39 | Why Emotional Avoidance is Causing Your Clutter
39 | Why Emotional Avoidance is Causing Your Clutter
I’m mixing things up a bit today. This episode is a replay of one of my free, public workshops from this year and it's all about emotions.
Emotions are central to our lives, yet we're rarely taught how to understand and navigate our feelings effectively. That's where I come in, providing valuable insights and practical solutions.
Join in as we unravel the profound relationship between your emotions and the clutter in your life. We will delve deep into the complexities of decision-making, emotional acceptance, and building self-trust as the keys to unlocking a clutter-free existence. You’ll gain valuable insights on how to embrace your feelings, make intentional choices, and develop resilience, leading you toward an unburdened life.
You’re more organized than you think.
MENTIONED:
17 | Decision Making Fundamentals
18 | Understanding Emotions and Clutter
19 | When Self-Doubt Becomes Self-Trust
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Intro: Welcome to a Pleasant Solution, Embracing an Organized Life. I'm your host, certified life coach, professional organizer and home life expert, Amelia Pleasant Kennedy and I help folks permanently eliminate clutter in their homes and lives. On this podcast will go beyond the basics of home organization to talk about why a clutter-free mindset is essential to an aligned and sustainable lifestyle. If you're someone with a to-do list, if you're managing a household and if you're caring for others, this podcast is for you. Let's dive in.
Amelia: Welcome to Episode 39, Why Emotional Avoidance is Causing Your Clutter. Each month in 2023, I've been offering free public workshops, and today's episode is a replay of one of those events. Clients come to me for one of four key areas. They're experiencing a life transition, such as moving, divorce or caregiving. They're experiencing an overabundance of clutter or too many objects for their space. They want a better relationship with time and or they're looking for ways to better share the chores and responsibilities within their home to lighten their mental load.
Learning to navigate and understand your emotions is at the core of each of these topics. It's the layer that you know is hiding under the surface. Emotions are central to our lives, yet we're not taught how to accept, manage, and process them. That's where I come in. Feel free to reach out to me with questions or feedback. After the episode, leave a review or connect with me on a consultation call at apleasantsolution.com/booking. It's the clutter solution you've been seeking.
Workshop Begins: The structure of the call, I'm going to talk about emotions kind of in general at first, and then I'm going to relate them to clutter and how the two intersect and make an impact on one another. So emotions. Our education when we're young is not that great around emotions. We're taught the sort of five main categories of sad, mad, glad, content, angry, those kinds of things. But it's really a complex landscape that we have inside of us and they're simply vibrations in our body. That's all emotions are. They come from our thoughts, especially how we're thinking about a particular object, a particular social situation, an interaction, a relationship with someone else. So our emotions are vibrations in our body that are created by what we're thinking, what we're perceiving about any moment or situation and that applies to the clutter in your life in particular.
So emotions, they give us information, simply how they do. They show up in our body, they give us information, they help keep us safe and away from danger. And that's a little bit how they relate to clutter and avoidance. And they push us to do things in our life or not do them, to procrastinate, to avoid, to sort of put off until later. It's that vibration that gets you going or keeps you stuck. So both positive and negative emotions are truly helpful because they put things in perspective. We would not know that life is amazing right now and the beach is beautiful and summer is relaxing and our house is tidy and calm if we didn't have those opposite moments of sort of a terrible thunderstorm or a hectic ride in traffic or what we see as a disorganized or untidy home.
Those thoughts wouldn't create the feelings of being scattered or unsettled if we didn't have them in relation to the positive, more calming experiences or emotions in our life. So we need both of them because they truly complement one another and help to put life in perspective. And on average they're 50-50. And we'll look at that here in a minute when we talk a bit more about emotional avoidance. And I titled this workshop “Emotional Avoidance and Clutter” because when I work with clients, this is a lot of what I see.
We're overwhelmed, we regret letting go or think we might regret letting go. We're holding on to objects because we're worried about where they might end up in a landfill, that they might not get reused the right way. There are a lot of emotions that come up when it comes to making decisions about our objects and our schedule. So emotional avoidance is when we choose to just turn a blind eye or turn away from the emotions that are showing up in our body based on what we're thinking about our space.
So I'm going to talk specifically about clutter and home, but this does apply to your schedule, it applies to relationships in your home, having difficult conversations with another person about care tasks we can avoid and when we avoid our feelings build and intensify. So avoidance actually results in the emotional experience building and intensifying. It's fascinating because these are vibrations in our body. They are messages. They want to be heard so they can shout a little louder if we don't respond and listen and allow.
