Heal Chaos and Overwhelm: DECLUTTER Every Part of Your Life

studies show that people with a lot of clutter around their homes have a higher than average rate of anxiety depression social isolation and ADHD like symptoms but here's what bugs me about these studies they assume that all these symptoms are caused by clutter and therefore if you clean up the Clutter you won't be depressed and stuck anymore you'll be happier more focused more connected to other people and honestly there's some truth to this but that doesn't mean that clutter is the main cause of those problems I'm going to put a bold hypothesis out here and

that's that clutter is just one more symptom of trauma alongside depression anxiety isolation and so on but it's not the direct cause of those symptoms now we know that trauma affects people neurologically and that means your brain your physiology your feelings and your behavior patterns now trauma can make people compulsive it can fill your thinking with stressful thoughts it can make you feel immobilized and unproductive it does something to your neurology that is quite often expressed as cluttering behaviors accumulating stuff that you don't need and piling it up around your living space or working space

intending to get organized at some point in the future but not having the inner power to do that and I think cluttering behavior is a trauma-driven version of Something normal and natural that we call nesting behavior and nesting that's setting up your home space making it comfortable and warm and orderly and well stocked which is a good and natural instinct but like all good instincts trauma can push this one over the line into something over the top and that's what cluttering is that good Instinct at an amplified level that makes it not good that is

caused by and causes a feeling of overwhelm and inability to get organized or to take action by cleaning up your stuff so you have too much food and some of it is rotting or too many jackets or giant stacks of papers you've been meaning to go through or you can't find your toolbox because you left it lying around and then other stuff got piled up on top of it that kind of thing so that's what I mean when I say I have my own hypothesis and it kind of goes against the research because while researchers

assume that the symptoms that go along with clutter are the cause of clutter I believe that clutter is more like a fellow symptom trauma causes all of them depression anxiety lack of mental focus and clutter does that feel true to you well wherever it comes from I think these symptoms interact with each other and that's why when you're healing trauma I don't believe that you have to always start with the root cause of the trauma you can start anywhere in your symptoms where you feel enough inner power to take some action so are you ready

to throw out the old vegetables in the fridge and clean out those icky drawers that's a great place to start Do you have a a couple of hours available to organize all your unsorted papers into separate stacks of you know trash file and do something about that's also a great idea and you know what both of those actions would almost certainly lift your mood and improve your ability to focus decluttering is a powerful re-regulation exercise with very good fringe benefits of like your bills get paid but in my experience you're always going to need to

be healing your dysregulation symptoms to even find that inner power to do any decluttering at all because that's the problem right you know you should declutter but you have a lack of power to do it not doing it makes all the other problems in your life a little worse now hoarding is like a separate thing and it's harder to change and I'm not really talking about that here today but in that one it's it's uh not only is there a lack of power but there can also be a distortion in the thinking that it needs

to be done it just seems like know everything as it is is terribly important so I'm distinguishing clutter is like no you agree it's a problem I wish I didn't have all this stuff piled up I can't find my keys so you agree it's a problem it's a lack of power so getting that inner power moving and accessing it that's how you're going to be able to declutter and with that power moving activated in you you'll also find that your your emotions get lighter your mind is more focused you feel calmer and you feel more

open to new experiences and letting people into your life I mean have you ever had that it kind of goes together clutter is a huge problem for a lot of people who had childhood trauma and it's not just the physical space and belongings that could be called clutter right people with cptsd also experience mental clutter too much on your mind all in a jumble can't focus or read situations because it's like a you know the bag of cats in there and then there's emotional clutter where your feelings are popping up everywhere some of them from

so long ago you didn't even know where they're coming from but you have a debilitating reaction to them that's totally getting in your way and there's also relationship clutter where the people are in your life they're a mix of people who are good to have in your life and people who maybe should not be in your life anymore and finally there's time clutter where you're overbooked you're not prioritizing you're getting swept away in things that feel urgent and ignoring things that are actually important and I'm going to talk about all of these because they're all

