I leave for my Italian vacation this week, but thanks to the emotional baggage I’ve been lugging around for years, I’ve easily spoiled my excitement.
My panic started about 10 days ago when I had lunch with my girlfriends and the reality of how much I hadn’t prepared for my trip started sinking in.
I’ve always felt anxious as the days grew closer to when I needed to pack for a trip, but a good checklist usually got me through it. However, since this is my first trip to Europe, even writing out a checklist is making me sweat.
So, I took a deep dive into my travel worries for this week’s newsletter to overcome my trip anxiety. Instead of being stressed out, I want to feel excited.
Writing has this bittersweet benefit – it helps me become more aware of my emotions while keeping me grounded in creativity and action. By exploring and releasing these old emotional wounds, I can make space to embrace the joys of my upcoming adventure.
My research started with a Google search, leading me to these articles:
Here are some helpful tips from those articles:
- Give yourself enough time to plan. ✅
- Make a list. ✅
- Pack outfits, not items. ✅
- Recognize that your packing style isn’t a personality flaw but influenced by past travel experiences and emotions. Ok, need to dig a bit deeper here
It’s time to do some detective work and put a stop to this worry once and for all!
I had a Talk + Tap session with myself, which is my DIY method for getting to the deep-rooted issue. In my EFT “tapping” training, we learned ways to connect our present anxious emotion back to an earlier time in our life when we had a similar feeling.
Upsetting emotions from childhood can leave lasting imprints that carry forward and influence our feelings in the present day.
Tapping, or the Emotional Freedom Technique, is a stress-reducing therapy that uses exposure and tapping on acupuncture points to stimulate the flow of energy and produce calming brain chemicals. It reduces the emotional charge of past traumatic memories, especially from childhood.
By tapping specific points while facing those emotions, it can help heal and ease the lingering impact of difficult experiences. Tapping can be a powerful self-healing tool that can be used when we’re in an emotional, heightened state.
The results of my tapping session revealed that my trouble was all about the dress. My daughter will be a bridesmaid at her girlfriend’s wedding, and I’ll be her +1 on the last leg of our vacation. I realized that the stress is about the dress or the lack of a dress. I’m not a fan of shopping, and 10 days pre-trip, I still hadn’t found a proper dress for the event.
During my tapping session, an old memory from when I was 12 or 13 came flooding back. It was my big Irish Catholic family’s wedding reception, and I remember feeling so self-conscious around my annoying boy cousins. They teased me relentlessly about the dress I had sewn myself, and I was mortified even though I tried to play it cool on the outside. Looking back now, I can smile, but in that moment, the humiliation felt overwhelming for my shy younger self. Revisiting that memory helped me realize where this insecurity about what I wear really stems from.
Humiliation in childhood can linger well into adulthood without realizing where it began.
Our childhood memories, big and small, get stored in our long-term memory to be called upon for wisdom and reminiscing. But stressful memories, on the other hand, don’t get stored in the same place, instead, they are front and center in our emotional (limbic) brain.
Our ability to quickly recall relatable emotional experiences is an evolutionary survival mechanism to help keep us safe. However, these lingering emotional memories often end up hurting us instead of helping us. While our conscious mind understands rationally, our body still feels those strong emotions, causing us to think or behave differently than we’d like.
Whenever I plan to attend a formal event, worrying about what to wear ends up making me feel very anxious.
So how do I stop letting childhood memories cause me so much stress?
As Dr. Joe Dispenza says, “Trauma without the emotional charge is wisdom”. Once I learned how to take the sting out of those childhood memories, they become wisdom rather than limitations.
There are many healing therapies out there that can help reframe those old memories. When we’re able re-live a memory from a peaceful place, it allows our brain to file it away in long-term storage instead of it constantly affecting us.
Today, I finally said yes to a dress and found exactly what I was looking for. It’s funny, but after that tapping session where I made peace with my insecurities around what I wear, it became so much easier to find the right outfit.
I feel lighter and way more excited for my trip this week. The tapping helped me dig deeper to find some much-needed relief from all that anxiety.
Fino alla prossima settimana! Arrivederci!