Ep. 241: Emotional Clutter: The Dish on the Counter That Made You Snap

I want to paint a picture for you.

It's a Tuesday. Or a Thursday. Or honestly any day of the week…because the day doesn't really matter. What matters is that it has been a lot. The mental load has been running since before you opened your eyes. You've handled seventeen things before noon, most of which were invisible to everyone around you. You're behind on something. You're worried about something else. You're carrying a conversation from yesterday that didn't go the way you hoped and a conversation from next week that you're already dreading.

And then someone…your kid, your husband, someone you love does something small.

Leaves a dish on the counter. Asks you a question you've answered a hundred times. Forgets something you mentioned. Says something in a tone that lands wrong. Does the thing they always do that you've asked them not to do.

And something in you just... snaps.

Not a little irritated. Not mildly frustrated. Snaps. The reaction is bigger than the moment. You can feel it even as it's happening: this is too much, this is disproportionate, this is not actually about the dish, and you cannot stop it.

And then it passes. And the shame arrives.

Sound familiar?

Let’s talk about what’s really happening here. 

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Transcript

Okay, so in that moment, when something in you and the shame comes rushing in, this is happening because you're the capable one. You're the steady one. You're the one who holds it all together. And you just completely fell apart over a dish. And so you apologize, you move on, you tell yourself that you're just tired. You add it to that quiet mental list of evidence that something might be actually wrong with you. And you keep going.

But here's what I want you to know today. It wasn't about the dish. It was never about the dish and understanding what it is actually about. Well, that is what today is all about. So welcome back to the emotional clutter series. This is episode two in this series. And if you missed episode one in this series, you're going to want to go back and listen to episode 239 in the intentional midlife mom podcast. That was episode one in this series. So in that,

In that episode last week, we defined emotional clutter for the first time. We talked about it like the accumulation of unfelt, unprocessed, unacknowledged emotions that have been set aside for over months, maybe even years of life in a season that just didn't have room for those things. We talked about the four categories of emotional clutter. Suppressed emotions, borrowed emotions,

unexpressed emotions and accumulated emotional labor. And then we talked about something important. Emotional clutter doesn't just live in your mind. It lives in your body. It lives in your behavior. It lives in your relationships. It shows up in ways that you've probably never connected to emotions before. And so today we're gonna be making those connections because one of the most, I think, disorienting things about emotional clutter is that it rarely announces itself clearly.

It doesn't show up and say, hello, I'm your unprocessed grief from three years ago. It shows up sideways. It shows up as something that looks like a completely different problem. And so you go after the wrong thing. You go after the dish. You go after the tiredness, the diet, the schedule, and you wonder why nothing ever quite gets resolved. So today we're going to stop going after the wrong thing. So here's something that I

I think might help you, it'll paint a good picture for you. And this is a time that taught me one of the most important things that I've ever learned about myself. So it was just an ordinary evening, dinner was done, the kitchen was mostly cleaned up. And I had been going since early that morning, way early. Not in a dramatic crisis kind of way, but it was just a steady day, right? I was feeling that relentless nothing is ever finished feeling.

Most days that is what it ends up feeling like when you're running a household and you have a life and you're trying to hold together all of the invisible pieces. And my husband left a cup on the counter right next to the sink. Not in the sink, next to it. And I lost it. Not in a yelling, dramatic sort of way, though I wanted to, but in that cold, clipped, every word precise way that is somehow worse than the blow up would have been. The tone that says

I'm holding myself together by a thread and you just cut the last one. The tone that is controlled on the outside and absolutely not controlled on the inside. And my husband looked at me genuinely confused because it was a cup. It was just a cup. It was literally right next to the sink and I could see on his face that he had no idea what had just happened. And the honest truth was, I didn't either. I knew that it wasn't about the cup though.

I knew that even, I knew even in that moment it wasn't about the cup, but I couldn't tell you what it was about. I couldn't reach in and pull out the real thing. I just knew that I was full, that whatever I was carrying, it had reached capacity, that the cup was the last thing that fit and everything was spilling over from there. And I went to bed that night feeling.

ashamed and confused and a little scared because if I couldn't explain my own reaction, if I didn't even know what I was actually feeling, well, what did that mean? And it took me a long time to understand what that moment was actually telling me. It wasn't telling me that I was failing. It wasn't telling me that I was too emotional or too sensitive or too much, honestly. It was telling me that I had been ignoring something for a long time, that somewhere underneath

all of that capability, all of that functioning, all of that holding it together exterior, there was a backlog. And the backlog had found the only exit that was available to it, a cup on the counter. Because here's what I've learned, and this is the thing that I want you to really hear, your emotional clutter, will eventually find a way out, every time. And like me, it doesn't mean that you're weak. It's not because you lack self-control.

but because emotions are energy. And energy doesn't just disappear, it moves. And if you don't give it a healthy, intentional direction, it's gonna find its own. Sometimes it finds its way out as a disproportionate reaction to a small thing. Sometimes it finds its way out as a physical symptom that you can't quite explain. Sometimes it finds its way out as a behavior pattern that you're not proud of.