common with childhood PTSD and they can all improve when you have the power to change even one of them when you learn to detect and heal neurological dysregulation that's caused by trauma this in turn causes so many other trauma symptoms including the ones that trigger your tendency to stay cluttered whether it's your calendar your file cabinet you know the floor of your car whatever having space and order I mean doesn't that sound good when you can practice noticing your neurological dysregulation which is a common trauma symptom and learning to master re-regulation the Clutter of all

kinds starts to settle down and there's a wonderful appealing feeling of peace and possibility that can come into your life and that's another source where that well where your inner power comes from it begins to fill up because there's peace there's visual space around you and there's time so let's start with physical clutter I'm talking about belongings just strewn around your physical space in your house in your yard in your car in the place where you work and it's visually chaotic it's full of things that you don't actually use or need and that makes it

hard to find what you do need like do you keep huge boxes or racks of multiple sizes of clothes in case you lose weight or gain weight even though the clothes that don't fit now are old and out of style and do the clothes that fit you right now have a good place to live in a closet with enough hangers or enough drawer space where clothes are clean and ready to wear right am I nailing you about something this multiple sizes of clothes is totally a thing with people who struggle with their weight that you

never really know like what size you know sometimes it'll come down for a while it goes back up and that's one of the beautiful things when order comes into your life around food you know and it's it can be a long time coming it goes this is the thing that goes along with trauma quite a lot like sort of clutter of the food clutter of of what you choose to eat and what you have available to yourself but then that has this effect on clothes and it can mean lots of boxes and cramming in closets

and then a weird like whole like segments of your closet that are sort of Shame portions clothes you can't get into and what you can do with clothes that don't fit right now is you can put them away it's okay to put them away but put them in a way in a you know a stored fashion and not just piled up everywhere and trying to figure it out and every time you try something that's the wrong size you feel bad about yourself like why do that to yourself do you pick things up at thrift stores

or left on the street like where I live in Berkeley that's customary like even in fancy neighborhoods when people have something that still has you use they put it out on the street and so yesterday or the day before I was taking a walk and somebody had put out a bunch of they put out like a plastic thing with different silverware there must have been 30 knives 30 Forks like the whole thing and actually a year ago we were really short we we have a lot of like big potlucks and things and we were short

on having enough silverware and so I bought some I got some at like Costco it was cheap we have abundant silverware but it's like this leftover feeling like we don't have enough I picked it up off the street and I'm holding it because I have adult sons right I'm like well maybe you know maybe as they go out on their own they're gonna need silverware I don't know but my husband's like you did it again you did it again I grew up very poor and we often didn't have enough and it's really hard for me

to walk past stuff that's on the street being given away for free without thinking I don't need this right now but I could and what if I did and I should have this now and then it becomes clutter and so you know I'm lucky that I have this giant garage that I can put stuff that I don't really use in but every year or six months I have to go in there and start like putting stuff back out on the street and it's almost like a funny thing in my family it's a tendency I have

that's definitely a legacy of some Trauma from when I was little so it's actually like a healthy nice feeling for me when I gather up stuff and I do put it back out on the street like it makes me feel good that somebody else is going to use it it always gets taken Again by some some of their poor sap who has this thing that I have like I don't know I might need a hundred pieces of silverware in the future or it can also be nice to donate stuff you can donate it like to

Goodwill and if the stuff is decent you know you get to add up the math with fair market value and that's a tax deduction if you itemize your taxes so one thing that holds people up is the feeling that these things could be sold so you know we have some broken bikes in the garage and we think oh well we should sell them you know if we fixed them up they would be worth X and it would cost this much to fix them and nobody ever fixes them that's what it is so if you are

in a situation where you have the power to sell things I mean I know people with really bustling businesses on Craigslist or Ebay you know selling things and maybe they go around and they actually like collect stuff productively and sell them and make some money that way well that's lovely if you're not somebody who has the level of organization and power to do that it would be better to give away the broken bike or to donate it and so a rule of thumb is like it just depends on how much money you have but let's

