Life’s Inevitables: Why Stress, Conflict, Criticism, Disappointment, Rejection, and Loss are Not the Enemy

by | May 9, 2026 | Podcast: The Baggage Reclaim Sessions

Tags: avoiding conflict, avoiding feelings, Conflict and Criticism, conflict avoidant, disappointment, emotional unavailability, grief, loss, people pleasing, perfectionism, rejection, resilience, self-blame, Stress, ungrieved grief

In this week’s episode of The Baggage Reclaim Sessions, I dig into what I call life's inevitables (stress, conflict, criticism, disappointment, rejection, and loss) and why our attempts to dodge them through people pleasing, perfectionism, over-giving, and overthinking are costing us far more than facing them ever would.

I share what it took for me to stop treating these experiences as punishments and start reading them as signals, and what it's like when you're raging against these inevitables while also being aware of the signals. I walk through each inevitable one by one, what it's actually there to tell you, and why building real self-esteem means developing the capacity to meet life's hard stuff rather than trying to eliminate it. If you've ever felt blindsided by difficulty despite doing "all the right things," this one's for you.

IN THIS EPISODE...

  • You can't outrun life's inevitables, but you can exhaust yourself trying. Avoiding the hard stuff doesn't just fail to protect you; it also cuts you off from the good stuff, leaving you numb, low on intimacy, and stuck in cycles of burnout and dissatisfaction.
  • What each inevitable is actually there to tell you. Stress as information about your limits and bandwidth; conflict as an invitation to deeper honesty and intimacy; criticism as feedback (not a court order) that you can take or leave; disappointment as the gap between expectation and reality that recalibrates your sense of what's truly possible; rejection as a message to stop self-rejecting and settling; and loss as a turning point that changes you, even when you can't yet see how.
  • Self-esteem isn't armour against life's inevitables; it's the capacity to face them. Outsourcing self-esteem to avoid hard things keeps you in a vicious cycle of trying to control the uncontrollable. Real self-esteem is built by showing up, handling things, and gathering evidence that you can come through difficulty, not by keeping it at bay.
  • Asking "what's the baggage behind it?" as a practice. When life's inevitables arrive and you notice you're freaking out, hiding, or raging, get curious about where else have you felt, thought, and acted similarly. Who or what does this remind you of? This isn't about finding instant relief; it's about gaining context and understanding what's being activated from the past.
  • A zero-to-ten approach for building capacity gradually. Rather than expecting an overnight shift, rate your current ability to handle a particular inevitable on a scale of zero to ten and aim to move one or two points at a time, not straight to ten.

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