More harm than good
11th October 2021
What is most important to have a ‘perfect’ house or to be happy and full of life?
All my life I’ve used tidying up and trying to have the perfect house as a tool to calm me down, to make me feel in control and to cope when things overwhelmed me. But in reality does it have that effect? Take the times when I’ve had people coming over and I had to scrub the life out of every tile, hoover every bit of carpet and paint any disrepairs on the skirting boards.
Did it make me feel better? It actually didn’t, it actually made me feel exhausted by the time my guests arrived and not enjoy our time together. Is it funny how do we do things on automatic pilot, which at some point in our lives we have learnt to brand as helpful and valid coping mechanisms but they’re actually hurting us?
That’s exactly what my habit of cleaning before a visit has been and I never realised until now. I may have had a tidy house but it has created arguments, tiredness just general destruction and despair around it really.
My mum is coming to visit after two years of not being able to get together because of COVID and my urge to clean, tidy and organise, as you can imagine, is huge…after all I learned this survival mechanism from her and so it like getting to the eye of the hurricane, if I can withstand the heat where is strongest I’ll get into the eye where there is no friction. So my aim for the next couple of days is to fight the urges to fall back to my old ways. I’m awake now, I realised that I don’t need to just cope, I can thrive, I can feel joy if only I resist the urges to protect myself when I feel overwhelmed as they’re literally were doing more harm than good.