Ep. 245: Emotional Clutter: How to Actually Start Clearing It.

If you've been with me through this entire series if you've listened to all three of these episodes where we’ve talked about emotional clutter, you have done something that a lot of women never do.

You've looked.

You've sat with the uncomfortable truth that the heaviness you've been feeling has a name. That the reactions that confused you have an explanation. That the exhaustion, the numbness, the patterns you couldn't break…none of that was a character flaw. 

It was a backlog. A real one. 

Built over real years of real life in a season that didn't leave much room for you.

And now you're here. At the episode where we actually do something about it.

And I want to say something before we go any further, because I think it needs to be said:

You don't have to clear the backlog all at once.

That is not what this is. This is not a dramatic overhaul. This is not a weekend retreat or a complete life restructuring or a process that requires everything to stop so you can finally deal with it all.

This is smaller than that. Quieter than that. More ordinary than that.

And that is actually good news. Because the ordinary is where you live. And the ordinary is where this work gets done.

Let's get into it.

Check out the other Emotional Clutter Series Here:

Episode 1 of 4: Why You Feel So Heavy When Nothing is Obviously Wrong

Episode 2 of 4: The Dish on the Counter That Made You Snap

Episode 3 of 4: You're not feeling it- You're carrying it.

Make sure you’re learning about all the types of clutter: physical, emotional, mental, and even schedule clutter on Midlife Clutter: Explained and Solved over on Substack HERE: https://substack.com/ ⁨@JenniferRoskamp⁩  

Get some powerful mantras to inspire, encourage, and life you up when you need as little something intentional to focus on. 

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Transcript

Well, okay, we've covered a lot of ground in this series and I want to give you the full picture before we move into today's conversation because everything we've built together matters for what comes next. So in the first episode on emotional clutter on the podcast, this is episode 239, we defined emotional clutter and we defined it as the accumulation of unfelt, unprocessed, unacknowledged emotions that get set aside over years.

Years of life in a season that didn't leave room for them suppressed emotions borrowed emotions unexpressed emotions and accumulated emotional labor Then in the next conversation the next episode where we talked about emotional clutter We talked about how emotional clutter shows up in your body in your behavior in your emotional reactions in your Outbursts in your relationships. We named the patterns we connected them

to that backlog that is lingering underneath. And on the podcast, that was episode 241. And then in episode three in this series, last week's conversation, we made the most important distinction in this entire series, the difference between feeling an emotion and carrying one. Carried emotions accumulate, felt emotions move, and feeling, really feeling.

with presence and without resistance is not weakness. It is just maintenance. And on the podcast, that was episode 243. And today is episode four in this series. And today we talk about what clearing some of this backlog actually looks like. Not in theory, but in practice, in your actual life with your actual schedule, in the ordinary moments that are the only moments most of us actually have.

So this is where everything we've talked about is really going to get real. So I wanna share a season, share about a season that really kind of broke me a little bit. And again, there wasn't a big dramatic breakdown and it didn't kind of break me all at once. It was just slow and steady in the way that things break when they've been under pressure for too long without any way to release.

I had been running on empty for a long time, not in a way that anyone could see really from the outside. Everything looked fine from the outside. I was functioning. I was showing up. I was handling it. But inside, I was running a deficit that had been building and building for years, giving more. I was giving more than I was replenishing. I was carrying more than I was setting down. I was managing everything for everyone quietly and privately falling apart.

when it came to managing my own self. And I kept going though, because that's what you do, right? Because stopping felt more dangerous than the exhaustion did. Because I had convinced myself that this was just what this season looked like, that it would ease up eventually, and that I just needed to push a little bit longer. And then one day I just couldn't push anymore. It wasn't, again, a dramatic moment. There was no single breaking point that I can point to on a timeline.

It was more like I woke up one morning and the thing that I had been used to, the going, the going, the sheer will, the forward motion, the staying busy enough so that I didn't have to feel it, all of that ability to push, it just wasn't there. I literally had nothing left. Not for my family, not for my work, not for myself. And for the first time in a long time, I couldn't outrun what I was carrying. And so,

I sat with it, not because I was brave or because I had a plan or because I finally understood what I now know, but because I was just too tired to do the running anymore. And here's what I want you to hear in that, because I think a lot of women are waiting for the brave version of the story. The one where they finally decide that they, and the way that they show up for their loved ones is worth it. Where they have some empowering moment of clarity and they choose.

the best versions of themselves. And can I just tell you, that's not what happened for me. I just simply got too tired. And that's okay. Sometimes exhaustion can be the invitation. Sometimes the wall that you hit is the very thing that finally forces you to stop long enough to feel what you've been running from. And it typically is not gonna be a glamorous thing, but it is real, it's genuine, and it's truthful. And...

