Posts Tagged: negative feelings

“EMOTIONAL HOARDERS”

On August 17, 2018 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

Are you a hoarder?  I am, though I don’t often admit it.  Of course, I need to hold on to plastic Wal-Mart bags!  After all, I sometimes take the dog for a walk, and she has to . . .  Well, you get the picture.

Of course, there is a difference between hoarding and collecting.  Or is there?  Perhaps collectors are just organized hoarders.  I remember once visiting “House on the Rock” near Spring Green, Wisconsin.  It’s a very strange place.  It was built (yes, on a rock) to be a retreat.  However, the original owner and subsequent owners have filled the huge house with collections of all kinds.  I left there with sensory overload and a splitting headache, and said to my wife, “Whoa!  What did we just see?”

We, as a society, are hoarders.  Think of the explosive growth of the storage unit business.  The first self-storage units were built in the 1960’s.  Now, there are enough of them to cover as much space as three Manhattan Islands!

But there is more than one variety of hoarder.  There are emotional hoarders.  There are people who hoard all kinds of feelings, but especially negative feelings.  They can tell you about people who hurt their feelings when they were eight years old, even though they are now sixty-seven years old.  (Hey, come to think of it I am sixty-seven and can remember people who hurt my feelings when I was eight.  Hummmm.)

Of course, we all have memories—some good, some bad.  But that is not what I am talking about.  I’m talking about hoarding the feelings attached to those memories.  Their minds are so full of bad feelings attached to bad memories, that they have to rent emotional storage units by the time they are twenty-one.

I’ve known a few people who did not fall into this trap of hoarding emotions.  They had found a way to feel whatever they feel, and then let those feelings go.

How did they do that?  I don’t know.  I’m not sure that even they know.  But I think that people who are not emotional hoarders may do three things.

First, they actually feel what they feel.  They don’t try to mask or deny their feelings.  They don’t necessarily express their feelings to the one who has upset or angered them, but they do acknowledge their feelings to themselves.

Second, they think about what happened.  They try to recognize that they may have actually been at least partly in the wrong.  In any case, they try to learn something from their negative feelings, even when they are not at all in the wrong.

Third, they let the feelings go.  They seem to have made a decision that it is harder to hoard all those feelings than it is to drop them.

I have often been an emotional hoarder, but I’m getting better.  I am discovering that letting go of emotions is both possible and enjoyable.  I used to tell myself that I couldn’t let go of those emotions, but eventually, I began to realize that I was lying to myself.  The problem was not that I couldn’t.  The problem was that I wouldn’t.  Increasingly, I can let go of those feelings, because I choose to do so.

Now, if I could just stop hoarding Wal-Mart bags!

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