say that you could replace something for twenty dollars and you're not using it right now go ahead and give it away because if you can replace it for twenty dollars you know if you have a little more money you could put the line at like fifty dollars if you could replace this thing for fifty dollars but you're not using it right now go ahead so a bike is more than that right a used bike is I don't know 500 or something that's a lot of money and but so then it's time to use a productivity

method to write down some things you're actually going to deal with and give yourself a timeline you go I'm going to get this bike repaired and the bike repair costs whatever sixty dollars and then you put it on Craigslist and sell it for whatever a few hundred dollars and then you have the money and that's that's satisfying and I would like everybody to have that money everybody's happy you know somebody has a bike and the bike is fixed and everything's going really well but it's just like realistically can you do that so another Arrangement you

can do is to partner up with somebody who is willing to help you and you split the proceeds from these Endeavors and sometimes people who you know they're looking for a little extra work they would be happy to do this with you but you still have to put the effort out to make that arrangement with them so I'm just saying sometimes the best way to get rid of the Clutter is to give it away it's still going to be valued by somebody it's still going to be useful in the world it's just that you're not

going to have the cash all right so another thing is your cupboard full of cans and containers of things that have been sitting there for more than a year so cans do last a while I understand I was hungry a lot when I was growing up we had times when we really did have nothing to eat and so it's just been this tendency that started when I first started having my own money in my own place to live I would way over buy food and it was stuff I was never going to eat but I

just need I loved the feeling of cupboards that were completely full and had stacks of things like that gave me the this feeling of peace and security but the fact of the matter is right now I don't need to have all that food in the cupboard because I have some money in savings and I could go buy it at the store at any time now if Hard Times be fill me like at the beginning of lockdown when we all thought oh my gosh there's going to be these food shortages we're all going to starve you

know we were thinking we're like well we live near a creek we'll have water and then I bought like cases and cases of tuna and chicken and green beans and corn and all this stuff that um you know we've barely made a dent in three years later and it's time for me to give some of it to the food pantry because it's good food and people will be glad to have it but we just need to distribute it where it's actually needed and going to get eaten even cans have their sort of sell by dates

right so that's something I'm actually really looking forward to and I'll have more shelf space and even if the shelves sipped empty that's fine I personally because I get so disregulated by visual clutter like seeing a shelf that has a little space between items it's actually very re-regulating for me and stimulates my I'm imagination and my sense of being productive it does do you have that do you have cars that don't work God forbid are they on the front yard well I grew up like that and I was really embarrassed and ashamed about it and

it was just you know my parents were going through a lot they did not have power to deal with it but yes there was a broken car in the front yard for years there was a wall between the living room and the garage that had been broken through these bricks with a big Jagged hole in it that was also there for years and that we used that for a doorway turn the garage into a bedroom but as a teenager it took me a while to understand what was going on in my family was alcoholism alcoholism

just sucks away all that tidying energy and this clutter was everywhere in the house there were thick layers of dust there was rotten food and it made me really ashamed for people to come home and so my husband had a car that didn't work he went ahead and bought another one thinking he'd sell the old one and then two years passed or more eventually he sold the car so good news he eventually sold the car but it got covered with leaves the neighbors began to complain the city came and was putting tags on the car

and it was really this huge source of old shame well there was like no I think I think some of it was legitimate present day shame but this old childhood thing about being like the most screwed up family on the Block and the neighbors themselves were complaining it was um yeah it was it was beyond even my standards and that level of clutter to me uh just it made it feel like we you know it we also were counting on having the money from that car and we had a plan for that money and we

couldn't go forward with the plan for the money because we didn't have the money because we had this car we kept paying registration on it and that kind of thing was very demoralizing to me a lot of my healing from complex PTSD has to do with getting um competency and Mastery over managing life in these areas that were not totally together when I was a kid like I always have car insurance I always see the dentist every six months even when I was a single mom and it had to go on my third credit card