If you're in that place right now, if you're not brave enough to stand up for yourself and really your loved ones, if you're not able to understand, you know what, and say I'm depleted, I want you to know that the fact that you are feeling depleted, it can be enough. You don't need a better reason than just saying, you know what, I'm depleted and I've gotta do something about that. Because I kept waiting to feel ready. I kept thinking that at some point,

It would feel safe enough or calm enough or spacious enough to actually deal with everything that I was carrying. And that moment never came. Life didn't slow down and hand me a window of time. The kids still needed things. The work still existed. The responsibilities, they didn't pause. What I finally understood and what I want you to hear too is that you will never feel ready. Ready is not a feeling that arrives before the work. It is a feeling that shows up in the middle of it.

You don't wait until you're ready to really turn towards yourself and to listen to yourself. You turn towards yourself and then you find out you were more ready than you actually thought. And in that stillness, in that forced, exhausted, have no other choice stillness, for me, something started to happen. Things started to surface, feelings that I hadn't let myself feel, disappointments that I'd filed away, grief that I'd pushed through, anger.

that I thought I didn't have the right to. Loneliness I hadn't admitted, fear I hadn't named, all of it, slowly, quietly, it just started coming up. Not all at once, not in some sort of flood, but in a way that things just kind of surface when again, pressure that's been keeping them down finally starts to let up a little bit. And I will say, it was uncomfortable. And it was more uncomfortable than I expected.

There were tears that I didn't fully understand. There was anger that surprised me. And there was sadness, honestly. There was sadness about things that I thought I was long over. And I want to be honest about that part because I think we sanitize it too quickly. The clearing, as you work through this stuff, as you process through this stuff, it's not probably going to be very peaceful. It does not always feel like this.

big deep breath and this long exhale. Sometimes it feels like being caught off guard by something that you thought you'd already dealt with. Sometimes it feels like crying in your car and not being entirely sure why. Sometimes it feels like irritability or restlessness or a heaviness that doesn't have a clear reason. That's not a sign that something is wrong. That's a sign that something is finally moving. And here's what I want to tell you about that season, what that season looked like for me. It was the beginning really of the most significant shift.

that I've made in my lifetime. And it wasn't because everything got easier immediately, it didn't. But because for the first time, I was dealing with the actual thing instead of essentially managing around it. I was feeling instead of carrying and slowly over months, not days, the weight that I was carrying began to change. It didn't disappear, but it changed. Because really, I was able to finally move through

things rather than feel like I was being buried by them. And this season is what eventually brought me into coaching as a client. I found someone who could help me see what I couldn't see on my own, who could give me frameworks for what I thought I was experiencing, who could walk beside me through the clearing, all this clearing that I needed to do and this processing that I needed to do in a way that made it feel less terrifying and more possible.

And what I learned in that process, what I want to give you today is that clearing emotional clutter is not the single dramatic event. It is a practice. It is a quiet, consistent, ordinary practice of turning towards yourself instead of turning away all the time. And it is available to you like it was to me right now, today, in the life that you're already living. So.

Let's walk through this practically because I think one of the reasons women don't start this work is because they don't know what starting looks like. They imagine that it has to be this big thing, right? And it's got to be structured and scheduled and it's got to require more time and energy than they have. But it doesn't have to be any of those things. Here is what clearing emotional clutter actually looks like broken into four practices that are small enough to do inside the life that you're already living.

And so the first practice is the daily check-in. This is the foundation really of everything else. And it's silly that it's so stupid, right? It's almost stupid that it's so simple. That's what I'm trying to say. That made more sense. So here's what it looks like. Once a day, it can be in the morning, but it doesn't have to. It can be at night, it can be in the middle. Really, it doesn't matter. When you have a quiet moment, that's the right time. When you have a quiet moment, you pause and you take a breath and you ask yourself,

three questions. Okay, these are the three questions. What am I feeling right now? Not what am I thinking, not what do I need to do. What am I actually feeling in my body underneath the noise? So what am I feeling right now? And then where is it in my body? And this matters more than it sounds. Emotions are physical. They live somewhere. The tightness in your chest, it's something.