Sometimes it finds its way out in how you show up or don't show up in your relationships, in your commitments, in the things that actually are meaningful to you. And all of these things are what we're gonna be covering today. And I want you to listen to this, not just as a list of your failures, but as a translation guide, a way of finally understanding what your body and your behavior have been trying to tell you. So.

Let's go through how emotional clutter shows up one by one. Okay? The first one, it shows up in your body. This is where a lot of women are most surprised because we don't naturally connect physical symptoms to emotional accumulation. We've been taught to treat the body and the mind as two separate systems. Something hurts physically, you look for a physical cause. Something is wrong emotionally, you look for an emotional trigger.

Rarely do we look at something physical and ask, what is this carrying that I haven't processed? And the body doesn't lie, and it doesn't wait for permission either. Chronic tension is one of the most common physical expressions of emotional clutter. The tightness in your shoulders that never fully releases, the jaw that you clench at night, the teeth that you grind, the headaches that come from nowhere, the neck that aches constantly.

That tension is not just physical, it's the physical manifestation of emotions that have been held and braced against and carried without release. Exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix is another one. This is the exhaustion that a good night's rest doesn't touch. You wake up just as tired. You're tired at noon. You're tired in a way that feels deeper than physical because it is.

Emotional labor is real labor. And carrying an emotional backlog takes an enormous amount of energy. And when your system is constantly working to manage and suppress and contain what hasn't been processed, it is genuinely psychologically draining. Other unexplained physical symptoms.

These are some of the other ways that emotional clutter can show up in a physical way. It's the recurring tension headaches. It's the digestive issues that flare when your stress is high. It's the immune system that keeps getting hit. It's the inflammation that won't resolve. These are the body's way of expressing what the mind is not. And then there's weight. We talked about this last week in my own story, and so I'm just gonna name it again,

real briefly because I think it's one of the most misunderstood physical expressions of emotional clutter. Not every woman's emotional weight shows up as physical weight, but for many it does. And treating it purely as a physical problem with physical solutions will only get you so far if the root is actually an emotional one and it stays there and it remains unaddressed.

your body is not working against you, even though it might seem that way, it's actually working for you. With all of these physical symptoms and manifestations, it's trying to get your attention. And when you start understanding its signals as communication rather than malfunction, then things can start to shift. So that's physical symptoms. That's the first way that emotional clutter can show up.

The second way, going a little bit deeper, is that it shows up in your behavior. And this is the category that I think most women will recognize quickly because these are the patterns you're probably already aware of. Even if you haven't connected them to emotional clutter, right? There's numbing behaviors. That nightly glass of wine that started as a reward and quietly became a requirement. The scrolling that goes on for longer than you meant it to.

the overeating that happens not because you're hungry, but because something just needs to be soothed. The Netflix binge that started as rest and it ended hours later as avoidance. The shopping, the snacking, the staying busy, the staying distracted. None of these things are character flaws. They're coping mechanisms. They are your system's attempt to manage emotional pressure.

that it hasn't been given another way to release. And the reason they feel so hard to break these habits, the reason that willpower alone is never quite enough is because you're trying to remove the release valve without actually addressing the pressure that's underneath. So although it might look like it, you don't have a discipline problem. You have a backlog problem.

And I want to be careful here because I'm not saying that these behaviors don't have consequences or don't need to change. They do. But shaming yourself for them, white-knuckling your way into stopping them without dealing with them, with what they're actually meaning, with what's actually going on, that is treating the symptom. And here, in the conversations I have with women, I'm done helping women treat symptoms.

Staying relentlessly busy is another behavioral pattern that's worth naming here, because not all the numbing looks like wine or Netflix. Some of it looks extremely productive. Some of it looks like the woman who is always doing, who is always moving, who is always on to the next thing, who cannot sit still, cannot be quiet, cannot let there be a moment of nothing, because in the nothing, the feelings, they start to surface. And she's learned somewhere along the way,

that surfacing is dangerous. Busyness as avoidance is one of the most socially acceptable forms of emotional numbing that there is. Nobody tells a productive woman to slow down and feel her feelings. They tell her she's impressive. They ask her how she does it all. And she keeps doing it all because stopping feels scarier than it does exhausting.

So the third thing, emotional clutter shows up in emotional reactions. So back to the dish, back to that disproportionate reaction that you couldn't explain but you felt ashamed about afterward. This is one of the clearest signals of emotional clutter that there is. When your reaction is significantly bigger than the situation warrants, it is almost never actually about the situation. It is about everything.

that that situation landed on top of. The dish isn't the problem. The dish is the final straw on a pile of straws that have been accumulating for weeks or months, maybe years. And that pile finally tipped. Disproportionate anger is one expression of this. Unexpected tears are another. Have you ever cried at something and had absolutely no idea why? A commercial, a song.

A moment that shouldn't have hit that hard and suddenly you're in tears and you can't figure out what's happening. That's not instability. That's the backlog finding a little crack. That's the pressure releasing just in that moment through the nearest available opening. Emotional numbness is the other end of the spectrum and I think it's the one that gets talked about the least. When you've been suppressing or pushing down emotions for long enough, the mechanism

that suppresses them becomes permanent. It stops being a choice and it starts being like a setting. And suddenly you can't access the feelings that you actually want to feel. You watch a sad movie and you feel nothing. You hear good news and you feel flat. You know you should be happy or sad or grateful or excited and there's just nothing there. That numbness doesn't mean that you're handling your emotions well. It doesn't signal peace.