I took my kids to the dentist all the time when I was a kid I had very rotten teeth and finally a relative stepped in and paid for me to have like huge amounts of dental work when I was like eight I had to have like four crowns by the time I was eight because nobody was brushing my teeth you know and um so that's a thing that's always helped me feel like life is okay life is together now a car is a great example of something that's hard you know sometimes decluttering has this series

of steps and when you have cptsd and you're having trouble holding your focus and a task involves a whole series of steps right that can be very hard for a person with cptsd and this is where having a white board or a digital online like I use this thing called kanban flow I'm always telling people k-a-n-b-a-n and I make a list that I look at every day multiple times and I delete things that I complete or move them into a done column but you can create a little task and then click and drag it to

these different columns and name them what you want you can color code them and so the steps involved with selling a car right you have to get it like hailed and super clean and then you have to make sure it runs and that the tires are full and you have to know where the keys are for all of this and once it's not always you know if you're very cluttered knowing where the keys are is a problem and if you don't have keys you have to get the keys made you have to have the paperwork

and the title ready to sign over so all of that can be so daunting and overwhelming that you can never do it I know exactly why we get cluttered and why cptsd is correlated with this like it's just too much if there's a lot if you're very disregulated so this is another case of sometimes the easy way out is to donate and obviously if your car has great value you know you still want the money but my family's done this before when we had a car that was kind of a clunker and we couldn't deal

with all the steps we donated it and they just come and take it and they take it even if you don't have the paperwork even if it doesn't run you know there's somebody who wants that car and that's really helpful to a person like me who can get overwhelmed and everything gets stuck and I can't plan anything unless I solve the problems right in front of my face toiletries let's talk about toiletries so a few months ago I bought some good makeup I've talked about that here before it was such a big deal in my

life finally I've got like really good makeup I'm wearing it now how do you like it right but I used to have just like the very cheapest stuff from Walgreens like I was putting stuff on my eyes that wouldn't even stay on my eyes and it was five dollars and little splinters were getting in my eyes and it probably caused this cancer I don't know it's what I had and it's what I was used to and it comes from growing up poor but I'm at a point in my life where having the makeup be together

and look nice and kind of stay on my eyes and not go running down is important to me so I hired an expert um and her name is Maria Riley she's a makeup artist and I had hired her for professional video shoots that I used to run before but I hired her just for me and she came and helped me and she showed me you know she told me what to buy and what makeup to get and she taught me how to apply the makeup and it was this really great day it was kind of

stressful and I've it just was a lot to learn for me I never really knew I like I I airbrush my face with Foundation yeah right it's so I didn't even know you could Airbrush Foundation onto your face but it just looks better and I don't know it looks great so so I have a little airbrush and I have these little pods and you know I have to maintain it all I have to wash my brushes and it's this whole thing but when Maria was sitting with me showing me this she goes well she said

first you know get out everything that you have right now and so I showed her all my makeup and she was so cool and non-judgmental about my crappy old stuff she's like this nail polish like I can't open it I'm like oh yeah I bought that like in 1999 uh to put my kids initial on his toothbrush you know it's a long time ago you know and it doesn't open anymore and um she said okay well you could anything that's like old and not usable anymore you can just throw out there was some stuff that

was old and you could still use it but now I had a new better version of it but it was halfway used makeup and I was like what can we do with this can we give it to somebody she was like no that's you can't give old makeup to people throw it out and so you know this part of me that's so Thrifty I can't stand throwing things out I got used to it it's like I I have better stuff now I don't need this anymore I'm truly not going to use it anymore and nobody

else wants my 15 year old bronzer or and they definitely don't want my two-year-old mascara that's kind of dried out you know they don't want it it's unsanitary and it goes you just throw it out so that was kind of freeing for me and I noticed that a little bit of hoarding style was there that it that I had an emotional attachment like this was the make like makeup from 20 years ago like I was young back then I had little babies I was I was a new mom and by throwing out the stuff that

