The Clutter Fairy Weekly #208
Vicious Cycle: Clutter as a Symptom and Cause of Negative Emotions
Negative emotions complicate and compound the difficulty of managing our clutter. Guilt, shame, fear, grief, anger, and other painful feelings reduce our ability to focus and make decisions, and cluttered spaces and piles of stuff can aggravate our emotional distress. In episode #208 of The Clutter Fairy Weekly, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, offers strategies for working around or through negative emotions to move your projects forward no matter where you’re starting from.
Content in this episode is based on the results of audience surveys.
Some content in this episode is based on results of a survey of our audience.
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The Weekly Tittle is an exercise designed to focus your attention on a specific space, aspect, or challenge of decluttering and organizing your home. We assign a new tittle in each webcast/podcast, then check on your progress the following week.
Emotion into Motion
This week’s assignment is to confront a negative emotion that complicates or interferes with your decluttering or organizing process:
- Reflect on a negative emotion that you experience at any stage of your process of decluttering, organizing, or carrying out routine maintenance in your home.
- Try one or more of the following activities to explore the connection between your negative emotions and the difficulty that they add to your process:
- Journal about the emotion. Write about what specific activities or types of decisions bring up negative reactions.
- Draw, paint, or collage something that conveys your feelings about the organizing process.
- Call a trusted friend or family member to talk about why decluttering work and decisions are hard for you.
- Vent to us in email or through the contact form on our web site about your negative feelings about the organizing process. (If you ask us not to share it, we won’t.)
- Write a positive affirmation that you can use to get into motion when negative emotions try to derail your project, such as “I am doing good, important work to claim the life that I want.”
For the full discussion of this week’s tittle, watch the Weekly Tittle segment on YouTube.
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