Surprising Advice About Emotional Clutter | Clutter Video Tip

⚡️ UPDATE: The Clutter Diet program has officially ended. I’m now helping professionals and entrepreneurs with personal branding and communication at 👉 BePutTogether.com ✨
Are sentimental items the biggest roadblock to organize your home? If emotions are flashing a red light at you when you grab that item from your past, watch this video. In today’s video Lorie Marrero is sharing some strategies for dealing with emotionally charged clutter. You may be surprised at her take on sentimentality. http://goodwill.org
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Hi I’m Lorie Marrero creator of The Clutter Diet Book & online program. I want to talk about sentimental objects today in a way that you might not expect.

People ask me all the time about this & the advice that you’ve heard from me, & other organizing experts, is that if you don’t use it, & you don’t love it, you shouldn’t keep it. Sometimes these kinds of objects bring a lot of uncertainty to us, & are difficult to decide about, that can be very provocative about what’s really going on with us in our emotional lives. Be very mindful when you run across something like this & explore it.

When you’re thinking about trophies, mostly you’re thinking about a symbol of accomplishment & achievement- overcoming some kind of obstacle. There are the obvious trophies of things that are positive & there are trophies that represent overcoming something negative in your life. If you are going through a decluttering project & you run across some memorabilia that’s painful for you, it might be a good idea to get rid of it if it’s going to be permanently painful. If you feel like that’s finished business for you & you really don’t want to have it in your life.

There are other things like trauma, & death, & loss that might be a little less obvious to get rid of. What I would caution is, if you get rid of that too soon, there may be work that you want to do on that area of your life that might make you view those items differently later.

This is not a license to keep everything that you’re uncertain about. But I’d like you to run across these certain items & ask yourself if there’s more work to be done. Is this unfinished business? If so, this might be the prompt that you need to finish that business in your life. So don’t display those items until they become a full circle experience for you to look at. They need to be something that you look at & experience a feeling of triumph, achievement & overcoming.

Here’s a story about this pillow. I grew up in a small town in West Texas that’s known as the wool & mohair capital of the world. This is a pillow made out of alpaca wool & it was purchased in my home town by my sister & my sister-in-law– & was given to me as a holiday gift. There was a time in my life that I would never have been able to display it in my home. I experienced trauma growing up in that town & I left it as soon as I could & going back there to visit was very triggering for me in a lot of ways. I did a lot of self-development work, a lot of therapy & counseling, & I worked on this a number of times over many, many years, to the point that I feel triumphant over that issue in my life. Now when I look at this pillow it is brings a feeling of achievement to me that is such a full circle beautiful thing that it fits beautifully in my house now. It represents the fact that I’m no longer held down by that issue, that I have taken back my power in my life over what happened to me long ago.

There may be things like this in your life that you want to display in your home because they do make you feel good now. If you put them away & keep them as a reminder that you need to do the work that might actually be a healthy thing for you. I have a friend who went through a rehab experience for addiction & he has the bracelet that he wore in the rehab hospital & he put it in a shadow box in his home & he is not embarrassed for anyone who comes over to see him to see that in his shadow box. He will be the first to tell you how proud he is of that experience & how it changed his life.

If you have these kinds of trophy objects in your life, don’t be afraid to display those, because they have a wonderful story behind them & they may inspire other people. Don’t keep everything for this reason, be very judicious about it. Please share in the comments if you have trophy objects that you’d like to talk about.

We’ll see you next time & may you always be happy & grateful for having more than enough.