belonged to me at that time and likewise with the pants I'm never going to fit into again you know it just was this idea of a time that I could go back to and I had to get it into my mind that it's okay it's okay to get rid of the belongings of that time because the way that we can revisit those times is looking at pictures having memories or really just living in the present and having a good time now there's so many ways you know for example that I'm more like a young person

in my life now and that I'm lighter-hearted I feel more free-spirited I can have fun at a party I don't sit there just like sour feeling like everybody hates me like I'm kind of younger than I've ever been so so it's okay you know not to have the belongings anymore and I'm telling the pants from like 1999 and the big bell bottoms and stuff I don't even want them anymore and I can't button them so so it's all good so those I donated and you know God help the people who actually want to wear those

old pants but maybe they do and I just trust that Goodwill will sort it all out and they whatever should be recycled as fabric they they're going to take care of it and I can stop grieving it or anything but it's out of my closet you know whether it's sentimentality or fear of that you'll be in lack in the future or feeling done with it but not having the inner power to you know just make the time and put it on your schedule and do it power is what you need whatever whatever the step that

you need to take is the thing that's going to propel you into that step is inner power so I'm going to talk about how to get that inner power within this video but I just want to cover clutter a little more so let's go over the other dimensions of clutter that hold you back and keep you from feeling open to life and ready for good things to come in all right one of them is mental clutter one thing I can say from my own experience of childhood PTSD is the stuff that I'm holding in my

mind can get very crowded and I'm sure there's some sort of problem with trauma that makes thoughts and ideas you know harder to sort and remember and process in a good way you know to move them along and that clutter of the Mind there it makes it hard to focus it makes it hard to prioritize things appropriately and it makes it hard for me to notice that I have choices when I'm feeling overwhelmed like the world gets very it gets very small like I I'm just like I'm so overwhelmed I'm so overwhelmed there's nothing I

can do and then I bring that dysregulation down and I the choices open back up again so I Rely heavily on to-do lists timers and calendars so that I can predict when I'm clear-headed what I need to be doing each day and then write down a plan now I know not everybody is a planner I am a planner plans help me get stuff out of my mind I know if I write it down I don't have to keep reminding myself don't forget don't forget drop the rent drop the rent now I don't always stick to

my plan in fact I almost never stick entirely to my plan because my plans are a little too ambitious but I don't have to waste time throughout the day trying to figure out what I need to do next I've already put them in ranked order priority of what I'm going to do and I declutter my mind twice a day by doing my daily practice techniques which helps me move you know fearful resentful thoughts out of my mind and onto paper so that I have more of my mind available to actually like think and envision things

and do things and there's a link to my daily practice course down in the description section of this video and all my videos if you want to try it it's free anybody can try it and that's one way to find out if it helps you too to clear your mind is give it a try okay then there's emotional clutter and mostly by this I mean old beliefs and resentments that once were true that you've been telling yourself and telling other people way past the expiration date like did a boyfriend in high school make out with

your best friend well that happened to me I only found out about it from the friend when I was an adult and I had a good hard cry about it for 10 minutes and I was really sad and and then for about four months I couldn't let it go I just couldn't let it go I was really resentful eventually the friendship with the friend fell apart not because of this directly but I think that when the truth of the relationship came out I don't know it just didn't hold we've been friends a long time but

what she did I did think a little less of her even though it was so so long ago I mean it was literally back in the 70s and um and we did drift apart but now I just because of my daily practice the emotions about it are just like they're not there there's I have no tears about it at all like I remember it it's a fact but I'm not carrying this emotional clutter this resentment at her or this victimization like oh it could have been so great with this boyfriend if she hadn't come along

