Ep. 239: Emotional Clutter: Why You Feel So Heavy When Nothing is Obviously Wrong

When was the last time you felt something negative or bad — really felt it — without immediately doing something to make it stop?

Not pushed through it. Not distracted yourself from it. Not poured a glass of wine or picked up your phone or gotten busy with something that needed to get done. Not told yourself to be grateful and move on.

Actually felt it. Sat with it. Let it be there.

For most of us, the honest answer is: I can't remember.

And that's not a character flaw. There’s nothing wrong with you. That's just what happens when you've spent years…decades, maybe in a season of life that doesn't leave a lot of room for feelings that don't have an immediate solution.

You feel something. It's inconvenient. It might even be heavy. But, you don’t have the ability to get into it. So…you set it aside. You keep moving.

And you do that enough times, for enough years, and something starts to happen.

The emotions don't go away.

They go somewhere else.

And today, we're talking about where.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

clutterlanguagesguide.com

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Transcript

Well, all right, welcome to something new today. If you've been with me for the last few weeks, you know we just wrapped up a three episode series all about the weight that we women carry. And I'm not talking about the number on the scale kind of weight, right? And if you haven't listened to those episodes yet, I want you to go back and start there. Not because you need them to follow along today, but because they build a foundation that is going to make everything in this new series land even harder.

So you'll wanna go back to last Thursday's episode, the Thursday before that, and the Thursday before that, okay? And I'm gonna give you a little recap here. So this will tell you a little bit about what each episode is about as well. So here's kind of the shortened version of what we covered. So in the first episode of that series, we named the grief that doesn't look like grief. The losses in midlife that never get a funeral, the shifts in motherhood, the future you thought you'd have by now.

The versions of yourself that quietly disappeared without anyone acknowledging they were gone. In the second episode in that series, we went deeper. We talked about identity clutter, the accumulation of roles and expectations and old versions of yourself and unprocessed disappointments that build layer upon layer until the weight is undeniable and you have no idea where it came from. And then in the third episode of that series, so last week we talked about permission.

the three permissions that nobody else is gonna hand you to become someone different, to make decisions about who you're becoming without giving everyone else the deciding vote, and then to actually believe that you are capable of the hard thing in front of you. That series was all about naming and identifying what you're carrying. And this series is about going underneath that because here's what I've learned. From both living this myself and from coaching women through it,

underneath the grief, underneath the identity clutter, there's something older, something that's been building for longer, something that is quietly fueling all of that. And it's called emotional clutter. And it might be the heaviest thing that you're carrying. And so in this episode, this is episode one of the emotional clutter series. And over the next several episodes, we're going to be doing something that I don't think most midlife women have ever had the space to do. We are going to go to the root.

not just to name the weight, not just to identify where it came from, but actually understand what's been accumulating inside you and what it looks like to begin clearing it. So that's what we're gonna be starting today. So first I need to tell you something that I don't think that I don't talk about enough. There was a period in my life, a stretch of several years when I gained 50 pounds and I couldn't figure out why. I wasn't eating dramatically differently. I wasn't sedentary. I was a normal

functioning woman doing something normal, doing functioning normal woman things, doing the same things I'd always done. And the weight, just came slowly, steadily, undeniably until one day I looked in the mirror and I didn't even recognize the woman looking back at me. And I did what most women do. I blamed my habits. I blamed my metabolism. I blamed getting older. I blamed having nine babies.

And I tried different approaches to eating. I pushed myself to exercise more. I white knuckled my way through programs that would work for a while and then stop working. And I'd made progress and then the weight would come back. And for years I treated it like a physical problem with a physical solution. More discipline, better habits, tighter systems. And it never stuck. Because I was treating the wrong problem. That's what I know now. That's what I know now.

Here's also what I know now that I didn't know then. I wasn't carrying weight. I was carrying emotions. Years of them stuffed down, filed away, pushed through, not dealt with. Grief I didn't have time to process. Disappointments I told myself I was over. Anger I thought wasn't allowed. Fear. Fear I didn't have a name for. Loneliness that I was too busy to acknowledge.

All of it was living in my body because I had never given it anywhere to go. I wasn't lazy. I certainly wasn't undisciplined. And I wasn't failing at self-control. I was a woman whose body was holding everything that her mind had decided not to feel. And it wasn't until I started doing the deeper work, the emotional work, the kind that doesn't come with a meal plan or a workout schedule, that things began to shift.

