Emotional Baggage

“Emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it.” Vincent Van Gogh.

Emotional reactions are like pop-up windows; they come up automatically when your buttons are pushed! You must’ve realised that certain stimuli provoke specific emotions leading to a predictable behaviour in you. And if the wrong buttons are pushed, they trigger negative reactions! All this happens because each one of us is walking around with some emotional baggage.

Emotional baggage can be simply defined as painful memories of mistrust, hurt, loss or rejection carried around from the past.

To be successful and live the life of your dreams, you must meet life’s challenges with equanimity. You must be focussed, clear headed and positive. But, some carry a heavier baggage than the others; hence their progress towards success is slowed down or even fraught with frequent stoppages, simply trying to pull the excess weight.

Emotional baggage manifests itself in many unpleasant ways. It can make you mistrust people, and stop you from having meaningful personal or professional relationships. It can make you too scared to take a step forward because of perceived threats. It can stop you from fighting back for yourselves. It can stop you from asking for support when you most need it, out of fear of rejection or failure. It can make you become a control freak, a yeller, a whiner, an escapist……the list is endless.

Your emotional baggage weighs down your personality. Even when you put up a grand show of being stable, rational and confident, it is lurking in the background to rear its ugly head when the wrong buttons are pushed. Then, it bursts forth with the intensity of a tidal wave to wash away all that you aspire to be.

Since change is an inherent property of the environment around you, you cannot continue to react to situations in a pattern defined by your childhood traumas or other unpleasant experiences. It means you need to get rid of the emotional baggage dragging you down. This task is not easy, but it must be done. Here are four steps to doing it.

# Become aware of your incorrect behaviour!
Accept that your behaviour needs to change and give no excuses or justification for it.

# Recognise the stimulus!
When you find a similar negative reaction repeating itself, try to map the different situations that led to the behaviour. More often than not you will realise that the stimulus to the reaction has been the same.

# Analyse and Forgive!
Try to unearth childhood experiences or other traumas that first caused you to react this way. Forgive those who wronged you then; forgiveness is a great healer. Tell yourself that the people and the situations of the past are not relevant any more. Teach your mind to live in the present instead of the past.

# Plan your Reaction!
Having recognised the stimuli to your emotional responses, you can plan how you will react the next time similar stimuli occur.

Life is a moving stream. If you do not dump excess baggage before you get on to the boat, you will sink. Hence, though the task is daunting, if you have resolved to change, you will succed in sculpting a beautiful personality and be rewarded with a more fulfilling life!

© Sujata Khanna. All rights reserved.

Ban The Burqa?

French President Nicolas Sarkozy intention to rid France of facial coverings worn by Muslim women was realized on Tuesday when the French Senate voted to outlaw all such veils in public spaces. The vote is regarded as eliminating a threat to France’s secular values and another step towards integrating Europe’s largest Muslim population.

Source: frontpagemag.com, September 17, 2010

Hesse, a state run by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, on Wednesday became the first German region to ban Muslim face veils for public sector workers. Hesse Interior Minister Boris Rhein announced it was “not acceptable as public sector workers are obligated to have neutral religious and political views”. A poll last year showed 61 percent of Germans favoured a burqa ban.

Source: www.blogs.reuters.com, February 3, 2011

Freedom of lifestyle choices is the basic tenet of democracy. The symbolism of the burqa, whether it represents subservience or anything else, is philosophical mulling! If Muslim women want to wear burqas, it is their prerogative and it is as okay as women’s prerogative to wear strapless evening gowns to ball-parties the name of fashion. And in any case, if someone chooses to be subservient, then that is a choice too!

Having said that, let me put forth that I am in favour of banning the burqua for all the right reasons. There is the issue of security. The burqua must be banned because it conceals the identity of the person wearing it. Who knows, who is behind that burqua, a ‘subservient, harmless, god-fearing Muslim woman’ or a ‘cold-blooded, indoctrinated terrorist hiding a bomb’. Hence, covering your body from head to toe is okay, but you must show your face for identification. Also billowing garments must be banned as they can conceal objects of destruction.

Security is an overriding concern for all nations, far more important than any single religious practice. Infact, there must be some common international code for conduct in public places and all nations must implement it, regardless of how many religions this code of conduct offends.

© Sujata Khanna. All rights reserved.