Monday Link Roundup
Today’s Monday Link Roundup centers around hoarding and decluttering. If your home is seriously cluttered, beginning to declutter for 15 minutes per day is the single most effective tweak you can begin today to transform your life.
What do I mean by “seriously cluttered”? If you have areas of your home that cannot be used for their intended purpose, then your life — and your family’s – is being seriously impacted by the clutter. For example, sometimes a family cannot eat at the dining room table because it is covered with stuff. Or a sofa or chair is out of commission because it has a heap of clutter on top. Sometimes people stop using beds, bedrooms or even bathrooms because the clutter has taken over. Is this you? Commit to turning the problem around for just 15 minutes a day — I promise you will be amazed at the results of a little consistent daily focus.
Here are the links: Read more
You Are Enough and You Have Enough!
If you subscribe to the free Nurturing Hope newsletter you may have noticed that I frequently remind readers, “You are enough and you have enough!” This is an affirmation that I was given by my wonderful life coach, Bill Baren.
“I am enough and I have enough,” immediately resonated with me. Many times in my life I had found myself trying to make up for a sense of inadequacy by putting other people’s needs before my own. In the workplace, I worked long hours and took on unreasonable responsibilities. I got into relationships with people whose addiction issues ensured that I’d be called upon to rescue them. Instead of taking the time to truly nurture myself and put my needs first, I ate as a shortcut way to comfort myself. I ate when I was tired, I ate when I was angry and I ate when I was sad or lonely. I tried to make up for my perceived inadequacy by spending money and buying stuff. Read more
“How Do I Help a Hoarder?” Some Useful Links
How can I help my friend or my family member? People write to me asking this question every day. They are spouses, children, parents, siblings or friends of people whose hoarding problems are out of control. They desperately want to help their loved one gain control over the clutter and mess that has overwhelmed them. NurturingHope.com is primarily a community for those of us who actually struggle with clutter and emotional eating, but I’ve written this post to offer some resources that can be helpful to friends and family.
A hard fact about any problematic behavior — hoarding, smoking, overeating, gambling, shopping addiction, drug addiction, and the list could go on and on — is that people can change their behaviors and their lives, but only if they truly want to. There is always hope that a person who hoards will come to the desire to change in his or her own time, but in the meantime the family and friends of the hoarder have to figure out how to make peace with the problem. They have to decide how and whether to offer practical help on a day-to-day basis while the hoarding goes on. Read more
An Excellent Documentary About Hoarding
POSSESSED from Martin Hampton on Vimeo.
This is a short documentary (a little more than 20 minutes) that you can watch in its entirety. Four people in the UK with hoarding issues talk about their lives and their problems with stuff.
Two moments that really struck me:
- A book hoarder expresses his guilt about the idea of parting with some of his books, “It’s almost as though you’re betraying them.”
- A woman who feels unable to throw her garbage away says, “It might be a lot of rubbish but nobody is allowed to touch it.”
What were your reactions to the documentary?
Read all the other posts about hoarding here.
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The Top 6 Non-Reasons for Clutter
CNN and Real Simple have published a fantastic article about clutter today. It’s not one of your typical “how to get your not-really-cluttered house a little more uncluttered.” This article really gets to the roots of our rationales for keeping the stuff we don’t love and don’t need. And it provides help with replacing these non-reasons with more useful ways of thinking about clutter. Read more
Anti-Hoarding Strategies from a Hoarding Therapist
Karron Maidment runs UCLA’s intensive treatment program for hoarders. She has written a really interesting article that contains many insights gained from treating hoarders in the program. I’m going to outline some of the article highlights in this post; it’s well worth the time to read the whole article if you are interested in more.
The UCLA treatment program concentrates on helping hoarders with discarding clutter, organizing kept items, preventing incoming clutter and introducing alternative behaviors. Therefore, I’ve boiled down the article’s strategies into these four categories. Read more
Decluttering Emotionally Charged Stuff
My son (who is 16 years old now!) has a dwindling collection of kitties (figurines) that he collected in his boyhood. A couple of weeks ago two of his kitties, a pair of black porcelain cats, mysteriously appeared on my desk. I inquired and he told me that he just really didn’t want them anymore.
Well, I didn’t really want the kitties either, to be honest, but still my heart kind of ached at the idea of getting rid of things that once held meaning for my used-to-be-little boy. The kitties spent the last two weeks on my otherwise uncluttered desk. Read more