And it wasn't overnight. It took a couple of years of learning and of getting honest with myself in ways that I'd never done before. It was years of sitting with things that I'd spent decades avoiding. But the weight in time then came off. And it wasn't because I finally found the right program. It was because I finally started processing what I had been stuffing.

And that journey, that slow, uncomfortable, deeply necessary journey is actually what led me into the world of coaching. I became a client first. I found someone who could help me see what I couldn't see on my own. And what I found in that process changed everything about how I understood myself and my body and the weight that women carry that has nothing to do with what they eat. And so that is what I want to talk about today. Not the physical weight, though I know some of you heard

that story and felt something familiar, I wanna talk about what's actually underneath that, the emotional weight, the kind that doesn't show up on a scale, but shows up everywhere else, in your relationships, in your reactions, in the exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix, in the tears that show up at strange moments for no clear reason, in the numbness that settles when you've been pushing feelings down for so long that you can't quite access them anymore. That is emotional clutter, and it is real, and it is heavy.

and it has been with you likely longer than you realize. So let me define this. Emotional clutter is the accumulation of unfelt, unprocessed, unacknowledged emotions that have been set aside, intentionally or not, over months and years, over months and years of a life in a season that didn't leave room for them.

It's not the same thing as being emotional. It's actually the opposite. The woman with the most emotional clutter is often the woman who appears the least emotional. Let me say that again. The woman with the most emotional clutter is often the woman who appears the least emotional. The one who holds it all together. The one who handles things. The one who doesn't fall apart. The one everyone leans on because she is so steady and so capable.

And so reliably fine because she has learned somewhere along the way, maybe very early on that there wasn't space for her feelings, that emotions were inconvenient, that other people needed her to be okay, that feelings, feeling things took long and it cost too much, that feelings, well, they could just wait. And so she waited and waited and the feelings with nowhere to go went underground. That is how emotional

clutter builds. And here's what I want you to understand because this is the part that can begin to change things. Emotions are not optional. They don't disappear because you ignore them. They don't resolve because you're too busy to deal with them. They are biological. They are psychological. They are real in your body in the same way that hunger is real in your body. And just like hunger, if you keep ignoring the signal, your body finds another way to make itself heard.

Sometimes that looks like anxiety, a low-level hum of unease that you can't explain, a sense that something is wrong even when nothing is obviously wrong. Sometimes it looks like irritability, snapping at your kids over something small, feeling a disproportionate reaction to a minor inconvenience, and then feeling guilty about it without understanding that the reaction isn't really about the thing in front of you at all. Sometimes it looks like numbness, a flatness.

going through the motions quality to your days. You're present, but not quite there. You're functioning, but not feeling. You've been pushing things down for so long that the mechanism that pushes things down is now just on all the time. And sometimes, like it did for me, it shows up in your body in weight that you can't account for, in chronic tension, in exhaustion that isn't about sleep.

in a body that feels heavier than it should, older than it should, more broken down than it should. Your body is not betraying you. Your body is talking to you. It's trying to tell you something that your mind has been refusing to hear. And that is not a weakness. That is wisdom. That's your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do, flagging a problem that needs your attention.

The problem isn't your body, the problem is the backlog. So now, let me walk you through what emotional clutter actually looks like, because I think when you hear these categories, something is gonna click, okay? So the first category is suppressed emotions. These are the feelings that you experienced consciously or unconsciously, and you chose not to feel them.

The anger you swallowed because it wasn't safe or convenient. The sadness that you pushed down because there wasn't time. The fear that you dismissed because you told yourself to be strong. The loneliness you didn't want to admit because admitting it felt like you weren't grateful for what you did have. These emotions didn't leave, they settled in and they've been there, unprocessed, quietly adding to the weight.

