I watch those shows like Hoarders and Clean House not to make fun of those people, but to give me incentive to not let my own house get out of hand.

Cleaning is not my favorite activity, but nothing motivates me to clean more than looking at a nasty house. (Hopefully, not mine.)

I have a confession to make – my husband and I are sort-of hoarders. What I mean by sort of is that we do Throw things away, but it’s hard.

We have a tendency to think we are going to need that someday or that we will get it fixed or that we can sell it at a yard sale.

Before you get excited and start telling your friends, we throw things away. Our house is clean.

We don’t have piles of trash everywhere or boxes stacked to the ceiling.

We don’t rent a storage shed in order to store our junk, we actually throw it away.

My kids make fun of me because I have a need to immediately get rid of any cobweb I see.  I can’t see 2 inches in front of my nose UNLESS it happens to be a cobweb. I can see cobwebs on Mars.

What I said is that we don’t always want to throw it away, but we do. After all, who knows when you might need it?

Are we the same way with our emotions?

Why we hold onto things

We Hold onto useless things for three reasons:

• They are comfortable
• They hold memories
• We are afraid that we might need them some day

We hold onto useless emotions for the same reasons. Yet if we don’t get rid of the junk, it will pile up in our lives and make living uncomfortable and sometimes even dangerous to our overall health.

Holding onto the hurt is simply Emotional garbage. It stinks and will attract disease and emotional decay.

Not only must we discipline ourselves into letting go of our emotional hoards, we must restrain ourselves from bringing even more emotional junk into our lives.

We need to deal with our emotional garbage the way we deal with all other trash – we must throw it out and not allow it to build up in our minds.

Comfort

Just like people who hoard objects, our emotional possessions create a barrier between us and the outside world.

We protect our feelings by building barriers against relationships that may cause us to hurt.

It doesn’t take long before our emotional Hoarding isolates us and causes us even more shame and pain. We must de-clutter our minds of our emotional junk if we ever expect to live mentally healthy lives.

Memories

Sometimes we hold on to our Negative Emotions as destructive, useless relics from the past.

We add imaginary value to worthless emotions.

We base our future on past pain.

We need to learn to remain open to those who did nothing to hurt us and create new relationships that are good for us.

We need to let our past pain go and allow ourselves new opportunities to love and be loved.

Need

Some of us hold onto negative emotions as if we are afraid we may need them in the future. We treat negativity as if it were a rare and valuable commodity.

There will never be a shortage of bigotry, hatred, anger or despair. It is OK to throw yours out. If you should ever need more, I assure you there will be a huge supply.

By hoarding our negative feelings, we don’t leave room for the positive to come into our lives.

Spend your energy collecting treasures rather than hoarding junk.

Do not store garbage in your life.

Keep your negative emotions safely in the dump and refuse to bring any more into your life.

This way you will have plenty of room for love, respect and kindness.

There is always room for treasure once the hoard is cleared away.

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