Around my house there are a few cupboards that are fit to burst. I do not often get round to sorting them out and more and more “stuff” gets shoved in there to be dealt with another day. I can’t face sorting it out and there is always something else to do. The door becomes more difficult to close and eventually when I need to find that pair of shoes, scarf or more recently a needle, it feels like an enormous task. I really was looking for a needle in a haystack. As I opened the door and started to look, everything came tumbling down around me.
It made me think about how often, by the time clients come through my door, they are completely overwhelmed, the cupboards in their head are fit to burst or even spilling onto the floor and they wish they that had got rid of some of the “stuff” before it reached that point.
Many people I work with describe themselves as “copers”. I often hear “its just what I do, I get on with things”, “I pushed it down” or “I bottle things up”. The results of this are often overwhelm, ill-health or feeling unable to cope.
“The pain is there. When you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else…” – Irvin D Yalom.
In the current climate of uncertainty, pandemic, war and cost of living crisis, many people feel that there is simply no more room in their cupboards. This is often an analogy I use when talking to clients about us having to look at some of the boxes in our heads. I explain that we can take some of it out, have a look at it, talk about it, think about it and decide whether it needs to be kept, given to someone else (because it wasn’t ours to hold in the first place), or to throw it away.
Why do we put off sorting out our physical or mental cupboards? Usually we would say that we are busy, we are trying to cram more in there, we are scared of what we might find, it feels too big a task, we don’t want to do it on our own, we know something in there might hurt us or we simply don’t know where to start. We may have learned as children that we have to cope on our own, that we should not ask for help, or we should not show our emotions.
I often talk to clients about our mental load. We all have an already existing load of things we have to think about on a daily basis, running our home, looking after family, work, and somewhere at the bottom of that list often is our own self care. If this list sits on top of existing boxes of unresolved issues, there is not much room for anything new to be stored away. Sometimes if we look at our existing mental load, we can find things that we can share with others or we can recognise that some things that we carry belong to someone else. This can create some space to think about the hidden boxes at the bottom of the cupboard. These might contain unresolved trauma, painful memories, shame or low self-esteem. Of course we don’t want to look in them. If we don’t however, they will find a way to impact our day to day life. We don’t have to empty these boxes onto the floor at once, we can take things gently, one step at a time. In counselling, you can look in these boxes with someone else, a new set of eyes and a compassionate ear to listen to your feelings about the contents and to think with you about how you can sort through the cupboard to create some space and some order.
Image by Josie Doodles. Print in my therapy room.
