Letting Go of Emotional Baggage

The pain we carry from the past weighs us down. So, how can we let go and begin to flourish? I've listened to some people who've been in very dark places and found a way to come out the other side.

Mar 09, 2025

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The world is full of people dragging invisible burdens. The weight of trauma often leaves them exhausted, sour or confused about what to do. The advice is to learn to let it go. But let’s be honest - and this is becoming a bit of a mantra - that’s easy to say and hard to do.

Vampire Weekend’s latest album, Only God Was Above Us (the cover of which is below), opens with this blunt statement:

“Fuck the world.”

It quickly becomes clear this is reported speech and the singer is criticising the person who said it for revelling in their negativity, going so far as to accuse them:

“You don’t want to win this war,

‘Cause you don’t want the peace.”

That’s a harsh claim. But hearing it, I was reminded that there are some people who are so attached to pain, they come to identify with it. They have become so used to war – they fear having to adjust to peace.

The final song on the album is called “Hope” and it carries a far kinder analysis and perspective. As the it develops, the frustratingly paradoxical nature of life is described in couplets including:

“The phoenix burned but did not rise,

Now half the body’s paralysed.”

Before we are informed:

“Your enemy is invincible,

I hope you let it go.”

We are being reminded that so many human behaviours are a misguided attempt to make sense of things. The band is summing up a description of the exhaustion, confusion and even bitterness life can engender if we keep fighting and don’t learn to let go.

Just as learning to accept what you can’t change isn’t about giving up, encouraging someone to let go is not a counsel of despair. Rather, it can be a profound cure. A way not only of shifting perspective, but also finding a workable, liveable way to be. Some of the wisest people recommend it.

Let me try to explain what they do and do not mean by letting go – and why it has had such a profound impact on me.

Letting go is about dissociating from negative thoughts and feelings that poison and distort our lives. When I forced myself to look closely, my behaviour was underpinned by some thinking that had sent me tearing off in the wrong direction, chasing shadows.

Those thoughts included:

- I do not deserve to be loved.
- The needs of certain others must always come before my own.
- I can’t feel joy.

When I went even deeper:

- If I don’t over-extend myself and achieve, it will all have been futile
- I need to fight many battles, because I - wrongly - believe it strengthens an identity that others will applaud and feel grateful for.

You may have your own versions. When I stopped to analyse mine, I realised that somewhere in my young mind I had - misguidedly - come to believe that these beliefs and behaviours helped me make sense of the world and were a way to be okay. One of the first conversations I had with a therapist really struck me. She said:

“We are all trying to make things okay. We learn from the key figures in our lives that if I do this - things tend to be better and we come to build a patterns of behaviour on that skewed thinking. The problem comes when those people have skewed ideas about what is right and wrong. And so it is passed on…”

Writing this down, I am aware that it can all sound rather glib and neat. All I can say is that as I focused on my issues, it felt like the painstaking creation of an electric circuit. When that circuit was completed, a lightbulb went on, illuminating how and why I was struggling, how certain patterns had developed and why I needed to let go of them. On a rational level, it made little sense, but there is an intense emotional logic that often confounds reason. As Blaise Pascale (image below) wrote:

“The heart has reasons, that reason can never know.”

In earlier pieces I have written about the staging posts on my journey:

Learning to accept the things I can’t change
Becoming aware of my hang-ups (or what the Hindus call Sanskaras, and Ekhart Tolle calls the Pain Body)

The next step of letting go of many of the assumptions I had about who I was and how I should live was by far the hardest. The neural pathways of a man in his fifties are fixed and hard to shift. It becomes relatively easy to see how and why you have been getting it wrong. But letting go? That is hard. How on earth do you do it?

For a start - those patterns are engrained. But there is another question that is equally hard:

Who will I be after I have done it?

Many people fall at this hurdle - they are not sure they want to change. There is a strange comfort in the old behaviours and routines. Our egos become attached to false identities - and we are frightened of change.

For me, it had become so clear that I was getting the wrong results in certain areas - I might as well try. But it wasn’t straight-forward.

Technique 1:

This involved being told to sit with my pain whenever I felt triggered. That meant attempting to catch myself, acknowledging that I had been upset and I was about to act out an unhelpful pattern. When I would normally push what you are feeling away - or block it out with an unhelpful reaction or behaviour pattern - now I let the feeling run its course.

At first this can be confusing. Everything inside told me to avoid what feels bad – now I was expected to confront, even embrace it.

Steeling myself, I discovered, that an emotion follows the wave pattern I described in an earlier piece: the feeling emerges, peaks, fades and goes. Going through the peak was tough, but there was real catharsis in this; instead of bottling it up or taking it out in another way, the emotion moved through me. Do this enough and I noticed that it was like draining a swamp: little by little, until I noticed each successive time there was less pain to experience.

