Enforcing Boundaries is the Key to Keeping Emotional Clutter Away

Emotional clutter is made up of negative emotions from past experiences, and limiting beliefs that no longer apply to your current situation. Keeping emotional clutter away from you requires vigilance in setting and enforcing your boundaries.

Your boundaries help define who you are and what is important to you. They help capture your identity. When you set a boundary, you are telling others how you want to be treated and what you will and will not accept.

Establishing boundaries and enforcing them is a key to keeping your emotional clutter and that of others at bay. When you clean out physical clutter, you typically make sure new papers and junk don't mess things up again. With emotional clutter, setting and enforcing boundaries keeps negative life experiences from piling up and sabotaging you again. In both instances, you get rid of "stuff" you no longer need.

Too often, we tolerate things we don't like and simmer angrily about them inside. We end up angry and resentful. The person violating our boundary may not even be aware their behavior is having this impact. We may end up hurt by how someone has treated us, and they may be oblivious to the fact that they have done something which hurt our feelings. It is important to let people know what your boundaries are.

It is especially important to set boundaries around the beliefs other people express toward us. When well-meaning friends or family tell you "You can't..." or "You'll never...," remember this is their opinion and has nothing at all with what you are really capable of achieving. Otherwise you may end up taking on their emotional baggage and allow it to limit you.

When you clear out the emotional clutter in your life, you make space for happiness. You are no longer bogged down with the baggage of your past experiences. While they happened and were part of your life, they don't have to define you. All of us have had positive and negative experiences. Even if we've made mistakes in the past, we don't have to allow them to define who we are. Don't allow yourself to live in the past.

Hanging on to the emotional clutter of negative emotions, limiting beliefs and other people's drama in the long run impacts not only your happiness, but also your health. Negative emotions can wear on your physical body and your immune system. Emotional clutter affects your moods, creating stress, and ultimately affecting your health. Setting boundaries around how we are treated isn't just about having people treat us nicely—it can be vital to our health.

When I work with clients to remove emotional clutter, they describe feeling "lighter," and "joyful," and this is often a very profound change from where they started. Sometimes getting rid of emotional clutter allows them to actually feel happy for the first time in their lives.

If happiness is a goal for you, look at your emotional clutter and find some ways to clear it out. While you may have been collecting it for years, it doesn't need to take years to resolve. The effort is well worth it. You deserve happiness and the life of your dreams! And once you've cleared your emotional clutter, set boundaries to keep it clear! nn(c) 2009 Linda S. Pucci, Ph.D.