I have no Illusions about that it's sometimes the hurtful things that happen are an indicator of the instability and ungodness of the things in your life the relationships in your life and so we get emotionally cluttered sometimes when we hold on with that sort of Shoulda Coulda Woulda thinking or um you know they really I you know they owe me and apologize I can't I apology I can't let this go until they apologize so we're sort of freezing stuff in Amber emotionally and it becomes an identity right and this was these are some of the

phases I've had to go through sometimes in healing like it was really healing for me at a certain point to go you know what I am I'm an adult child of an alcoholic and that was like my whole thing for a while and gradually I did a lot of healing around that and this the things that go with that and I also noticed that there's stuff going on with me that's a problem that has nothing to do with that and to solve those problems it helped me to free up and start going I'm a person

who has a lot of things I've had some hard things I've had some advantages um I I will always be an adult child of an alcoholic but that is so not my primary identity anymore I'm a person with complex PTSD but I'm always telling people your your trauma is an injury but it's not an identity it's not what you are and so carrying all this stuff like this terrible stuff happened I can never change there are a few problems in life that actually can't be changed right and one example I use is um losing a

limb you cannot get another limb but you can get a work around you can often get a prosthetic that will help you do many things and your life can continue to Blossom anyway and so that's that is an uncluttered approach to dealing with life's hardship is not to carry it around forever like it's always going to take some time to deal with the grief and sadness and disappointment and anger of of what has happened but soon with healthy healing it gets moved down the conveyor belt down into the past space opens up again for new

experiences new relationships and yes new heartaches new ones life goes on emotional clutter also comes in the form of seeking out social media people you're obsessed with or seeking out news about things that make you angry like anger is the drug like being different than better than disagreeing with hateful towards some other kind of person and that's a drug and that is clutter outrage is total emotional clutter if the news you read isn't helping you be informed so that you can be more useful it's clutter all right it's it's emotional clutter and it's probably making

you sick and it's probably getting passed on to other people and making their world difficult I really urge you to pay attention and prioritize what is useful so just like you would go through a drawer and keep the genes that you still wear and get rid of the ones that you're never going to wear when you're consuming media what is the stuff that's actually useful to you like necessary for your job or truly entertaining and uplifting for you great I'm all for people being informed but we are so far beyond like being informed anymore with

the level of information that is designed to agitate us and clutter us up emotionally and the consequence of that is a lot of division and isolation and trust me as a traumatized person you don't need extra of that so if your media consumption is causing you to feel separate from people if it's causing you to feel turned against or victimized by people in a way that you didn't used to then it's clutter if it's helping you recognize a problem that you can solve or that you need to address it's useful that's basically the formula now

finally emotional clutter can be the sad stories that that we tell ourselves about stuff like you know I was the black sheep in my family and now I can never feel like I belong or I was rejected by my mom and I just can't have relationships those are things that I've believed about myself before and thankfully I got those out of the cupboard I got those out of the cupboard and I made space for a new idea and a new experience to come in and I get this a lot in um in the letters people

write to me and somebody was writing in you know I spent years waiting for this girlfriend to get done with school and then she didn't she didn't want me anymore and they felt wrong for all those years and it had been years and years since it had happened and then now they could never have an education and I'm just going to say yeah no that sucks but there was nothing stopping you from doing whatever you wanted to do with your life while you were in that relationship or now and there there are certain relationships that

stop you that do stop people abusive relationships course of ones being trapped in terrible poverty being incarcerated these are some reasons why people legitimately get stuck but a lot of times this is learned helplessness we're like the little bird in a cage the door's open but we never think to fly out those stories you tell yourself this cage I can never get out they need to be questioned you need to ask yourself is that true is that true is there another way what would happen if I walked out of the cage and the circumstances of

your life I know it's going to include some things that are hard and some things that are easy some things that are probably never going to be solved in some things that are just one second away just one little decision away and some things that are so massive that you don't really have control over them but you start with the thing that you can do you start with the thing right in front of you people with cptsd get overwhelmed and overwhelm is this feeling like I see a hundred things to do where do I even

start you just start with the thing in front of you one thing that you can try right now is just take a fast do a day where you don't talk about a certain problem anymore you might even take a fast from thinking about it it's you know you can't totally control your thoughts but when you notice you're thinking it again divert your thoughts to something else just for a day just to teach yourself about that space that you actually do have within you where you're not consumed by this problem that happened this this limitation that

