on grief and clutter

in order to understand clutter, you must first understand grief

👋🏽I’m dina jones and I write about how to heal your home and how to get you dream space. Thank you for visiting.

getting to know grief

Grief shows up as every emotion.

Sadness, heartache. Guilt. Relief. Joy. Anger.

Grief knocks on the door when someone that you love passes.

It shows up even when it’s someone you don’t know too well, because it makes you think of the ones you love passing.

It can show up if we lose a job.

If we lose a physical ability.

If we change our appearance.

If we lose an item we love.

If we stop an addiction.

If we break up with a friend.

If we break up with a lover.

Grief in all its forms shows up to try to trick us into thinking that if we lose anything, we’ve lost a part of ourselves we thought we would have forever.

Grief can be so sly and viscous.

But the truth is, nothing is forever.

The less we are taught this growing up, the harder it is to handle the big heartbreaks as adults.

grief and toddlerhood

Grief expresses itself like a 4 year old toddler.

Grief, like the toddler, does not care what you are doing, it will let you know how how it feels at whichever point of the day or night, very loudly, and you must tend to it immediately, or it may implode.

Like a wild toddler in need of boundaries, grief needs to be held with walls of tenderness.

It can sense when you are trying to shut it up and will take up more space until it spills over and destroys everything in its path.

Teach toddlers to handle grief in the same way you must handle grief itself— with gentle hugs, and the space to cry when the tears come up. Teach them that after the tears, life will go on, and you will find someone to hold your hand through the next stage.

If you try to distract grief it will never get the chance to mature.

toddlers too.

Grief will learn to trust you the more you hold a space for it to be seen.

toddlers too.

Give it regular times in your day to process however it wants to show up. It will learn to trust that you will take care of its needs regularly, instead of “when you have time”.

If and when it comes knocking unexpectedly, care for your heart like it matter, the same way a mother tends to a child no matter the time.

Dealing with heartbreak will not kill us, but avoiding it for too long might.

clutter

Letting go of our things can summon grief, in any of its forms, in an instant.

The most important part here is to understand that if we don’t want to be controlled by the grief, or the stuff, or even our own children, we must give ourselves the space to deal with them, with the full understanding of what they need.

When people try to take everything out of their closet and then get depressed and put it all back, I remind them that it’s like taking all their emotions and dumping them on the bed too.

The size of the container you have to hold the emotions has to match the size of the mess.

on how to build the container

for grief

Begin with the easiest possible ritual you have the capacity to keep doing consistently. It doesn’t matter if it’s writing one sentence a day, or listening to the same song before you sleep at night.

It may take some time, but soon grief will learn to trust you and will wait until your alone time together to torment you.

You will dotingly give it space- the song to cry through, the one liner in your journal, the walk around the curb, to process whatever came up that day. When the tears stop, it will be time to move on to the next thing.

A few years ago when I began my nightly journaling sessions I would hear myself saying in my head throughout the day — I’ll have to write about that in my journal tonight.

It’s amazing how much it helped me get through the rough patches of the day.

for clutter

Give yourself a limit of dealing with one item a day and let that feel like enough. I’ve dedicated my whole career at this point to teaching the One Item A Day For 30 Days method to declutter. I did this method when I was decluttering postpartum with my third child. The process was emotional, so I decided in order to keep my sanity I would journal every night.

Eventually I started dissecting the prompts from what I was journaling about and turned it into a guided journal for my clients to use. You can get Phase 1 of the journal here. My plan is to make the next Phase 2 guided journal all about supporting the deeper grief that comes up while decluttering.

If this has helped you any tiny bit I’d love to hear from you.

Let me know if this spoke to your heart and where I can support you.

I offer 1:1 phone sessions for anyone trying to work through the process of healing their home and I’d love nothing more than to help you through this process. You are stronger than you think 🫶🏽

I told my kiddos when I get my first paid subscriber I’d take them wherever they want to celebrate. They chose the mall— because it has gelato. Thank you so much for supporting our dreams, big and small🍨