Hi, and welcome to this blog post series.
I originally wrote this series with Stacey Sabido, right before the pandemic hit in 2020. We had planned to work in a holistic way, where she’d go into your home and help you de-clutter and I’d be working with you from the psychological side of things, to understand what led you to the path of hoarding.
As you know, everything came to a stop in 2020 with the lockdowns and the threat of passing on the virus to anyone we came into contact with. Looking back, these were extreme measures that are controversial and made it difficult for life to carry on as usual.
Since then, I’ve moved my practice fully online, offering counselling, supervision, and social media and other types of coaching both individually and in workshop form (plus a self-learn course for those who prefer that!), and Stacey has moved on to work as a Mindfulness Teacher as well as an HR Educational Officer. You can find her LinkedIn profile here.
This will now be an edited version, as these are invaluable posts to help us understand a bit more about the practical and psychological reasons, and effects of hoarding. There are even TV shows focusing on helping people with this, which mirrors what we’re talking about here (though we only see limited clips on the tv shows that don’t express the intense work that needs to go during this difficult process for those experiencing this).
A bit more about this series.
I am sharing these because the topic of hoarding is something I’ve come across in my therapy room, and even though it might not be the main topics in my clients’ therapy, clutter does impact on their wellbeing and mental health. (See my blog post on Spring Cleaning – en Español aqui).
It is important to do the practical stuff, but without the emotional support, the root causes will remain the same and the individual will most likely “relapse” and begin hoarding again.
In my post on Spring Cleaning, I talk about how de-cluttering (not in a hoarding situation for me) is a work in progress – papers under control, clothes organised and I really don’t need to buy any more in a long time, so I won’t! Everything has it’s place and not many extra things are around.
De-cluttering, or in some cases, de-hoarding, will help you create Serenity in your own house. To be more comfortable. To be able to breathe better.
As they say, the clutter in your room or house is a reflection of the clutter in your mind. And Vice versa.
Understanding what’s going on in your mind, through counselling, figuring out what things from your past you haven’t worked through and are still affecting you now, will help you separate the physical effects of it (in this case hoarding or clutter), and will help you heal in a psychological and emotional way.
As you work on your understanding in therapy, alongside starting to allow someone to help you de-clutter, both activities will have an impact on each other, leading to a calmer life and environment for you to grow in, get to know yourself better and move forward with your life.
“Serenity is…the state of being calm, peaceful, and untroubled.“
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