Reining in Paper

Today's client was so intimidated by certain boxes in her basement that she wouldn't venture to look to see what was in them. She just knew that she didn't want to go near them. They'd been there for years.

I opened the boxes and discovered full multiple accordion files stored away in boxes. These are the plastic expandable files that have twenty to thirty pockets for papers. It turns out two previous moves ago she was overwhelmed with her papers and bought a lot of the expandable plastic accordion files as a way of making herself feel organized. She stuffed a lot of papers into these files. They gave her a temporary feeling of relief. These collapsible files ended up going into in boxes for a move and stayed there. Three years ago these files in boxes ended up in her basement and remained there unopened, until today.

She felt nauseous as I took out the first bloated file. She's not the first one to feel this way. I've worked with a lot of clients who have bought these kind of files with the hope that they would be a solution to the clutter. Maybe for some people they work and that's great, but for many they don't. Because a person is feeling overwhelmed, they are looking for way to get the papers out of their sight. Once they go into the pockets, they are often forgotten. But even though they are hidden, they still bother the person with the clutter side-effects of feeling chaotic and uncomfortable in their own home.

With today's client, I took out a few papers at a time and handed them to her. I knew she was feeling edgy and scared and I wanted her to consider as few things as possible so she could get her bearings back. She was a little shaky at first. But she was able to think clearly enough to see that these papers were not a part of her life. They were trash. She put papers either in a recycling box, or in a shredding pile.

There were eleven accordion files total. When she was done going through them, the papers filled up three recycling trash bags and one shredding box. She kept a small amount of papers that she needed. We created eight hanging file folders and labeled them and put the papers in their places. She felt so much better.

When we get overwhelmed, papers have a way of taking over. They go unchecked and become free-range paper. It can makes us feel powerless. "I can't believe I'm being dominated by paper!" It's hard on us to see the paper laying around, or knowing it's in boxes, and feeling overwhelmed and not being able to do anything about it.

That's why I made it as simple as I could for my client. She could look at one or two things at a time. We can do the same for ourselves. To leave the papers there won't help, but delving into it in pieces, and moving forward slowly towards finishing it makes it possible. I was thinking that driving home after the job. There was a blizzard here in Chicago. It was very overwhelming to not see very far through the snow and have my car slide out of control at times. So I had to go at half speed, and I had to pay attention to the feel of the car. Plus I focused on my breath. This calmed me. I could relate to what my client had been going through. I think we both felt what it was like to be very present during a difficult experience.

Some Ways Around Being Overwhelmed

I got an email about a particular clutter situation that I think a lot of people can relate to. Here's what she had to say:

"I have plenty of "buried clutter" that I am trying to deal with over period of time (closets, basement, etc.), but amidst that there is the daily "surface clutter" which I would consider to be the everyday visible, high traffic areas of my home. The surface clutter is what is really getting to me right now. I am really struggling with maintaining these areas, even after a good decluttering. I have observed that I can keep an area looking nice for a few days, or even a couple of weeks sometimes (feeling like THIS TIME things will be different!), but then it seems to pile up quickly and I feel so down and discouraged... I feel like if I were just more self-disciplined I wouldn't keep struggling with this yo-yo effect...I just need to be an adult here and clean up after myself and stop whining. I'd love to get your thoughts on how to deal with (and break!) this discouragement and this feeling of being trapped in a yo-yo cycle."

(My direct response to her)

Thanks for sharing your clutter situation. There's nothing wrong with you. Surface clutter appears normally for everyone. We get caught up in other things and stuff starts to pile up again. It's like raking leaves in the fall. You do a really good job, and then later in the day there are a bunch of leaves on the lawn again! It sounds like you might be exhausted. Discouragement has that effect. Life can be very tiring at times. When we get over tired, things appear bigger than they are. That doesn't mean they aren't a pain in the butt at times. But when we start to get down on ourselves, it often means we are beat and don't even know it. I don't mean this in a blaming way. We all get tired and we're not as effective at that time.

Maybe a way of breaking this cycle is when the clutter appears on the surfaces again, instead of blaming yourself for not being self-disciplined, you could say, "Oh, well, it looks like there's some stuff here. It's kind of like there's some spilled soup on the floor, but instead it's spilled clutter on the counters. I don't like that it's all over. But it makes me soooo tired to blame myself for this, so instead I'm just going to clean things up the best I can. It actually feels better to take care of what needs to be done. See the job. Do the job. Stay out of the misery." Sometimes seeing things as they actually are, without thinking they should be otherwise, or feeling that something is wrong with the situation and ourselves, makes it easier to do something positive about it. It alleviates the self-pressure so we can think more clearly and intuitively, and do what we need to do.

