, all the back to where they first began.

Why? Because these core wounds influence your thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

They fuel conflicts in your relationships.
They hinder you from setting and enforcing healthy boundaries.
They lead to self-sabotage actions.
They result in attracting emotionally unavailable partners.
They prevent you from overcoming challenges and embracing emotional connections.

These behaviours are patterns developed as a way of coping with early life experiences closely linked to your core wounds. These wounds stem from childhood programming, influenced by what you saw, heard, felt, and experienced.

While these patterns and behaviours may have served you during your formative years, they now work against you. In fact, they are most likely keeping you stuck or blocked from having what you want in love.

In the Confident in Love program, we explore these core wounds in Pillar 1; Love Blueprint.

The worthiness wound often originates from feeling abandoned by a parent during childhood. They may have physically left or emotionally were not available for you. You might have taken their actions personally and internalized them. Or caused you to develop feelings that you’re not deserving of love, and feel unworthy of their attention.

Harmful statements or verbal abuse from parents is another form of how we may experience the worthiness wound. Statements like “you’re of no value, you’ll never achieve anything, you were a mistake.” are programmed into you and believed as true.

As an adult, there may be parts of you that don’t feel like you’re good enough as you are to receive love, attention, affection, appreciation, or acceptance.

You know, consciously, that none of these things are true and yet, it’s still there deeply embedded in how and what you were programmed to think about yourself.

Our early home environment is where we learn whether we matter or not, whether we are worthy or not, or whether we are deserving or not.

These insecurities can manifest in your relationships in certain ways:

You find yourself over-giving or people-pleasing to make your relationship work.

You find that you don’t let anyone get too close to your heart

You’re guarded and don’t like being vulnerable.

You struggle to receive compliments, recognition or help from a partner.

You rarely speak up and share your thoughts and feelings

Our core wounds show up in a variety of ways in our love life.

Healing this worthiness wound requires self-inquiry into your childhood experiences, identifying the cause of the wound, creating a safe space for your nervous system to heal, and recognizing how this wound still impacts your life today.

Here are two questions for your self-inquiry:

“I’m unworthy because _______.”
“If I believed I was worthy, one way I would show up differently is _______.”

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

I know for me it has been journey of recognizing where my core wounds show up in my love life and the different ways I have created adaptive behaviours. It took me years to finally realize that I’m worthy of the love I desire and deserve. In my attempt to feel worthy in the past, I would play small and tolerate unacceptable behaviour from others. I took everything personally and believed I was responsible for everyone, leading to over functioning in my relationships.

If you’re interested in exploring these core wounds and not bringing forward this baggage in a relationship, consider joining me in the Confident in Love coaching program. Book a call with me and will see if this program is right for you.

Also check out some of my other blog posts: Affirmations for Self Acceptance, How to Deal with Overwhelming Emotions While Dating, and Is this Holding You Back in Dating?