simple, functional, grace-filled living

Declutterology: reclaim your soul, space, & identity

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you and a group of friends in your community have gone through everything together:

The good. The bad. The ugly.

You’ve had so much in common over the last few years.

The latest commonality is the fact that you are all empty nesters.

The one thing that you don’t share in common is the pileup of clutter in your home. Once your young adult children left home, you started missing them so much that every time you went to a thrift store, flea market, or department store, you bought items that reminded you of their infancy, childhood, and teenage years.

It started off as a minor hobby. But then it got to the point that you couldn’t stop yourself.

Last week, you purchased a coffee table that resembled one you owned when your children were toddlers, hoping that this table would keep the memories alive.

At the point of empty nesting, your friends gave their children their belongings, purged unnecessary items, and decided that they would only live with the items that they needed, brought them joy, and were functional for this season of their lives.

For some reason, you couldn’t do it.

Every time they offer to have small group, girls’ night in, or game night at your house, you come up with a lame excuse as to why your house won’t work:

Their homes are bigger.

At this person‘s house, you’re able to see the sunset better.

This person’s house is more centrally located.

This person lives closer to the lake.

The list of excuses go on and on and on.

But at least you can pat yourself on the back for the few times within the past year that you’ve made your way to Goodwill and donated.

The problem with the Goodwill trips is that for every piece you donate, you quickly replace it with three times more . It’s a vicious cycle.

And you keep replacing the items because you’re locked into a soul-tie with your belongings. And you refuse to go through withdrawal long enough to allow yourself the physical and emotional space needed to feel , grieve, heal, and move forward. It’s a vicious self-sabotaging cycle.

You’ve lived in an alternate reality of a false sense of control, comfort, safety, and security for so long that you don’t know who you are.

Trauma works as a portal for allowing your identity to be stolen by placing it in a state of numbness and clutter: excess people, places, things, and ideas), and causing your soul(mind, will, and emotions) to be locked into it.

As soon as you get rid of a few items, you suffer from the “lost in the woods” trauma effect, where you have an existential crisis.

You feel lost. You don’t know who you are and what you’ll do if you don’t have these items. You’re afraid that the memories will disappear because the items are gone.

You are sick and tired of going from one negative, toxic thought to the next.  As a matter of fact, your whole mindset is infected with scarcity. Suppressing and ignoring doesn’t seem to help.

If anything, the more you suppress and ignore, the worse the toxic thoughts seem to take over.

 You are putting in a conscious effort to suppress and do nothing.  Your stomach muscles are even sore from the suppression.  As a matter of fact, you are telling everyone who will listen ,There’s nothing that I can do about these thoughts. They have taken over me.

This situation has been going on for so long.  Your intellect says that since God knows Your thoughts, and that he has better plans for you. And you know that these plans are good. You feel that God should reveal his plans and thoughts to you without you having to do anything.

What is happening in this case is that you are giving the entire responsibility of your thought process and mindset to God.  

God will help us.  Scripture does tell us to keep our mind on God so that we can claim our peace and rest in him. However, it does not mean that we are supposed to spiritually bypass the informational memories these thoughts are presenting.

The even bigger problem is that you feel helpless and powerless.  You have been Repeating this cycle for so long, you have adopted this mindset and toxic thinking as your norm.

This is why you have settled with your thinking, your mindset, and life in general.  You believe that there is a scarcity of clarity, growth, and joy in the world.

You would rather do anything except face the fact that you must deal with those thoughts that have been plaguing your life. The thought of dealing with them head on gives you a headache.

The irony of the situation is that the more you Suppress and ignore your toxic thoughts and mindset in general, the more hopeless, stagnant, powerless and scarce your life and mindset becomes.  You are in a state of stagnation.  If God has promised you a life of abundance, this couldn’t be what it looks like.

And when you buy things, you’re buying them based on the identity of every other family member, friend, coworker, business, and ministry partner. You don’t know who you are because your soul, space, and identity has been flooded with and overtaken by stuff.

Thus, you enter the LACK(love, approval, comfort, and knowledge) cycle of addiction. These items are expected to give you a false sense of love. Then the false sense of love fuels the approval addiction, because now you feel like at least you can compete and measure up to others.

And then the approval addiction gives you a false sense of comfort. And then the comfort addiction leads you to gaining more and more knowledge about the items that you accumulated and have done nothing with, and then the cycle starts all over again.

There are only three things that you can do with emotional and physical clutter:

You can Keep it (internalization), give it away (blow your trauma clutter through someone else), or throw it away ( process the pain properly and throw the unnecessary and unfruitful out and move forward).

Only you can decide which path you’ll take.

Go on a 1 year journey of Coaching, Decluttering, and Organization.

Declutter your memories.

Declutter your home.

Declutter your life.

Simple, Functional, Grace-Filled Living…Helping women reclaim their soul, space, and identity so they will know they are enough.

DM me or Email me at Katinahortonvgm@gmail.com to get started coaching, and allow Simple, Functional, Grace-Filled Living to Declutter & Organize your home  while you’re at it.

Serving Northern Suburban Cook County & Lake County, IL.