Bozo vs. Baggage

We usually discover we must have some baggage hidden in our psyches when we've formulated a particular desire. We may want to do something and find we can't get the feeling, motivation or inner commitment to do it. We might want to stop reacting the same way and discover the urges, moods or fits won't leave us alone. We then suspect we have some unresolved issues that won't come to mind. We wonder what our hang-up amounts to that consistently refuses to reveal itself. We cannot determine what lurking inhibition interferes with our admirable and respectable desire. All we know is that we've got some emotional baggage.

Our emotional baggage opposes our conscious desires. It's coming from a different place and sees those desires with a very different frame of reference. What looks like a problem to our desires appears as a solution to our baggage. When we want to do something differently, our baggage perceives us cluelessly wanting a bigger problem and abandoning a viable solution that's already in use. We don't get what we're implying because our conscious frame of reference is contemporary. Our baggage has our long personal history on its side. We trying to change when our baggage is convinced that nothing has changed that could make any new adventures possible.

Our baggage maintains these incessant inner conflicts. Our conscious desires appear to be conceived by a real idiot. There's no end to the struggles between Bozo vs. Baggage. The two go round and round in a vicious cycle while maintaining their irreconcilable differences. Neither tries to understand the other's frame of reference. Trying to overcome the other is doomed to fail. The only way out of the vicious cycle is to "try smarter" to understand both frames of reference.

As I've progressed at formulating the workbook for resolving baggage, it's become clear that our conscious desires are "set-ups to fail". In order to set ourselves up to succeed at changing, it works to want a dilemma. When we expect to start with a Catch-22, a no win situation, we're off to a good start. Our expectation that the differences are irreconcilable is a good place to begin. When we perceive that we don't see eye to eye, Bozo vs. Baggage can begin to settle their differences.