The heaviness in your shoulders is something. The not in your stomach is something. Locating the feeling in your body helps you actually allow it instead of just thinking about it. So what am I feeling right now? Where is it in my body? And the third question is, can I just let this be here for just a moment? Not trying to fix it, you're not analyzing it, you're not making it mean something just.

Let it exist. Give it 30 seconds of your actual presence. That's it. That's the whole check-in. And it takes less than five minutes. It doesn't require privacy or silence or a journal or anything, really, except for a moment of honest attention. And I want to add something here, though, because I think it's important. A lot of women try this once and they feel something uncomfortable. And so they stop. Let me just also say this.

When you ask this question, you're probably going to feel something that will make you feel uncomfortable. But you don't want that uncomfortableness to make you stop. And so that's what tends to happen, though. And so they feel this uncomfortable thing, and so then they stop. And they decide that it's not working, or that they're doing it wrong, or that whatever came up is just too much to sit with, and maybe it's better just not to poke at it. That is resistance, and resistance is normal.

The fact that something uncomfortable surfaces is not evidence that the check-in is dangerous. It's evidence that it's working. You've been holding something down and when you stop holding it down, it moves, it shifts and that's the point. And so the uncomfortableness, it tells you to stick with it, right? Stick with it, even when it's uncomfortable, especially when it's uncomfortable. Done consistently,

not perfectly, but just consistently enough, the daily check-in begins to change your relationship with your own emotional life in ways that are really, they're hard to overstate. You start to know yourself again. You start to catch things earlier. You start to feel the pressure building before it reaches this point of the dish we talked about that just becomes this disproportionately overwhelming blowout, right?

you start to have access to yourself in a way that you may not have had in years. So the daily check-in, that's the first thing. The second thing to practice is honest release. Now this is what you do when the check-in surfaces something that's bigger than just a moment of presence can hold, something that needs more space, something that needs more expression.

And I want to be clear that this does not mean talking about it. It does not mean calling someone or processing it out loud or scheduling a conversation with your husband or putting it on the agenda for your next therapy session, though all of those things do have their place. Sometimes this honest release can look like just writing it down, not journaling in a structured, beautiful, sharing it later kind of way, just getting it out of your body onto paper. It can be messy.

private, unfiltered, the act of moving something from inside to outside, even just onto a piece of paper that you immediately throw away even. That is a form of expression and emotions need expression to move. So sometimes it means writing it down. Sometimes it means crying. I mentioned this happened to me, right? Actual, physical, nobody is watching you crying. Not managing it, not holding it back if it comes, not.

doing the thing where you let yourself tear up a little bit and then you just pull yourself together because you have things to do. Actually crying, which is uncomfortable and probably unglamorous and also one of the most really physiologically effective emotional releases your body has available. It has a very good purpose. And if it's there, allow it to be there. Allow it to be. So writing it down, crying.

Sometimes it means moving in your body, a walk where you're not listening to a podcast or mentally running through your to-do list, just walking and letting whatever is there be there and letting your body move through it. Physical movement and emotional processing are more connected than most of us realize. Your nervous system responds to movement. Things shift when your body moves that don't shift when you're sitting still. I finally figured out that this

is why I don't like missing my daily walk. It's not about the walk, it's not about the exercise, it's about the release, the emotional release that I get on the other side of the walk. And the honest release doesn't have to be long, it doesn't have to be neat, it just has to be real. And I really wanna give you permission to be terrible at this at first. Most of us have spent years, decades maybe, getting very good at not releasing what we're feeling.

at swallowing things back down before they surface, at redirecting and managing and staying functional. That is a deeply practiced skill and many of us are very good at it. You are not going to undo all of that practicing of holding everything all in. You're not going to be able to undo that overnight by all of a sudden deciding to feel your feelings. You're gonna need to learn what it looks like and what it feels like to feel your feelings. Gradually, you might...

sit down to write and stare at a blank page. You might start a walk and spend the whole time mentally running through your grocery list. You might try to cry and then find that nothing actually comes because the mechanism has been basically on lockdown for so long that it doesn't easily open up anymore. And that's OK. Just keep showing up for the practicing anyway. The capacity and the ability builds slowly, then kind of all at once. Once you figure it out, you figure it out.

