Emotional Spring Cleaning (aka ESC)

It’s that time of year—the season when you survey the accumulation of dust bunnies and coats in your closet and wonder how you can possibly make room for all your springtime clothes.  Some of us look forward to this seasonal rite of passage with pleasure while others of us dread the process wholeheartedly.  And, while some of us carefully prioritize the ritual of spring cleaning in our homes, relatively few of us take time to note what is happening inside our hearts with such regularity.

I propose that we each periodically take similar stock of our emotional lives in a process commonly known as emotional spring cleaning.  This practice, I believe, is a key part of self-care—taking time to acquaint ourselves with what is cluttering our hearts and minds.  I think that most would agree this is a good practice, yet few people practice it regularly.  Why is that?

You know that old pair of well-loved socks in your sock drawer that you don’t want anyone to see?  You know the ones—the cloth is all pilled and the heel is worn and there’s a hole in the big toe of the left one.  We sometimes have an affection or loyalty for things that have outlived their usefulness—thoughts, feelings, relationships past their prime that we can’t seem to renew or discard.

With your typical household spring cleaning, you may dread this sorting-through process.  How you loathe the pang of guilt as your hands pass over that sweater your aunt bought for you four birthdays ago that you’ve never worn. (Who ever thought chartreuse was a good idea?)  And yet, there is also a great degree of satisfaction in seeing those tidy bags of donated goods going to faraway lands—one man’s trash, and so forth.

How much higher stakes, then, to take stock of our emotional inventory—to explore new ways of being in the world, to really make conscious our day-to-day choices, to embrace responsibility for our actions and to contemplate alternatives!  It may feel like a staggering task—and yet, the rewards are so rich if we do!

Here’s some good news.  Much like cleaning out your closet, you can focus your attention in your emotional spring cleaning on a single task or outcome and see it through to completion.  People often have the impression that when they come to therapy and start to probe into their heart clutter, they must be prepared to plumb the depths of their psyches and bring all of the skeletons out of their closets in order to find benefit from the practice.  Fortunately, this is a myth.  While there is great value in doing work of this depth, I frequently remind people that it is possible to focus on a single practice or concern with great results whether in therapy or on your own time.

I have a rule in therapy—just because you see something that “needs doing” does not mean you have to do it right then.  There may be costs or limitations associated with not doing a particular thing, but with few exceptions, you always have a choice to make about when and how the work gets done.

The same rule applies for your emotional spring cleaning, too.  Most of the time, you can pick and choose what to address and when.  That said, if you have a habit of deferring or “stuffing” feelings or old emotional business, it may get hard to close the closet door and you may be presented with a decision to explore and clear out some stuff or be perpetually battling to keep that door closed.  The part I want to emphasize is that it generally is your choice about how to go about this business.

The good news is that there is an easy way to determine if you are overdue for an emotional spring cleaning.  We will talk more about that next time in part two of this four part series.  And after that, I’ll be offering you some ideas about how to jumpstart your own emotional spring cleaning.