2-3-4 Friday
‘Seeking to spark the most potential within you per word of any online newsletter’
1 thought
On Tuesday, I was clearing the home of someone who had been
hoarding for 5 years. After his mother died, he struggled to find the motivation to clear the items.
After all, there wasn’t anyone else worth clearing the home for.
Walk into the home, and you would smell a damp, rancid smell. Food boxes had been left there for 2.5 years, and plastic bags were stacked neatly, one on top of the other.
Even as we attempted to clear the place, there was an order to the clearing. What I saw as trash, like a bag, wasn’t trash to him.
He remarked,
You can’t throw away everything,
some of this still have sentimental value.
Where are you being sentimental in your life?
There’s nothing wrong with being sentimental.
The problem comes when these accumulated trash become debt, that we keep locked within us. Meet enough clients as a helping professional and you will see people with varying degrees of debt locked inside them.
You might see it in others, but we struggle to see it within ourselves.
Here are some warning signs.
- You find yourself reacting aversely to things that would normally not prompt a response from others, and you might have heard other parties saying before ‘Why do you take things so personally?’
- When someone gives you negative feedback, you find your eyes narrowing, rather than being able to look them in the eye. Your arms are folded across the chest.
Just as we throw away the trash in our homes, we also need to toss out the proverbial emotional trash that we keep within ourselves.
1
talk
“If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.
Thich Nhat Hanh, A Lifetime of Peace”
1
tip
Find the knot of resentment and bitterness that you still feel within you. Often, this might express itself in:
- Anger
- You might tell yourself “I don’t care” when you think about a certain person
- You ignore the person that’s caused the
hurt
Those are signs that there’s still some un-tossed trash within you.
You may not feel ready to reconcile or forgive the person, but something that my therapist taught me was the act of writing a ‘Statement of Release’.
- Write down the hurt the person has caused you
- Write down how you felt from it
- Write down what you’d like to say to the person
- State ‘I choose to hurt no more, and release you from my anger’.
Sometimes when people hear this exercise, their defences immediately go up and they think,
hell no, I cannot forgive this person.
I’m not asking you to forgive the person or to whitewash what the person has done to you.
I’m simply saying that you let go of the matter, and needing to find vengeance for what has happened.
Try that, and
let me know how it goes.
John
Live Young, Live Well - Work Your Love
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