So just trust the process, even when it feels like nothing is actually happening. Just keep doing it. And the third practice is the boundary around borrowed emotions. So in episode 241, in episode two in this series, so two weeks ago, we talked about borrowed emotions, the feelings that aren't yours but that you've been carrying anyway. It's things like the anxiety of your kids, the stress of your husband,

the worry of your aging parents, the emotional labor of everyone around you. Clearing emotional clutter means getting better at recognizing what belongs to you and what doesn't. This is a practice of pausing in the moment when you feel someone else's emotional weather moving into your atmosphere and you're gonna legitimately ask, is this actually mine? Is this anxiety mine or did I just absorb it from my teenager?

Is this heaviness mine or did I just spend an hour holding space for someone else's hard thing without any space for my own? Is this stress mine or did it walk in the door when my husband did? You are not responsible for carrying other people's emotions in your body. You can care about the people in your life deeply, sacrificially with your whole heart without metabolizing their emotional experience as your own. Now know that

This making this distinction, the boundaries around other people's emotional clutter, it definitely takes practice. It takes awareness and it takes really a willingness to say, even if only internally, this is not mine to carry. And know that this is not about being cold or dismissive. It's not about being emotionally unavailable to the people that you love. It is about staying on your side of the emotional line so that you can actually be present.

genuinely, sustainably present rather than running so depleted from carrying everybody else's weight that you have nothing real left to even offer them. And I will say it very plainly, I say it a lot. You cannot pour from an empty cup forever. At some point, your cup will be empty and there will be nothing left to pour.

And if you are absorbing everyone else's emotional experience on top of your own unprocessed backlog of things, you are running on fumes. And the boundary around borrowed emotions is not selfish. It is what makes sustained, genuine love actually possible. The fourth practice is the regular acknowledgement of what hasn't been grieved.

This is the slowest practice of them all. This one's going to take you the longest, the one that you will probably return to again and again over months and years, not just weeks. It's the practice of going back without a sense of urgency and with a lot of compassion for yourself and giving acknowledgement to the things that just never got acknowledged, the loss that didn't get a funeral, the disappointment that got filed away, the version of the future that

quietly didn't come true. The dream that you set down without calling attention to it. The season that ended before you were ready. You don't have to resolve these things. You don't have to reach acceptance or make peace or arrive at some clean emotional conclusion. You just have to acknowledge them. Say even just to yourself, even in just a quiet moment in your car before you go inside. Just acknowledge that it mattered.

Say things like, you know what? I lost something there. I never let myself say so, but I did. But it was real. And it hurt. And I'm saying so now. That acknowledgment, that small, private, utterly unglamorous act of witnessing your own experience, this is one of the most powerful things that you can do for your emotional backlog. Because a lot of what we're carrying isn't waiting to be fixed. It's actually just waiting to be seen.

And you are the one who gets to see it. Now, I wanna say something about all four of these practices because it is super important. None of them are dramatic and none of them require you to blow up your schedule or find hours of free time or change your life in any significant external way. They are small, they are quiet, they are the kind of thing that nobody around you will even notice that you're doing. But done consistently, imperfectly, without pressure, just regularly.

they will change you, again, not overnight, not in a way that you can point to on a timeline, but in the slow, steady, deeply real way that actually is what transformation looks like. You will start to feel lighter, not all at once, but incrementally in the way that a room feels lighter after you've quietly sorted through a few boxes. Not because the whole house is clean, but because something that was cluttering the space is finally gone. And that is what

clearing the emotional clutter or backlog actually feels like. And again, this is something you can start right now today. And I want to offer you a final reframe for this entire emotional clutter series, because this is the last episode in that series. And I want it to be the one thing that you carry with you forward. Clearing emotional clutter is not about becoming someone who doesn't feel things deeply. It is not about becoming a tougher,

or less sensitive or more able to push through without consequence version of yourself. It is about becoming someone who feels things fully and then lets them move. There is a version of strength that looks like not feeling, that looks like holding it together, pushing through, staying above it. We have all practiced that version a whole lot. We've gotten very good at it. But that version of strength does have a cost.

and you've been paying it for a long time. But know that there is also another version of strength here. It looks quieter from the outside. It looks like a woman who knows what she's feeling and lets herself feel it, who cries when she needs to cry and sets things down when they're not hers to carry. And she acknowledges the losses that never got acknowledgement. It's a woman who does her daily check-in

when nothing dramatic is happening, who practices the ordinary, consistent, unglamorous maintenance of her own emotional life. That woman is not weaker than the one who white knuckles her way through life. She's actually more free. And I want to be specific about what that freedom looks like because I think sometimes we hear emotional freedom and it sounds like something totally woo-woo.