It's hard for me to say exactly what to do without seeing your place and your exact reaction to the things in your place. Maybe you need some times where you take it easy in your home and rest and relax. Even for a half hour. You can take a bath or a nap or go for a walk outside. Taking a short break in a nice way allows in new perspectives.

Plus, I think it's worth considering the "buried" clutter a little more. That may be contributing more to your exhaustion and feeling overwhelmed. Often times when I work in people's homes, they have lots of surface clutter. But once we get through that, there's a lot of old stuff underneath. The surface clutter was there to cover up the old unresolved clutter. The older things can make us feel a lot of emotional attachment. Rather than look at it, we may just want to cover it up with other stuff. It intimidates us in that way. But taking care of those things, stopping and asking each one of these older things, "Do I need this anymore, or can I let it go?" starts to give us back our energy and peace of mind.

This doesn't have to be done all at once. But it's worth delving into and investigating. This situation is making you feel a lot of pain. You are worth feeling better. You don't have to live under the thumb of clutter. It's your home and I think it's very possible and doable to feel good in our homes. It's calling into question the things that have temporarily taken over. It's your home, not your stuffs' home.

Even the Clutter Buster was Helped

Yesterday I worked with two clients and I'd like to share some of my favorite parts:

- One of my clients shared with me that her daughter helped prepare her for the clutter bust by saying, "If you don't notice something for a long, long, long time, you realize you don't need it anymore, and you can throw it out."

- While I was going through papers with my client, she began feeling tired and emotional. She said, "Going through all this stuff is time consuming." I could feel her saying underneath the words, "I don't like doing this, it's a waste of my time." Maybe she was feeling some pain and wanted to push it aside. I wanted to help her refocus, so I said, "Everything is time consuming. Whatever we do requires time." She paused and it felt like she got some clarity. She said, "It's time consuming not to be able to do anything because of all this clutter!" She kicked into some high gear tossing.

- The first client came across a piece of paper and she said, "I have to take care of this" and she put it in a very tall and wobbly to-do stack. When she did this she looked very weary. I got that the presence of so many things needing to be done was exhausting her. I got tired looking at the towering pile. I pointed out her reaction and got her to take care of that paper. She filed out the info, and put a stamp on the envelope. This made her feel very present. We came across another paper and she wanted to add it to the leaning tower again. I said, "I think that's in building code violation...You come to life when you take care of things, and you look sooooo tired when you put things off. I think it serves you to complete things. It gives you energy." She's a workout coach. She said the same thing happens to her clients. They don't want to work out, but when they start, they get the energy.


- There was another tower of paper in this client's home office. It was on the top of her filing cabinet next to her desk. It leaned perilously toward her chair. It was made up of art work done by her three kids. She said she hated even looking in the direction of the art edifice. She said,"It's like an anvil hanging over me, waiting to smash me." That must have been hard for her to be intimidated by something that she also associated with the love she felt for her kids. Clutter is often built with this dichotomy: there's something precious in it for us, and there's something abhorrent. This split shuts us down and we can't decide. I took a look around her space and found three long and empty and flat boxes. I asked her what they were for. She said she bought them for her kid's art work. She forgot she had them. I put them on the floor, opened the boxes, and brought the art work down to the floor. She told me she felt horrible about tossing any of the art. I told her that she felt horrible about the presence of the art in general. Too much of anything can be overwhelming. Maybe there was a better alternative. We went through one piece of art at a time. Suddenly she was able to think again. She could consider clearly with her heart whether a piece of art should stay or go. She was happy again.

- I worked with my second client in her home office too. She felt so uncomfortable in this room. She hated the couch and her desk. Then she told me about how she hated a bunch of furniture in other rooms of her home. She had been wanting to sell the furniture for a while, but she kept not getting around to it. I suggested having a charity come and get the stuff so she didn't have to suffer anymore. She was an accountant and said that it would be a financial mistake to not make the money from the sale of the furniture. I said there's no amount of money worth the pain she was enduring living like this. Because her situation was illuminated in this clear and open way, she understood and decided to donate the furniture.