The second category is borrowed emotions. These are feelings that aren't even yours, but you've been carrying them anyway. The anxiety of your kids that you absorbed, the stress of your husband that lives in your nervous system, the worry of your aging parents, the emotional labor of everyone around you that you've been quietly managing and metabolizing without even realizing it. If you've ever walked into a room, fine, and walked out feeling exhausted without saying,

Without anything specifically happening, you know what borrowed emotions feel like. You were carrying someone else's weight. And the third category is unexpressed emotions. These are feelings that you had but never got to say out loud. The things you never told your husband that still sit in your chest. The grief you didn't get to cry because you had to hold it together. The frustration that never had a witness. The hurt.

that went unacknowledged because the other person wasn't ready to hear it. Emotions need expression to move. And when they don't get to move, they stay. In the fourth category, the one that I think is the most common for women in midlife is the accumulated emotional labor. For years, maybe decades, you've been the emotional manager of your household, the one who reads the room.

The one who tracks everyone's feelings. The one who adjusts and adapts and smooths things over. Who keeps the peace, anticipates needs, absorbs tension. The one who makes sure that everyone else is okay. And somewhere in all of that managing, you stopped being managed. Nobody was reading your room. Nobody was tracking your feelings. Nobody was smoothing things over for you. And that emotional labor, the weight of being the emotional...

Center of gravity for everyone around you has been building in your body without anyone, including you, giving it a name. That is emotional clutter, all four categories of it. And here's what I want you to hear right now plainly. This is not your fault. You were not weak for feeling these things. You were not dramatic. You were not broken. You were a woman doing what women in your season of life do, surviving.

managing, showing up, carrying on. And nobody handed you a framework for what happens to the emotions that you set aside in order to do all of that until now. And so here's the reframe that I want to offer to you. Emotional clutter is not evidence that you're falling apart. It is evidence that you've been holding it together for a very long time. The woman with the most emotional clutter

is usually the most capable woman in the room, the most reliable, the most steady, the one who showed up when everyone else fell apart. She isn't clutter-filled because she's weak. She's clutter-filled because she's been strong in a way that didn't leave room for her own humanity. And here's what I know to be true of you if you're this woman. You cannot carry this indefinitely, not because you aren't capable enough, but because no human

No human being is built to hold this much without a release valve. The weight that I carried for those years, the physical, literal weight, wasn't a discipline failure. It was my body demanding a release valve that my mind refused to provide. Your body will find a way to get your attention. The question is whether you get honest with yourself before it has to get even louder.

And the good news, and there is real good news here, is that emotional clutter is not permanent. It is not damage. It is not who you are. It is accumulated. And what accumulates can be cleared. Not all at once, not in a dramatic fanfare sort of way, not by blowing up your life, but by slowly, honestly, and with the right framework and the willingness to start seeing what is actually there. That clearing.

what it looks like, how it happens, what it costs, and what it gives back. That is what this series is gonna begin to show you, because today it was the beginning, and there is a lot more coming. So here are three things I want you to take with you today. One, emotions don't disappear when you ignore them. They accumulate. They go underground. They show up in your body, your relationships, your reactions, in ways that often look like completely different problems.

What you've been calling anxiety or irritability or exhaustion or numbness may actually be the backlog making itself heard. Number two, the woman with the most emotional clutter is often the most capable woman in the room. This is not a weakness issue. This is what happens when you have been strong and steady and reliable for everyone else for a very long time without anyone managing the emotional weight for you.

Number three, what accumulates can be cleared. This accumulation is not permanent. This is not damage. This is a backlog. And backlogs can be worked through. That's what this series is going to begin to show you. And so if something hit you today, if you heard the word backlog and felt something in your chest, or if one of those four categories gave language to something that you've been living without a name for, I just want you to sit with it today.

Don't rush to fix it. Don't immediately try to do something with it or resolve it. Just let it land. Hold it. Because that recognition, that moment of, holy cow, that is me, and that's what this is. That's not a small thing. That is the beginning of something real. Now, next week, we're gonna be going one layer deeper on Thursday. We're gonna be talking about how emotional clutter actually shows up in your body, in your behavior.

in the patterns you've probably never connected to emotions before. And I think it's gonna be one of those conversations where a lot of things that have felt confusing suddenly start making sense. So make sure that you're following along or subscribed here so that you don't miss it. And know that if this conversation resonated with you, it would be so awesome if you could share it with a woman who you know needs to hear it. You already know who she is.

and grab my free guide. You'll find it down in the show notes below. It's called, is Why Midlife Feels So Heavy. If you haven't already grabbed it, it's down in the notes for you. It's the perfect place to start if any of this hit home for you today. And know that I'll be back to carry this conversation forward next week, Thursday. Until then, lead yourself well, friend, and we'll talk soon.