I asked my client to tell me about the rooms in her home. She said that a certain room was, "Scary."
I said that was the room in which we would work. I like picking the room no one wants to work in because it's the most powerful way to help the client take back their house from the stuff.
This room was used as a storage space for things she and her family weren't using. When she gave me a tour of the room via Skype, she came upon a box hiding out in the back of the room, my clutter radar went off. I suggested we go through the box. My client let out a groan.
She opened the box and it was stuffed with papers. She glumly said, "This box is so full of gravity, it's a little black hole of gravity."
She didn't want to go through the papers. She said there were too many to consider. I said it seems that way when you see them all. It's like two hundred people talking to you at once. It helps to listen to and consider one at a time.
She picked up a piece of paper. She read it. I could feel it taking a toll on her. I said whatever she was looking at made her look old and tired. I like to point out the negative effects because we often don't notice them ourselves. She said it was a detailed grievance she had written about someone. I said that holding on to the resentment she felt towards someone wasn't making her feel better in anyway. She let the paper go.
Then she picked up one piece, then another, and another. She looked at all three at the same time. She looked overwhelmed and confused. I asked her to only look at one piece. She set down the other two and was able to decide about the one. Again, it helps to focus on just one thing at a time. We're not built to multi-task, we're built to focus our attention on one thing.
Next she came upon a number of spiritual papers. I asked her to go through the spiritual papers one at a time and choose the ones she liked and wanted to read, and let go of the rest. She put the ones she wanted in a folder.. After she found about ten articles, she was uncomfortable and said she felt like she had saved too many pieces. At the same time, she didn't want to let any of them go.
I told her she's not alone. As humans we have an appetite for more. We feel like we'll be happy
when we get more. But it has the opposite effect. With too much we shut down.
We do better with a
smaller amount that fits our needs.
I asked my client to go through and pick a smaller amount of articles that felt comfortable with reading.
I said it would be helpful for her to know that at times she's still going to have the tendency to want more. But at the same time she'll have the understanding from her experience that she won't actually be happy with more. By knowing how she operated, she could learn to start keeping herself in check.