You're listening to episode 76 of the Baggage Reclaim sessions.

I'm your host Natalie Lou, author of Baggage Reclaim.com, where I help people to offload the shady relationships and emotional

baggage that block healthy self-esteem and loving relationships. This week I talk about why we wait for the other shoe to drop when it comes to our happiness.

Plus, I talk about the quick questions we need to ask ourselves about our relationships.

I was chatting with somebody recently who shared her story with me about how she had been through

a pretty horrific breakup that have brought up a lot of things from the past for her.

And I think combined with some struggles that she was having at work, it really triggered a period of depression, which in turn she's given herself a hard time about because it's like she's saying, oh, there's something faulty with her because of how she responded

to that particular set of circumstances it's like oh I should have been better

than this I shouldn't have had depression.

And so now it's a few years down the road and she is struggling to feel

content within herself despite the fact that circumstances are very different to how they were before and she's not in the same emotional and mental space.

And as we were chatting away, I said to her,

has it occurred to you that because of the incredibly difficult time that you went through and overcame.

That there's maybe a part of you that is protecting you by not allowing you to really kind of get happy, you know, like to really immerse yourself in the moment to embrace what's going on in your life right now, because it's almost as if you're afraid that if you allow yourself to be happy, you know, you allow

yourself to be happy with this job, you allow yourself to be happy living in a foreign country,

meeting new people, you know, starting a new relationship, so forth, you're afraid that if you

allow yourself to be happy to exceed a level of happiness that kind of takes you beyond that very

very difficult period, that when, not if, because obviously

that's the way that she's looking at things more in terms of when things go wrong, that when things go

wrong, it's going to be that much harder to recover because you have

built yourself up in a way through these experiences, these better experiences to a level of

happiness that when you fall back to that

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