So we're taught culturally, socially, to avoid our emotions altogether. There are certain moments in certain spaces that are safe to feel them, and it makes sense to have grief at a funeral. But on an everyday basis, we're typically taught, don't cry, don't show anger. It's a little too much for this situation. And we disconnect as a result. We're able to be compassionate towards other people's emotional experiences, but we typically have a hard time being self-compassionate and looking inwards and being kind to ourselves.
So what happens is when we avoid, we all know the effects. We might not know that it's coming from avoiding our emotional experience, but we know what it's like when our sleep is disrupted, our stress levels increase. We're just in that state where we're not taking care of ourselves and our health is affected. And oftentimes it might be because we're avoiding the reality of what we're feeling and experiencing. And it's this judgment that causes suffering.
So I got so excited yesterday because the New York Times had an article referring to a recent study that was done and I was like "right on time." It was specifically about how when we avoid our emotions, we typically judge ourselves. Again it's easier to be compassionate to others, but to ourselves we judge, we criticize, we tell ourselves we shouldn't feel this way. And again, think about the objects in your home.
Think about the standards and expectations of how you share the load with a partner, if you have one. Think about how you may feel or think about how organized or tidy you may be. In this study, it specifically outlined how judgment causes even more suffering. So when we perceive them as bad. So if we look here, we like to say on average that we have 50% positive experience in life, 50% negative. And it's when we think it should be different that we have more suffering.
So when we judge, we pile a layer on to the negative emotion because now we're thinking about the way we feel, we're judging ourselves about the way we feel and that negative emotional experience can grow. And of course it can also happen to the positive experience but if we lean into that more so than the negative. So the thing that I want you to think about and take away about emotional avoidance is that it's actually counterproductive and we'll get to solutions here in a moment.
But it's counterproductive to avoid your emotional experience. And you can just think that resistance equals persistence. So build and intensify, the more you turn a blind eye to the moment that the expression of emotion in your body. And I recognize that you can't always feel right in the moment that an emotion shows up in your body, but you can give pause and give time a little later in the day or at a different moment to get curious about that emotion and how you're feeling because it's probably sticking around.
So on the other end, the way that emotions show up when we accept them or allow them, life looks a little different. They are shorter lived, so they pass through our body, the physical responses that we might get. A tight chest, shallow breathing, a hot face, kind of everyone experiences emotions differently, but like kind of a hollow or a pain if you're feeling sorrow.
All of those are realistic bodily experiences and we accept them. They actually are shorter lived. That's what this study showed. Previous research has shown when we allow them, they pass through. So we want to think about emotions as neither good nor bad. They just are. They're messages for us. We can listen to them, we can fight them, we can allow them and practice allowing emotions, and I'm going to give you a couple steps here in a little bit, it builds resilience.
So everyone on this call has had a variety of emotional experiences in their lives. And when we're in the moment, we forget that we are resilient creatures who can tolerate, allow and process emotion. It just seems a little disruptive at the time, but you have had experience with emotions. And the more you practice and allow them, the better you will get at feeling and the better you will get at allowing them to sort of pass through your body, pass through your life in a more efficient fashion.
Alright, this is a really key point. Some of us think that if we feel, then we're accepting what is happening, accepting the circumstance, accepting what someone said, accepting that someone said or did something. And when it comes to a clutter object or an object that you're kind of deciding whether to keep or let go of the story behind it. So when you accept the emotion and allow it and begin to tell the story and engage with the emotional experience that's coming from how you're thinking, know that it is not an acceptance of the particular person, circumstance, or situation. You can decide to be unhappy or dissatisfied or angry and feel that feeling and just disagree with the situation when you feel the feelings and accept them or not, just kind of jumping on board with what happened.
So lastly, feelings are the reason that we do or don't do anything in our lives. And I said that at the beginning and I'm going to relate it to clutter here in a moment. But that's also an important takeaway. Your feelings are signals and they will keep you stuck in overwhelm if you give them permission to do so without allowing them.
Alright, so let me switch to just talking about clutter. So the definition of clutter. It's the unwanted objects or commitments in your life. There are lots of things that you love, you value and you want to keep around your home. That's not clutter. It's the definition of when you look at something, look at a relationship, look at the way something is working within the system in your home, the sharing of the chore load, a particular object and thinking, this isn't serving me, it's not helping, it doesn't add anything to my life. That's what makes it clutter. And the way that clutter shows up is everywhere.
