“Life Baggage” is a term I use to describe the carryover of our life experience into our current marriage and parenting. When we travel we carry with us baggage loaded with important items for the journey. When we marry we carry into our marriage journey baggage loaded with life experiences that have shaped us for life. The average person spends 18 years or more of being shaped/molded by their life with parents, siblings and a variety of models and experiences from many other areas in life such as time spent with extended family, childcare, school,work and a multitude of other social environments. How we experienced teaching and modeling in these environments shaped what we believe about everything in life, whether that experience was influenced by a parent, sibling, extended family member, neighbor, teacher, coach, priest, pastor, Sunday school teacher, childcare staff, boss, peer, or any other person along the journey.
Your own personal journey may have started in a home with abuse of some type or many types. You could have experienced verbal, physical, sexual, spiritual or a combo of several. It could have included domestic violence fueled by addictions or fueled by religious extremism. The list of abusive environments is long. You could have experienced a home environment where there were never any arguments or fights at all. Even this environment could set you up for marriage problems because you never saw how to resolve conflicts.
The examination and analysis of how we were influenced or shaped by our life experiences can take some time and could be emotionally stressful as well as relieving. The journey can enlighten us as to how our life baggage damages, blocks intimacy in our marriage and lead us to personal healing and increased trust and intimacy in marriage and parenting.
Probably one of the most discouraging facts about marriage conflicts I see in my counseling office is that most of us have never been given insights or knowledge of how to succeed in marriage or parenting. In the last 29 years of marriage counseling I have often asked the question, “Have you ever had a class on marriage or parenting?” Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time the answer is a resounding “NO”. Year after year in our education process most of us have had math, science, language, history etc.year after year for at least 13 years, but never a class on marriage or parenting. We load up on knowledge that will help us with our career choice and experience, but we are totally ignorant of how to succeed in marriage and parenting. Ignorant does not mean stupid, but it does mean lacking information. How could we succeed in any area of life with ignorance?