It's the system shutting down because it has been running on overdrive for too long.

Emotional clutter also shows up in relationships and this is the one that I think causes the most confusion and the most pain because relational patterns they feel interpersonal. They feel like they're about the other person and sometimes they are but a lot of times they are the external expression of an internal state of being. Withdrawing, that pulling back, the going quiet, the becoming less available emotionally. That's not

It's not because you don't care, but because you have nothing left to give. Because the emotional tank is so depleted from everything that you've been carrying that there's genuinely nothing left to bring to connection. And so you go through the motions. You're physically present and you're emotionally somewhere else. And you feel guilty about it, which then adds to the weight, which depletes you further. Over-functioning. The doing of everything.

the controlling everything, the managing everything, because if you stop, if you let go, if you trust someone else to handle it, something might fall apart. And you cannot tolerate that. So you keep over-functioning, you keep over-managing, you keep carrying more than your share, not because you want to, but because somewhere underneath it, it feels safer than the alternative. And then there's people-pleasing, saying yes when you mean no, adjusting yourself to the temperature of everyone around you.

making yourself smaller and more agreeable and less inconvenient because somewhere along the way you learned that your needs come second. And they come second. And the price, that was the price of being loved. And you've been paying that price for so long that you don't even notice you're paying it anymore. These relational patterns, they're not personality traits.

They're protective strategies and they developed for a reason. They made sense at some point, but they're also costing you in energy, in authenticity, in the slow, quiet erosion of your own sense of self. And they're connected, all of them, to that emotional clutter underneath. And so here's the reframe that I wanna offer you today. And I want you to really just let it in. Your patterns are not evidence of who you are.

They are evidence of what you've been carrying. The snapping, the numbing, the withdrawing, the over-functioning, the exhaustion that won't lift, the tension that won't release, the reactions that confuse even you. None of that is a character indictment. All of it, it's just information. It's your system communicating loudly, insistently, in whatever language it has available, that there's something underneath that needs attention, that the backlog is real, that the weight is real.

that you have been managing and suppressing and pushing through for long enough that your body and your behavior and your relationships are all saying the same thing. Something needs to change. And here's what you really need to hear in all of it. It's not too late. You're not too far gone. The patterns, they can shift. The weight can lift. The reactions can become.

less overwhelming and the numbness can start to thaw and the exhaustion can become something that sleep actually fixes, but not by going after the symptoms, by going to the root. And that is what this series that we're doing here is doing and we're not done yet. So here are three things to take with you today. Number one, when your reaction is bigger than the moment, it's almost never about that moment.

It's about the pile, it's about the dish, it's about the thing in that moment, but that's not actually what it's about. Those are just the things that brought in the tipping point. The real question is what's been accumulating underneath that random stuff. Number two, your coping behaviors are not character flaws. The whine, the scrolling, the busyness, the over-functioning.

These are your system's attempt to manage pressure that it hasn't been given another way to release. And so it looks like you have a discipline problem. I get it. But you don't. You have a backlog problem. And that requires a different solution than a discipline problem does. Number three, your patterns, they're information. They're not an indictment.

Everything we covered today, the physical symptoms, the behavioral patterns, the emotional reactions, the relational dynamics, all of it is your system communicating. So start listening to it as information instead of as evidence that something's wrong with you. Because what it's telling you is not actually that you're broken. It's that something underneath needs attention. And now let this be the moment where you start finally paying attention. The mess.

Whatever it is, it's not the problem, it's the signal. And so if you are listening today, and if any one of these patterns, if they spark something in you, and I'd be willing to bet that you heard yourself in more than one of these patterns today, I want you to feel something other than shame about it. I want you to feel seen. Because these patterns are so common among midlife women. They're so universal.

They're so quietly, privately experienced by women who are convinced that they're the only ones falling apart over dishes and crying at commercials and running on empty while everyone else seems fine. You are not the only one and you are not falling apart. You are a woman with a backlog. And now we've started to have a conversation.

And we now have this understanding of what the backlog has been doing, where it's been living, how it's been showing up, and what it's been trying to tell you. Now next week, we're gonna be going one layer deeper still. We're gonna talk about the difference between feeling an emotion and carrying it, because those are not the same thing. And understanding that difference is one.

of the most practically useful things that I can give you in this series. So make sure that you don't miss it. Make sure that you have subscribed and are following along. And share this episode with a woman that you know will hear herself in it too. You know who she is. And then also make sure you check the notes down below and grab my free guide. It's called This Is Why Midlife Feels So Heavy. If you don't already have it, make sure that you grab that because it's gonna start

Again, to shed some light on some things that you have probably been looking at one way, but there's actually something totally different happening. So make sure you go back and listen to episode one in this series if you haven't, that's episode 239. Share this one with a friend and then make sure that you come back next week where we continue this conversation, but one layer deeper. Friend, we'll talk again soon.