It manifests as an internal soundtrack in our minds. So for example, to-do list, self-judgment as we were talking about, the pressure to try harder, procrastinate, all of that is kind of clutter in our minds and raises our cortisol levels, blood pressure and every time we pass by a pile or something that's out of place, our brains, there's a micro-moment because we're visual creatures that we're taking that information in and we categorize it as not belonging there or needing to be handled or put away. And it's that micro moment that leads to it being classified as clutter. And we have our emotional experience inside.
So I'd love to know some of your thoughts about where clutter, the unwanted things, where does it come from? Where does it start? How does it get here? Anybody wants to put in the chat, please share. Definitely avoidance in our home.
Yeah, Paige says "everywhere. Kids especially.” Feeling like we don't have enough time to deal with it. "Thinking about what we've brought into the house." Thank you Alicia. Yeah, these are common things and what we're told by society, by social media, all of these things that we think that it comes from lack of skills, lack of space, lack of time, procrastination or avoidance, other people, that's a big one. Not helping other people, adding to the piles or the mess. And then there's a subtle layer of internal moral failing. That dialogue of if I worked harder, if I was more efficient, we think that's what causes the clutter in our lives.
However, before I jump to what I think it is, which you probably can guess, some of the common solutions that all are helpful. I'm curious what kind of things that you think might be some of the solutions that are offered out there as well in terms of decluttering and bins and boxes, containers, everybody loves a good container.
What's a solution to clutter? Another one I'll add, I hear a lot of like if I just buy the right journal or calendar system. More organizing. Yeah, but it doesn't get rid of the stuff. You hear a lot in time management, time blocking, habit stacking, delegating, asking for help. Again, we're thinking about clutter in a broad way. Yes, containers, organizing, decluttering, systems, zones, all those words you kind of hear as buzzwords in the organizing world. They're all super helpful, don't get me wrong. I certainly buy into them but they lead to sort of temporary external results. It's what we experience. If we buy enough containers, we'll get everything in place. If we do more organizing, then we'll get everything in place. But it doesn't solve for that internal dialogue and that internal clutter, which is why I think it's emotions. But there's a layer there that we can explore.
So back to emotional avoidance for just one second. We want to get to acceptance, of course. Avoidance. The reason that it causes clutter, the reason that I titled this workshop the way I did was because when we avoid our emotional experience, it leads to avoiding making decisions. Avoiding listening to our inner knowing or what we think might be right for us in our home. It causes us to avoid rest. Because when we hear that internal dialogue, we're like, I got to keep going. I got to do more organizing and decluttering. We overwork when we aren't listening to those signals inside of our body that are like, I think I need a break. We avoid hard conversations with our partners or our kids and we say, I'll just do it all because it's easier. I don't want to bother them with this or I'm not sure how they might react. We're avoiding the emotional experience that we predict or project might happen if we bring up the conversation around help or doing things differently or seeking their input on different strategies. And when it comes to physical objects, we simply just hold onto more. When we avoid our emotions, we're just like, yeah, I'll get to that later, like I don't want to do that work today. I'll put it off. I'll just keep holding onto it because it's easier to hold onto it than to let it go.
Alright, so what are some of the primary feelings that you can name that might show up for you in your life when it comes to clutter? So what are some of the primary feelings that impact your ability to take action on clutter? Overwhelm, guilt, decision, fatigue, yes. We don't realize how many decisions we make on a daily basis. So when it comes to another project, we're just like, oh sounds like so much. And overwhelm is a great example because it's one of those emotions that really keeps us stuck in spinning. We're just like, "it's so much." That's the thought that leads to the feeling of overwhelm. And then it might cycle back to, "I just can't, I don't have enough time, I don't have the skills," can cycle to additional thoughts, anger.
And I'll open the floor for coaching in a little bit if you want to discuss that a bit further. But anger is often one of those emotions where we dig a little deeper. There might be some hurt or pain underneath because we're thinking someone else isn't being sensitive enough or hearing us depending on the situation. Of course, all valid, totally, which is why we want to get started learning to feel. That's what you came for, right? Alright, so as I mentioned on my podcast episode 18, I go into more about why feelings and clutter are related. So that's a resource for you.
And the first step, the one we have been avoiding, is to actually feel, and you can do this in small micro-moments, microdoses, a few minutes of feeling your feelings. Again, we'll allow them to release and it may take a few rounds of feeling, may take practice, but oftentimes I think we think of feeling as like we're just going to fall apart for the rest of the day.
