If you are the King or Queen of Clutter, take a moment to ask yourself what your messes really mean. Could it be that impossible standards of perfection keep you so frustrated that you simply throw up your hands and give up even trying to keep things neat? Are you reacting to parents who were compulsively neat and expected you to be the same way? Did you live in so much disorder as a child that you never learned there might be another way?

Perhaps hanging onto things mirrors the way you also hang onto feelings rather than experiencing them, expressing them, and letting them go. Physical clutter often reflects emotional clutter that is buried deep inside.

Holding onto "stuff" can be a way of trying to hold onto what is over and can’t be reclaimed. Mementos of happy events, souvenirs of times in your life that were special, reminders of the years when children were young, relics from happy days in high school, treasured letters, textbooks from your college days…can be hard to part with because they help you relive special times. You may even assign almost magical powers to these objects. Unconsciously you imagine that keeping them keeps you safe in some way. By not getting rid of keepsakes like these you don’t have to face your grief about life changes and life losses.

Clutter also can be a signal you send to others that you’re angry, depressed, or overwhelmed. It is a frequent indicator of a cold war between spouses, especially if one partner is a neatnik and the other refuses to honor his need for order. Creating chaos, confusion, and clutter are indirect ways of saying, "You can’t control me. I’m angry. I don’t care how you feel. I’ll determine how we live in this house." Or, "I’m not willing to grow up and be responsible for taking care of things. I don’t want to have to do what I don’t want to do. I’m just a child. What can you expect? This is just too much for me."

If your home is a mess you can’t be expected to have friends over or entertain. Being cozy with clutter can be a way of isolating yourself from the rest of the world. Your home life is a secret you don’t reveal. Only family members can enter your space.

Disorder and clutter make everything more difficult. A classic Cathy cartoon strip pictures Cathy recounting her wasted time looking for sweatpants, sweatshirt, clean socks, tennis shoes, contact lens case, the TV guide, remote control, etc. on a typical free evening "sacrificed to the God of Disorganization." Her exhausted irritation strikes a chord in many of us. We pay again and again for our sloppy habits and rebellious refusals to make life easier for ourselves. Instead of spending a few hours now to organize, throw away, and create a sane system for handling the "stuff" of life, we procrastinate, intending to get it done someday, when there’s time, and meanwhile, waste countless hours in frenzied frustration.

Procrastination, clutter, and disorganization (PCD) are first cousins and allies. They are great ways to torture yourself and visit your pain on others. The PCD Syndrome insures that everything you do is more difficult, more frustrating, and more discouraging than it needs to be.

You might want to notice some of the ways you keep yourself in the PCD trap. Listen for your inner voice that may make comments like these:

"You’re not going to throw that away are you? You’re sure to need it someday!"

"You really ought to keep that. After all, it belonged to your great Aunt Bessie. It’s your duty to save if for your children."

"That’s a perfectly good coffee maker (waffle iron, TV, 8 track player, etc.) All it needs is a little repair to be good as new. One of these days you can take it to be fixed."

"It’s just too much trouble to clean it all up. You’d never get it done anyway. Why not take in a movie instead."

"A little disorder is a sign of genius!"

"This just looks like confusion. I really know where every thing is…(Beneath this mess there’s a brilliant plan.)"

"Don’t get rid of those clothes. They’ll come in handy when you lose ten pounds."

"Just put it in the basement…(attic, garage, etc.) You can decide what to do about it latter."

"Don’t get rid of that. Save it for your next garage sale."

"You’d better keep that sock. You may find the mate somewhere."

The PCD Syndrome is a substitute for genuine self-nurturing. To get an idea of how you satisfy your unmet needs for nurturing take a look at the clutter you accumulate. What are your favorite places for stashing it? Your refrigerator? Your cabinets? Your desks? Your file cabinet (or do you even have one)? Your closet? Your dresser? If you’re female, be sure to check out your make-up drawer. If you’re male, take a look at your tool storage area. Or, check out sporting items you’ve used only once or twice.

Where you find your clutter may provide clues about the purposes it serves: 

The PCD Syndrome is a passive stance toward life. If you’re ready to get active and establish order in your surroundings, follow these steps:

1. Develop a system for handling your routine chores. Allocate a limited amount of time each day or each week to work on cleaning up and clearing out. Just thirty minutes a day spent sorting, organizing, and throwing away will produce miracles in a week and a month.
   

2. Throw away junk mail the minute you receive it. Put your bills in one place, ready to be paid. If you have a computer, use it to organize your financial life.
   

3. Develop habits that make life easier. Once you’ve cleaned out your closet, keep it that way. Hang your clothes when you take them off. Have a regular time to do laundry.
   

4. If you’re overworked and overburdened, get help. Ask for what you need. Hire people to assist you. Be smart about getting things done and let go of the notion that you should do everything on your own.
   

5. Do some reading that will help you develop the skills and organizational ability you need. I recommend Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

Remember that as you get rid of what you no longer need you are creating space for new and better things to come into your life. Without space there is no room for what you desire. As you let go of what is finished you open yourself for what is to come.

This is the rhythm of life; breathing in and letting go; receiving and releasing. Life is constantly moving and changing. Nothing stays the same. Even your physical body is continually renews itself. As Dr. Deepak Chopra points out:

In order to stay alive, your body must live on the wings of change. …The skin replaces itself once a month, the stomach lining every five days, the liver every six weeks, and the skeleton every three months. To the naked eye, these organs look the same from moment to moment, but they are always in flux. By the end of the year, 98 percent of the atoms in your body will have been exchanged for new ones.

We may fight against this natural change process. We may resist it. But we cannot overcome it. The simplest path is accepting it. To accept the constant flow of change we must embrace and experience our feelings as people, experiences, and objects move into and out of our lives.

Maturity accepts what life presents and deals with what must be faced. To accept "what is," is to live life one moment at a time, tending to the business of each moment with full attention and presence. The object is not to overfunction or underfunction but to find balance and peace. We don’t want to be compulsively neat or mindlessly messy. Rather we want to experience the beauty of life like the beauty of nature – balanced, peaceful, and without the blight of careless clutter that distorts the joy of living.

So dig yourself out, step by step, day by day! Celebrate every action you take. You deserve to live in a beautiful, special space. Why live another day in the nightmare of being consumed by things that no longer serve you?