- I wanted to get a chance to write my blog about this day and publish it yesterday, Friday. I usually write this blog daily Monday through Friday. But there wasn't time during the day. I felt the pressure though. I didn't like the feeling. I tried doing it around midnight last night. But I was so tired and knew it wouldn't be good. I realized there was a part of me that felt you might be disappointed. I couldn't believe I was feeling that way. "What, are you kidding me?" I found some of my own clutter! I realized this was a good opportunity to take care of myself. I went to bed. I waited till around noon today and wrote this. And it was fun!

The Elusiveness of Memories

I got an email question that I feel will be helpful to share with you:

"I have a lot of wonderful memories and I hate to part with my things,especially my books. I have hundreds of books and they are all like friends to me. However, my husband says they are ruining our house and eating up potentially useful space. How can I organize my books?"

It seems the clutter situation is her love of her books and her husband's dislike of the books. She and her husband can sit down and talk about the situation. They share their home, so both of their feelings matter. Just because someone dislikes another person's things doesn't mean they can decide for them.

She can also decide to take an honest look at her books. She could pick up one at a time and ask, "Do I still enjoy this book, will I reread it, or can I let it go?" It helps to look at one item at a time and make a decision. If she looks at all of her books, it can be emotionally overwhelming because she feels they are all her friends. But individually she might have another perspective.

Her relationship with her husband is a thing too, as much as the books. She can look and see how the presence of the books affects her relationship with her husband. Does she like the effect or not? Sometimes we do things in one area of our life to bring attention to another area of our life. We may not be very conscious of it, but sometimes its easier than direct communication. By taking a kind approach to looking at her books, she might get a better understanding of her feelings about her relationship with your husband.

Something else to know is by letting go of something, we won't lose our memories. We don't have control over our memories. We may think by keeping something that it will trigger our memories. But what happens is we keep some thing, and pretty soon it fades into the background with all our other things. We get used to the thing being there and it no longer stands out. Or it goes into a box, and because we probably won't look in there, it's forgotten. Plus our memories about things are not static. An object may one day remind us of the love we feel for someone. Another day it may remind us of a time they pissed us off.

I recently went through my songs which I keep on itunes on my computer. I came upon my Aerosmith collection. That fact that I said, "collection" makes it suspect. I felt an instant need to protect them. It was an odd feeling. There was a part of me that went, "No, not Aerosmith!" I have so many great memory movies in my mind about this band. I felt like I would be losing that joy. But the thing is, I don't listen to Aerosmith anymore. When they came up on random play on my computer, I'd get irritated and fast forward to the next song. So I deleted the Aerosmith songs from my computer. What a relief!

We have this feeling to hang onto the memory because it's a way of trying to save and savor a good feeling we experienced in our life. For me it was a few isolated "golden moments" seeing Aerosmith in concert in high school. But the feeling is elusive. It can't be trapped or controlled. It comes to our awareness out of the blue and lasts for a few seconds. It's a very powerful few seconds. That's what makes us want to maintain the feeling.

Unless something is still part of our lives, I recommend letting it go because it allows new experiences to come in that can be equally or even more compelling. As long as we're still alive, there will be new treasures to be experienced.

This clutter busting process is all fine tune adjusting. We're seeing what makes us feel good in our life now, what we still enjoy, what serves us, and what doesn't. We may be surprised at what actually matters to us now. It's worth the look.

When Control Becomes Clutter

This is a question from one of my blog readers:

"I don't know if you have covered this or not, but can you talk about the correlation between clutter issues and control issues? Do people that feel like they are not in control of their lives more prone to clutter? It's interesting. I believe a life of simplicity is a life of freedom, and we begin to let go of things, people, materials that are no longer holding onto us."

Clutter seems to happen to all kinds of people. Everyone has some clutter in his or her life. I don’t think that people who feel like they are not in control of their lives have any more clutter than those who feel like they are in control. I’ve worked with some clients who attempted to control much of their life and they turned out to have plenty of clutter.

Control is interesting. Sometimes we hang onto things because it gives us a feeling that things aren’t changing. This is a way to get a sense of security that we think will give us peace of mind. But it’s false control because life is changing in and around us all the time. It actually ends up making us feel unstable because we are trying to pretend that things are other than they actually are.

I don’t like to use the word “issues” because it often makes people feel at fault. There’s a feeling of blame in the word. I think a better word is confusion. At the heart of a clutter situation is a feeling of uncertainty and personal chaos. “I want to feel good in my home, but I don’t. I tried letting go of things, but I can’t make myself do it. I feel I should be able to control this, but I can’t. My things have a strong hold over me. I feel stuck in my own home. I don’t know what to do!!”