was put on you at one time and just see if you don't if there isn't like a little door in that cage There's real life possibilities in front of you right now and to see them you might need to move past those hurts and let them recede into the past and I I keep promising you this I will talk about how to do that okay but I want to talk about a couple more kinds of clutter relationship clutter and I'm talking about all kinds of relationships friends co-workers family people in in the Romantic category if

you have cptsd chances are you have a shortage of people with whom you feel safe and good and seen and heard who get you and you have an abundance of people you don't like you don't want to deal with but you're forced to see them either because they live in the same building as you or you feel obligated or they work where you work or it's you have you carry this thing like I don't know it's probably just me I should keep putting up with this person who really makes me feel terrible because it's probably

just me that's a trauma thing so relationship decluttering means you make space in your life to enjoy people with whom you have Affinity you like them you feel good you inspire each other or you have a common purpose like you're working or raising children together and you do this by gently removing people who don't really belong in your life anymore it's better to have fewer people who are good for you than a whole bunch of people who just make you feel relationship cluttered you don't have to have a great reason for for stepping back from

a relationship it helps to have Clarity though and if you need clarity about who those people are my connection boot camp talks about that so you can check that out if you're interested all right finally there's time clutter and I think this one you know what I'm talking about that's where you you take too much on and this is the problem of over functioners who get their need for approval and meaning met by saying yes to things and having accomplishments and having this sense of a very colorful busy calendar these can be good things but

if you're not having time for friends or exercise or learning or adequate sleep or healing your trauma then your time is too cluttered you need some space in your life that is unscheduled that's unspoken for and it's open for you to decide in the moment how you want to spend that even if it's just sitting there staring at the wall because it's in those down times that you can really recharge your batteries to get new ideas you can make changes you could do something really big with your life that you couldn't have done when you

were chained up to other people's timelines and other people's agendas and that's one of the functions of meditation is to you know to sort of schedule and bring in that quiet time for that new inspiration to come in the thing is when you stop being cluttered all over your life openness does come and so does responsibility and sometimes that urge to clutter up your mind your heart your time your home it's a way to hold life away from you it's covert avoidance is something I call that life is hard sometimes it can be triggering and

for that what you really want is boundaries and ability to make decisions and say no but clutter I believe is a low-grade barrier to keep your life manageable I'd actually put debt in that in that column too like getting in debt staying in debt it's a way to hold life back I see I have no choices see I have to stay stuck where I am because actually thinking about my next step is stressful triggering but that's not a good way to accomplish you know self-care and to treat that feeling of being overwhelmed and triggered all

the way the side effects of that it's isolation it's it's getting Frozen in Amber instead of growing and it's getting isolated and making everything in the end unmanageable it gets more stressful not less stressful when you shut life out so even if you don't know what your next step is yet consider just opening up something better in your life because there's greatness in you and it needs room to breathe and grow beyond the trauma beyond what was done to you in the past and one way that you can begin to step into that good energy

of change and growth is by decluttering you can start where you are with just one closet or one thing on your calendar that needs to be taken off by ending a friendship that no longer serves you or by letting go of an old Grudge that you held against someone that really is not going to change anything whether you have The Grudge or not when you make space in your life some old trauma-driven feelings and thoughts are definitely going to surface and so to keep your decluttering steady and sustained and not fall back into it or

start piling things up again in every sense of the word you'll need tools to help you face and release the friction that arises the feelings that used to get stuffed down by by your inability to take action you know push it down you know keep avoiding so if you want to open up to this and be able to process those feelings that come up one thing I recommend to you is to try my daily practice techniques they are free it's a it's an online course that you can complete well you can learn the techniques in

less than an hour and there's a whole bunch of FAQ videos to learn the fine points and the link to that free course is right here and I will see you very soon [Music] thank you [Music]