But I've heard people say like just setting aside five or 10 minutes, even if you're doing it multiple times a week to address maybe a stronger emotion that is showing up in your body can make a long-term difference because feelings can actually lodge in our body physically. We hold on to them as a sort of knot or pressure internally if we allow them to persist and deepen when it comes to particular relationships or situations or trauma that we've had in our lives. So feeling, it's straightforward, you want to sit still and breathe, you can do this now on the call if you'd like. But that's really the first step, giving ourselves time and space. And if you have kids, you just want to lock yourself in the bathroom for a few minutes, full permission to do so. Find a quiet space, play hide and seek, but really hide. We want to get curious and just observe what's happening in my body.
When my mother was diagnosed with dementia, I spent a good deal of time with this process because there were a variety of motions, including grief, including helplessness, deep sorrow. And we need time to allow ourselves to feel that. And I share that because even objects, they hold that story, they hold that emotion from the person that we were or the relative that gave it to us and our relationship with them. We want to just observe and get curious about what's happening in our bodies.
Research has shown that naming the emotion, like physically identifying it in your mind, speaking it out loud, calling it out, makes a huge difference. When you name the emotion and again, if this is new for you, you can Google a feelings wheel that'll give you more choices than just those top five we're most familiar with. Name it and describe for yourself what's happening and how it feels.
Again, my blood pressure is rising, my face is hot, I feel a hole in my stomach. My skin feels prickly or bubbly. It all shows up differently for each of us. Curiosity is your friend. When we're feeling we're going to ask, again back to that image of the circle, how is this emotion that I am experiencing because of the way that I'm thinking about this item that I might want to let go of, I haven't decided yet and I'm just still thinking about it. “How's the emotion part of the 50-50 of life?” Perhaps it's putting something else that you want or value in perspective. “How can this feeling push me where I want to go?” Again, we haven't gotten into the decision making step yet, but we're simply getting curious about, well if I feel this way and this is the message, do I want to continue to feel this way? Let's say I hold onto the object or continue to show up for this commitment that I'm questioning. I now know the emotion that it brings up when I think about it.
Do I want to keep having this emotion? Because we get to choose when we slow down and pause enough to feel our feelings. We don't always see or recognize the cost of keeping something in our lives because we don't know the feeling that comes up when we walk around and we see it there. We see that it's out of place, it's in the basement, in a bin, in storage and we haven't addressed it. That's why it's clutter, because it's producing an emotion that we either want to keep feeling or we want to move on to decision-making to kind of allow it to pass through, decide about the object, decide about the commitment, decide about the situation. It's just information so it can keep you where you are. That's fine. It's a decision. I'm never going to tell you, you need to get rid of something that you truly aren't ready to get rid of or you want to keep.
But when you get curious about that emotion, then you can think about how it might push you to make a change. Because feelings are the reason why we stay in overwhelm, stay in guilt, stay in anger, we avoid making decisions because of how we're feeling, we stay stuck and we can use them as a tool to push ourselves to do the hard thing. Not in terms of willpower, but in terms of just knowing how we're feeling and then intentionally deciding, "Hey, do I want to stay in this space?" I know the project seems like it's going to take a long time. I see that I'm procrastinating, I see that I'm avoiding it because I'm tired or I feel obligated to do it. What do I want to do next?
So the next part is about decision-making and trust. Those are the next two steps. If you take nothing away from this call other than allowing your feelings, I will be thrilled because that's really what I wanted the message to get across is that avoidance resistance equals persistence. Allowing, naming your feelings, sitting with them, either in a short burst or on a longer walk or in the bathtub or whatever quiet moment you can get to yourselves that that will process through.
And I'll host some future workshops, more on decision-making and trust. But this is step one, step two then, when you've allowed your emotion and begun to feel and identify it is to decide. And episode 17 of my podcast has more on decision making fundamentals, and I'm going to talk about it briefly here, but decision-making gets back into our heads. Feeling happens in our bodies.
So I just want you to be aware that we don't love this. Our habit is to jump over this step and go straight to decision-making, which is very much a thinking skill. So once you know your feelings, you can decide from an informed, intentional place. And that's sort of the message that I want to communicate, is that decision-making is a skill. We do it all the time in all the areas of our lives. And when we bring feeling into it, we build resilience. The more we practice decision-making, again we build resilience, we build stamina, we can make more decisions the more we practice, specifically around clutter or unwanted objects. So the more you practice intentional decisions, the easier they will become. And we always want to use curiosity.