We can look for control as the culprit, but the interesting thing is, the desire to control is natural. We need to take care of ourselves. A lot of control is good: driving our car on the right side of the road, preparing and cooking our food, paying our bills on time, getting regular exercise. These are all efforts that we can usually control. But when the control extends to trying to create the exact outcome we want, or control everything that happens to us, and to a greater extent, trying to control the universe, we suffer.

One of my clients told me that once when he was standing next to his car while the engine was running, the car slipped from neutral into drive and started moving forward. He put his hands and shoulder onto the windshield and the side of the car to try and stop the car and dislocated his shoulder. Sometimes we put our shoulders into life's car and we think we can control its momentum.

That’s the control confusion. We may get so mixed up in it that we try even harder to control, or maybe the experience fries us and we give up altogether. But hopefully we start to see the limits of control. Through our experiences we might start to see we aren’t separate from the rest of life. Life does what it wants, regardless of how we try and control it. “It’s not my fault after all. Maybe if I start to see things for what they are, I can take care of the things I’m capable of.”

That’s a life of simplicity. It puts us in touch with our natural strengths and vulnerabilities. We do what we can with what life is presenting us. It reduces things down to what is. There’s peace of mind in living that way.

From the Clutter Busting Front Lines...

I'm on a lunch break from a clutter bust and I wanted to share with you what's happening so far with today's client.

We've been working on her desk in her home. When we started, she told me that she avoided ever doing anything with her stuff on, around and under her desk because it felt too time consuming. But she also told me that she dreaded ever coming into her office or going near her desk because the piles, stacks and containers of papers was so intimidating. That's how clutter works. It's presence is overwhelming and diminishing. It takes away the energy and courage to clutter bust. By starting, we get the energy back, and this is the fuel that helps us clutter bust.

There was no place to put her legs under the desk because it was filled with clear plastic storage containers that were filled with papers. She got them because she felt they would help her get organized. But it turns out they were trash cans because we went through the papers and 95% of them went into the recycling trash bag.

I asked her if I could write down some of the things she was saying during the clutter bust. They were pretty good and I was thinking you would like to read them. She said yes. I think it helped her get perspective on what she was feeling and doing. Here's some great quotes from her:

"All this stuff I thought I needed to have, I don't have to have again."

"This stuff was taking oxygen out of the room. I can breathe again."

"I never approached this stuff because it felt like it was locked in cement."

"Every single day this stuff is dragging me down, it feels like an anvil or a storm over my head. But as I'm letting this stuff go, it feels like things are clearing up in the sky."

"I was thinking I needed to keep this stuff, so I never would look at it."

She also remarked that she felt she needed to collect and keep all the paper because on some level it made her feel secure. However she never felt any sense of being safer. The presence of the papers just made her feel more anxious. She realized that her need to keep the papers was logical, but with some introspection she saw that the need was not based on reality. She was surprised that she felt more stable and secure without the papers.

She laughed and told me that her grandmother used to tell her grandfather, "You can't keep all this stuff, it keeps you from living in the present, it makes you old."

Okay, it's back to the front lines...

We're Smarter than the Clutter

Everyone's approach to clutter busting will be different. Your creativity will determine how you take a look and investigate the things in your space. That's why I keep my descriptions of how to clutter bust very basic. It allows you to bring in your own intuitive and natural ways.

Here's one of my blog readers approach to looking at the clutter in her home:

"Our space was feeling clutter-y; I photographed every clutter-spot throughout the whole house. (They reminded me of mushroom clumps.) The images were powerful; I was appalled. It motivated me to CLEAR one of the spots before bedtime. It felt wonderful! It was great to see my space as an "outsider" would see it."

That was a very creative clutter bust. Her inventive approach allowed her to see her things in a new way. The "outsider" perspective helps diminish our emotional attachment. Suddenly, the thing that we avoided looking at or making a decision about, clearly becomes trash. This clarity of awareness compels us to remove the clutter.

In my book I talk about taking an item that we are feeling stuck about and putting it on a chair and interviewing it. We would ask it questions like, "So, why are you here?" and "What are you doing for me?" It's a way of getting a better view of whether something serves us or not. I believe in our creativity. When we're open to it, we become more aware. Our awareness tells us whether something is right or wrong for us.

Clutter is crafty and insidious. It has a way of mixing in with the things that do matter in our life and making it seem like it matters too. But we are much more intelligent than the clutter. That's why when we take a look at our things in a new way, we become more alert and we stop falling for clutter's tricks.