This morning I was out for a run - and after long months of grey skies and empty branches, I saw that spring was here. Buds were about to stretch into flowers:

Frothy blossom had suddenly exploded:

Nature was shaking free of winter. But it needed to let go at various stages to allow this process circle of life to progress.

Technique 2:

A second letting go technique involves actively choosing to sit quietly and see what comes up. Often it is memories and feelings from the past that you have allowed to stick inside. Again, the idea is to sit and properly experience them, realising that they too lose much of their power when you allow yourself to face up to them and pass through you.

All of this requires courage. No one wants to re-experience their most painful moments – but as you do, you realise the process is like an emotional detox. The poison rises and is expelled. The blossom emerges.

But because the process is hard many shy away from it. More to the point, many people are completely defined by what has happened to them - there is a perverse need to nurture their pain. Someone I care about finds it almost impossible to have a conversation without specifically referencing the wrongs that were done in their past. So much so that I have started to realise they fear starting on the process of letting go because it would confront them with a stark question:

Who would I be without my pain?

The idea of letting go on one deep level feels like it might mean destruction of their fragile ego.

In her seminal book, "Feelings Buried Alive Never Die" by Karol K. Truman focuses on how failing to deal with past traumas eats away at us – even going so far as to suggest it could be a factor in some illnesses.

The book encourages readers to cultivate self-awareness and take ownership of their emotions. By recognising and addressing buried feelings, individuals can empower themselves to create positive change, deepen their understanding of themselves, and enhance their emotional well-being.

Truman emphasises the importance of releasing stuck emotions before going on to say that for her, letting go involves forgiving oneself and others. As she does so, it becomes clear that for her, forgiveness is not primarily something you do for others. It is something you do for yourself. No matter how guilty another person is, if you don’t forgive them, you can be saddling yourself with an enormous burden. Finding a way to be at peace with what they have done is a way of setting down that burden.

One of the most powerful moments in my podcast series, Desperately Seeking Wisdom, came when I spoke to Tanya and Nadim Ednan-Laperouse (pictured below).

What I believe is the worst thing that can happen to a human being happened to them. Their beloved daughter, Natasha, ate a Pret a Manger sandwich which did not list sesame seeds in its ingredients. She was highly allergic to them and went into shock. She begged her father and a doctor to save her, but they couldn’t. Realising she was dying, Nadim called her mother to allow her to say goodbye. He explained how he reacted to Clive Schlee, the CEO of Pret a Manger:

NADIM: I was angry at the world, at my child, having been taken away from us, it really, really was very, very powerful force, very dark. And I blamed the company and the boss of the company around that, who as it happens, turned out had been hospitalising a number of people from the same food and hadn't done anything about it.
One day I was in church, and I had a vision - I say vision: something came in my mind that I actually would forgive the very man that I blamed for the death of my child. And four days later, I met the man in a meeting, and as he went to leave, I went up to him, I put my hand on his heart, and the other one on his shoulder, I said, Clive, I forgive you. I want you to know, I forgive you for the death of my child. I do this to set you free, so that you as a man, and who is a father to two children, two daughters, you can therefore be the best father to your two children. And that the horror of what's happened in this tragedy does not continue to flow down.”

The CEO welled up and started to cry.

What Nadim then told me is extraordinary:

NADIM: I can say, if you'd asked me this a few years ago, I would have you know, had a whole another view basically and would be uncaring or unsympathetic towards him as a man, as a human being. But you asked me now, and I'd say he's just like me and like all of us in, now. You know, he's a human being. None of us really set out to do harm to others in this way that we're talking about. You could say it's a mix of poor judgement and eye off the ball, and any other thing, but he still deserved to be forgiven for even the most horrific thing.

I asked Tanya about how forgiving others can stop the burden on ourselves. She addressed her answer to Nadim:

TANYA: I think, Nad, as well as all this blame, you've really blamed yourself. I mean, you were with Natasha when it happened, and you just couldn't get past the fact that you'd actually paid for that sandwich, even though it looked completely safe and you know, Bethany and Natasha, both thought it was safe as well by looking at the ingredients label. And it was only really after Nad was able to forgive, and I would say, both yourself and Clive, actually, that you could actually start healing. Because before that happened, it was just impossible, you were just eaten up by anger and grief and pain, and you couldn't really function properly.

I can’t think of a better way to show the power of forgiveness - which in many ways is the ultimate in letting go. Freeing the “guilty” party – but also going easier on yourself.

We live in a world of risk – but we are also fallible. We do things innocently or not – and the consequences can be devastating. What would the point be of not forgiving - mainly for your own peace of mind and spirit.

I don’t want to give the impression that letting go or forgiving is easy. It’s not. But what I can say is when I stood back - I could see I was holding on to emotions and behaviours that weren’t helping me. When I tried to let go or forgive, I found their grip on me loosened - and the pain and mistakes reduced.

The swamp isn’t completely drained. But it’s getting there. Or, to put it another way: the tree isn’t fully in flower - but the buds are emerging…

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