When making a decision. Some of the things that I invite you to ask yourself is what is the story that I'm telling myself about this particular item? Because every item, even if it's just a pile of paper clips and pens, we have too many of them. But instead of throwing them out because we're like, oh it's not the most environmentally responsible thing to do, that's the story. There's actually no difference between tossing it out, and keeping it in your home because then you are the trash receptacle or the holder of the unwanted objects versus the landfill or the recycling system that can properly pass on or dispose of those items. You just become the holder in the meantime of that clutter.
Other stories. So when I was downsizing and I had lots of family heirlooms, I had stories upon stories about those pieces of furniture and my family legacy and all that happened with those and how they arrived in my life. You got to figure out what that story is that's really weaving you and attaching you to that particular set of objects. And if it's a pile of papers that you're avoiding, you might have a story about the information that's in those papers. If you have tubs in your attic or in your garage, things from babyhood, but you don't really have a plan to have more children or bring more children into your life, the story might be someday maybe if and you get curious about that, then you want to ask yourself, what do I really want here? And it's such a powerful question that we forget to ask because we have all that noise from the clutter, the object, the story.
So when we feel our emotions, we can kind of get down to underneath and say, what do I really want here with this particular object, particular relationship, whatever it might be? And the answer was different and I'd love to hear maybe some of the possible answers in the chat, but what I hear from clients is I want more space, I want more time, I want less to clean because when I have piles or things out of place or outgrown pairs of shoes or shoes that hurt my feet, but I just haven't let go of, I want less to clean up, I want more help from other people. And that's where The Fair Play Method comes into it. Like having those harder conversations and feeling, yeah, more time. If you have less to clean, if you have less to organize, less to straighten up, then you actually have more time to focus, more mental space to dedicate to other things as well.
So yeah, The Fair Play method for sharing the load and getting more help from other people. And I love this one to be free from thinking about this item, commitment, concern, whatever it might be anymore. I just want more mental space. So I'm going to look at this decision through that lens. What do I want here? I don't want to have to think about it anymore. I don't want to have to feel this emotion anymore. And sometimes that's a perfectly great, acceptable reason to make your choice. And the last thing I want to offer is owning that, not making a decision. If we're in step two of decision making time, not making a decision is a conscious decision. You don't have to make a decision, but you have to recognize that putting off the decision or delaying the decision is a decision. That's the difference between deciding to keep it and deciding to let it go. You can decide to keep it all you want, but if you're in that in-between space of like, not sure I'm just going to keep avoiding, swimming in the muck of overwhelm, which I have experienced.
Just knowing that, staying there is a decision because you have the tools of feeling and deciding and then we're going to get to trust here in a second to get out. And when you don't make a decision, when you're in that in-between space of the swamp, the muck and the mud, that's when back to the first chart that we're more in that judgment of ourselves for not making a decision. So when you're not making a decision, that's when you can be judging yourself about the decision. The third part is trust. And this is what results from feeling and deciding. And I'll just spend a couple minutes on it. Episode 19 of my podcast, I talk about trust in detail. So self-trust is the reward, the result, the more you practice step one of feeling, step two of deciding, they come together to create a level of trust and inner knowing and they build up that layer of resilience inside of you.
So emotional acceptance leads to emotional resilience, feelings, decisions, leads to trust. The more that you do what you say you're going to do, even just 15 minutes on a project, 45 minutes on a project, whatever length of time that you can sustain making those decisions doesn't have to be like a three hour marathon of clutter, like tackling. We get stuck in thinking that we have to just plow through and use willpower. 15 minutes, 45 minutes, whatever you can sustain, the more that you stick to that process of saying things like, “I'm going to do this. I'm going to process my paperwork for 10 minutes,” the more you build the self-trust. And just remind yourself we're all amazing, beautiful humans that are successful in many areas of our lives. And even if organizing isn't a skill that you have, it's something you can learn and it is something that has gotten you to the place that you are in other areas of your life. So knowing that you have the tools to problem solve, to plan, to feel, that builds trust.
You can look for other ways in other areas of your life of what's working. And the more you look for what's working, the more you remind yourself that you're more organized than you think, then the self-trust will come. Thank you Holly, I appreciate your comment. And Alicia says "She works regularly on the thought. Every little bit counts to get started." I love that, every little bit counts and I've already started. Talk to y'all soon.
Outro: Hey y'all my monthly second Friday's workshop series is here. Join me on the second Friday of every month in 2023 for a practical no frills, come as you are hour of teaching and coaching. I'll show you exactly how I handle one area of home organization. Then the floor will be open for questions and coaching. We'll troubleshoot what's feeling challenging for you and get you unstuck on the spot. Find out more and register at apleasantsolution.com/workshops or via Instagram. Can't wait to meet you.
