Let’s face it dating in midlife, or your third act, makes it more difficult to find someone who isn’t carrying a cartload of emotional baggage. But here’s the problem, while you’re focused on avoiding other people’s emotional baggage you’re avoiding dealing with your own. You may not be aware of it, but it’s possible you’re carrying enough emotional baggage to tip you over the maximum weight for a new relationship.

Whether you’re divorced or single/never married, once you’re over forty you can’t help but cart your emotional baggage into your dating life. This doesn’t have to be a life sentence blocking you from long-lasting love. The truth is, it’s never too late to find the love of your life.

Exploring the different types of emotional baggage puts you in the driver’s seat to make necessary changes and open your heart to love again. No matter your circumstances your past in love doesn’t have to look like your future.

Even though the details are unique to you, the hurt, sadness, shame, and guilt from failed relationships are universal. Your past experiences don’t have to block you from sharing the rest of your life with the love of your life.

What kind of emotional baggage are you carting around that’s keeping you single?

5 Types Of Emotional Baggage Blocking You From Love

1. Your Exes

Every time a relationship ends, you collect a brand-new duffel bag to add to your collection of emotional baggage. These bags can be labeled, “I don’t ever want to feel (or experience) that again!”

Perhaps your ex cheated on you—you’ll never want to feel the pain of a betrayal again. It makes logical sense to focus on finding someone who’s loyal and would never cheat. However, that’s simply the foundation of a desirable relationship, and doesn’t help you to find an ideal match.

Perhaps you and your ex grew in different directions (or your ex never grew at all while you continued to evolve) and you found yourselves living like two strangers in the same house.

You may imagine it’s a good idea to only date people who attend the same personal growth workshops, spiritual retreats, or place of worship as you. However, the right match will be a different person from you and may have different strategies for implementing similar values.

Whatever the catalyst for your heartbreak, having elaborate strategies to avoid repeating the same mistakes doesn’t help you find the right person. You can’t create from lack so concentrating on finding not a cheater, or someone not emotionally unavailable, will keep you stuck finding the same person who is not a good match for you.

It’s like trying NOT to think of a pink elephant. First, you must see the pink elephant and then negate it to remove the image from your mind. By focusing on what you don’t want to experience you’ll end up attracting the kind of person you’re trying to avoid.

It’s easy to convince yourself you already know what you want. Sadly, most people are clear on what they don’t want, while their desired outcome is vague and unclear.

Release Emotional Baggage By Discovering The Gifts From Past Relationships

Having your heart broken is a rite of passage. It’s only an issue when you close your heart to new experiences. Thinking of each relationship as a stepping stone to the right one allows you to move forward and not be hung up on past hurts and disappointments.

If you’ve ever had food poisoning, you wouldn’t give up eating at a restaurant forevermore. You simply would not return to the one that made you ill.

Discover the gifts from your past relationships. If every experience in life is an opportunity to grow, you can always learn, evolve, and make better choices the next time around.

2. Your Unrealistic Expectations

Do you have the unrealistic expectation of thinking your baggage should be without any blemishes, easy to carry, and beautiful to look at?

If yes, you may be setting yourself up for continuing disappointment in love. Unrealistic expectations about yourself will spill over into any relationship. They make it impossible for anyone to live up to your expectations. Plus, it’s likely to also mean you have unrealistic expectations of your partner.

You may dream of a relationship that comes easily, with someone who just gets you, there’s no conflict, and they anticipate your needs so you never have to speak up. These fantasies of happily ever after are deeply ingrained in the collective subconscious. The idea that you’ll magically meet the right person one day going about your mundane day-to-day life has been wreaking havoc on your love life.

Even with your beloved there will be miscommunication and disagreements. You’ll disappoint each other and not every day will be rosy. That’s because your soulmate will always be a different person than you.

It’s unrealistic to think that another person will handle the same situations as you would. Different people respond differently to stress, loss, and challenges that inevitably come with spending your lives together. Just as you have challenges as a single person, you’ll also have those when you’re coupled up. It’s not reasonable to think that your partner will always be on the same page as you.

Release Emotional Baggage By Navigating Your Differences

A conflict doesn’t mean you’ve picked the wrong person—a conflict simply means you’re both human. Turning a conflict into a deeper connection is part of the skillset for lasting love.

