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Emotional Spring Cleaning "I got my heart broken last fall," admits Del, 32. "I’ve got a lot of emotional baggage from that, plus my apartment is full of photos of us and things she gave me that make it almost impossible to forget her and move on."
Sound familiar? Are you still trying to stow the baggage from your last relationship? Do you continually trip over the detritus of your past romantic debacles? We asked a professional organizer and a therapist for tips on how to clean out your emotional closet and get ready for love.
CLEANING HOUSE. The first step toward starting over is scrubbing your space — literally. Keeping photos and mementos around keeps past memories alive — and future hopes at bay. Even in a box in the back of your closet, sentimental souvenirs can haunt you.
"The biggest challenges to organizing are time and objectivity," says the Organizing Guy, Bill Bliesath, of Los Angeles. "Commit to the task by scheduling organizing time in your calendar and get a buddy (friend, relative or professional) to help you prioritize and purge."
Remove photos from frames. Shred the photos if it will make you feel better and give the frames to a local charity thrift store or sell them online. Other items like clothes or gifts can also go to charity. And if you come across something you feel you must keep, set it aside and keep going, Blieseth suggests. When you’re done, come back to it. And if you can’t hold onto it without feeling a painful pang, it’s got to go.
Getting rid of these items not only puts more physical space between you and the memories, it also gives you more space in which to think and heal. An uncluttered home is one key to feeling less bogged down and more able to exercise your options.
FREEING YOUR MIND. Once you’ve gotten your house in order, it’s time to focus on your head. “If you’re caught up in the drama of working out your hurt, you can’t get close to anyone,” says Stefan Schlessinger, M.A., a Seattle-based therapist who counsels clients over the phone or in-person, and is the director of www.globalcounseling.org.
Schlessinger offers these tips for cleaning out your emotional garbage:
1. Take responsibility. It’s easier to blame your partner than yourself, but you did have a role in the relationship’s demise. Review the situation, figure out your part in it, accept it, and then move on with the knowledge of what to avoid next time. Learn from the past, don’t relive it.
2. Break past patterns. Examine your past romances to find patterns or characteristics that don’t work for you. Vow to avoid people who exhibit them.
3. Take your time. Dating should be a reasonably long process - and once you have been physically intimate, you’re not dating, you’re in a relationship. Think of it as interviewing someone for a job and reject candidates who don’t meet your criteria.
Following these steps will make the hard process of getting over past heartbreak a little faster and a lot easier.
North Carolina-based freelancer Margot Carmichael Lester writes for MSN.com, Go magazine and monster.com |
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