Healthy Relationships Support Group
No relationship is perfect. A long-term relationship requires constant effort to understand each other, fix misunderstandings, solve problems and continue to grow as both individuals change and evolve. How we deal with our misunderstandings is the focus of this community. Join us to find support, get advice, and share your experience with your relationship.
Does my excessively cluttered lifestyle put a strain on my relationships or do they love me anyway?
-
Look at what my best friend did with my picture!
-
We all have 24 hours in a day. How we spend these hours is important. Watching a little bit of a video about how sitting affects us made me aware of how much sitting and laying down I do. Gonna have to work on that.Your turn. Tell me another truth.
If someone you are with is bothered by the clutter it’s a pretty sure thing it will affect the relationship.
True Life Example: "Are you getting rid of this broken lamp or do want me to try and repair it?"
My mother responds without blinking an eye, "I like that color and I'm saving it as a color swatch."
Yep, her 3 BR home is stuffed to the gills and she's moving into an efficiency and wants to hang onto a large broken lamp as a color swatch. I offered to take a picture with my digital camera, find a paint swatch that exact color or even have Lowes do their little paint scanning thingie and have them print out the code for that exact color of paint. Nope, none of that was good enough. After running into similar issues with almost every old, broken, unused thing laying around her place, I finally had to just give up on helping her.
Did that put a strain on our relationship? Sure it did. She needed help. I honestly wanted to help her. We ended up with my brother taking over, having knock down drag out fights about what she could bear to part with so we could get her moved. They're fine and even joke about it.
Meanwhile, I feel like that in order to address this issue I have to argue and fight to make headway, turning me into the bad guy while she's just a nice little old lady who boarders on eccentric. True hoarding his a sickness and the person often puts things above people.
We all have objects that are special to us for one reason or another, but hoarders attach an emotional connection that doesn't make rational sense to items that are truly garbage. It's more than have a large what-knot collection. True hoarders hang onto broken clothes hangers (for a crafts project), 12 pairs of scissors (they all cut different things) and old magazines (like to read them, though she never actually does) I could go on and on with the examples, but I'm sure you catch my drift.