Something that maybe doesn't apply to the kind of woman that you are. The capable one, the one who handles things, the one who gets things done, the one that everyone counts on. But this is exactly what it looks like for that woman. It looks like a hard conversation that doesn't spiral because you're not carrying six months of unspoken resentment into the conversation with you. It looks like a moment of genuine joy that you can actually feel fully without the flat, distant quality that comes from kind of being

emotionally overloaded. It looks like a difficult season where you don't lose yourself, where you move through it instead of disappearing under it. It looks like knowing what you feel and trusting what you know. And here's what I really want you to sit with. That version of you, the one who is present and grounded and not buried, she's not a different person. She is not someone that you have to become from scratch. She is who you are already.

This is who you are underneath, all of that stuff that you've been carrying. The emotional clutter didn't create a new, worse version of you. It just covered over the real one, the full one. And so in this way, the work that we're doing here is not reinvention. It's more like excavation. You're not building something new. You are clearing away what accumulated over years of a season that didn't leave room for you to do these things.

And what's underneath is still you that was always you. It was just a version of you that was inaccessible, maybe for a long time. That is what's on the other side of this work. It's not perfection, and I wish it was, but it's not the absence of hard things either. It's just you, present and grounded and not buried underneath what you've been carrying. That is the work, the discomfort, that is the work of going through the discomfort of clearing. That is why it's worth it.

And freedom, the kind that comes from actually living in your own experience, instead of, again, managing around it, that is what this whole series, all four of these episodes now, have been building toward. Because if you haven't heard me directly say it, I don't know that I've directly said it, but I'm gonna say it right now, you don't have to carry all of that emotional baggage anymore. And you never did.

So here are again, those four practices to take with you. Okay. And there's one for each episode in this series. So again, four episodes, I've got four key takeaways from each one of these. Number one takeaway is the daily check-in. Like we talked about today. Once a day, you're going to pause and say, what am I feeling? Where is it in my body? And can I just let it be here for a minute? Can I just sit here? Less than five minutes.

more powerful than it sounds. The second takeaway is the honest release. That's something else that we talked about today. When something surfaces that needs more space, write it out, cry it out, walk it out, move it from inside to outside, give it expression so that it can move. The third takeaway is the boundary. I lied, these are all from today, by the way. I was thinking they were from each of the episodes, but they're from today.

But the third takeaway is the boundary around borrowed emotions. When you feel someone else's emotional weather moving into your stratosphere, pause and just ask, get curious, is this mine? Because if it's not, you need to set it down at that boundary line. Because you can love your people deeply without carrying their emotional experience in your body. And...

Four is the regular, the fourth takeaway is the regular acknowledgement of what hasn't been grieved. Go back gently and witness what was never witnessed. Again, not to fix it, not to resolve it, just to acknowledge it and say, you know what, that was real and that happened. And this is how it affected me. That was hard and I can see it now. That's what we're looking for. These four practices are not a program. They are not a curriculum. They are just a way of

Again, looking inside, turning towards yourself and actually seeing consistently, imperfectly in the ordinary moments of your ordinary life and doing the quiet work of becoming someone who carries less. And I want to close down this entire series by saying something directly. You came here because something was heavy, because something felt off, because you had been carrying something for a long time without a name for it.

and without permission to set it down. And over these four episodes on the podcast, they were episodes 239, 241, 243, and now 245. You came across this grief series. These were, again, the episodes in this emotional clutter series. Now that you have been here, you got the name, you got the framework, you got the language, and I hope that you also got something harder to quantify but more important than any one of those things.

I hope you got the sense that what you've been experiencing is real, that the weight is real, that the losses are real, that the accumulation is real, and that none of it, not one ounce of it, is evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with you. You are not failing. You are not crazy. You are not losing control of yourself. You are a woman in the middle of a significant season, finally doing.

the honest work of understanding what is going on and understanding what you've been carrying and learning slowly and imperfectly and on your own timeline how to carry less. This is not a small thing. This is everything. So thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. And if you know someone who needs to hear this series, please share it with her. You know who that person is.

Also, I wanna thank you for doing the work that most people never do. If you are working through these episodes with me, you are looking honestly at what is going on instead of just pushing through and hoping that it gets better on its own. It gets better, but it only gets better when you do this work. And you are here and that means you are doing it. And so until we talk again, lead yourself well.