Rather than expecting your partner will be like you, learn to appreciate and value your differences. Deferring to one another’s strengths creates a strong bond and delineates a division of labor within your household. You each get to the things your best at while nurturing the love between you to grow.

Discover the dynamic you desire between you and your soulmate, including how your desired relationship functions even when you don’t agree. Let go of your need for perfection and you may be surprised who shows up on your radar.

3. Your Projections

Projection is the attribution of one’s own feelings, thoughts, and behavior onto another person. This most often occurs with uncomfortable feelings of insecurity, anger, or shame, as a defense against anxiety. In short, projection is a self-defense mechanism.

It’s easier to project the thoughts and feelings you struggle with onto another person rather than take responsibility for them. A large part of emotional baggage is resistance to dealing with your own negative emotions and circumstances that make you uncomfortable.

Accepting responsibility for your faults isn’t easy, however, it’s essential to creating a healthy lasting relationship. If you grew up in a home where everyone dodged responsibility this idea may seem foreign or terrifying to you. Learning to take responsibility for your thoughts, feelings, and actions sets you free to love and accept yourself as is, which allows you to love an imperfect partner.

Release Emotional Baggage By Practicing Self-Acceptance

You are the common denominator in all your relationships—meaning you are the one constant. The realization that your struggle for lasting love is inside of you puts you in the seat of power to create the changes you desire. Mustering the courage to love your less than perfect self allows you to be authentic, more vulnerable, and curious about others so you can evaluate a match for the long term.

It’s the love of self that allows you to create long-lasting love with another.

4. Your Childhood Experiences

If you’ve ever said (or been tempted to say) something like, “You’re behaving just like my mother!” You know how much your childhood experiences have impacted your intimate relationships.

Your childhood wounds are the foundation for most of your emotional baggage—it’s when the first bag was packed. Upon your birth your parents immediately saddled you with generations of baggage that they probably weren’t even aware of. Every person has been raised by flawed people, who were raised by flawed people, and on back through the generations. This is the human condition; we are all flawed in some way.

Many of the beliefs and strategies you developed to cope with the circumstances of your childhood are still with you today. Maybe you get annoyed and nit-picky if someone doesn’t load the dishwasher exactly the way you prefer. You may get controlling when feeling anxious. Or perhaps you become passive-aggressive when you don’t get your way. You could also go into sacrifice when you love someone by denying your needs and pretending you don’t have any.

When conflict arises between you and a partner it’s common to revert to old strategies that you developed as a child. The person you’re in relationship with isn’t responsible for your childhood experiences. Nor are they treating you, “Just like your mother.”

Release Emotional Baggage By Owning Your Past

In a healthy relationship, you take responsibility for your childhood strategies and strive to develop new ones. You’ll work together to heal one another’s childhood wounds so you can love each other more deeply. Healing those wounds helps you put the past behind you.

5. Your Fears

There are plenty of things to be afraid of in this life—dark and dangerous streets at night, climate change, dying alone, and crumbling democratic norms, to name a few. Worrying about whether a stranger you meet for a first date will like you, is not one of them.

There’s a big difference between fearing for your physical safety while standing on the edge of a cliff, and an emotional fear that your date may reject you. To avoid fear of rejection, you may find yourself endlessly swiping left, closed off to everyone before someone can hurt you.

Release Emotional Baggage By Leaning Into Your Fears

Leaning into emotional fears moves you out of your comfort zone. It builds resilience and confidence. Stretching beyond norms creates trust with yourself and assurance you won’t self-abandon.

Self-abandonment is when individuals surrender their own needs and desires as an attempt to win approval or please others. Over time this strategy leads to disconnection from personal identity including individual preferences, like wants and needs.

Unpacking your emotional baggage and opening your heart to love doesn’t have to take years of therapy. Claiming your baggage puts you in the driver’s seat to change your circumstances moving forward. Leaving your emotional baggage behind let’s you begin a new relationship with a curious mind and an open heart.

If you’re sick and tired of relationships where your needs and wants are not met, and you’re ready to end the cycle of bad, toxic, or unfulfilling relationships altogether, join us for a complimentary Breakthrough Call. Together, we can show you how to release your emotional baggage and guide you to create a custom plan for the long-lasting love you desire and deserve.