Internal Resistance

One of the big problems I have found in helping compulsive hoarders with their problems is a huge amount of internal resistance they have.

One of the main patterns hoarders tend to have is that of wanting control over their environment. Many hoarders grew up with controlling or abusive parents, or in financial hardship. Any attempt at removing clutter or "helping" someone who is a compulsive hoarder is seen as meddling, and is incredibly threatening. I know when people go through my stuff, especially my papers, my heart used to race and I'd flat out panic. I felt completely invaded and violated, as if someone had their hands on my body and I couldn't get them to stop.

Of course, the more loved ones try to help, the more they are pushed away, and the stronger the internal resistance to change becomes.

For me, a lot of the internal resistance came from my Mom's attempts at keeping house. Chore time was never fun or happy. I remember constantly being lectured that I was never doing things well enough, or that I wasn't trying hard enough, when Mom had never shown me how to do it in the first place (I suppose I was supposed to just pick up how to sort laundry by osmosis!). I remember Mom forcing me to clean my room several times. Once, when I was five, she got so frustrated she threw my favorite doll against a wall so hard she broke it. Another time she went through all my papers when I wasn't home and decided what to keep and what to throw away.

I resented this. I was angry, and I wasn't allowed any way to express my anger. This meant that any time chores, cleaning, or throwing things away came up, even years after I moved out of the house, I still had to fight that internal resistance, that fiery defiance that refused to clean because no one could make me any more.

With EFT, those emotions are now gone. The memories are there, sure, but the anger, sadness, and despair around them have vanished. The feelings of hopelessness are gone. I no longer feel like I'm having to swim through bowling balls to clear off my desk, I can simply go and do it.

I can't even begin to describe how freeing this is. It's amazing. When you stop fighting yourself, when your depression is gone, your body feels light and free. EFT is the only thing I have ever found to work, within 20 or 30 minutes in most cases, at completely collapsing childhood angers like this.

You have to try it for yourself! Until your internal resistance is removed, you will keep sabotaging yourself and even if you do manage to change in the short term, in the long term you'll put yourself back in the same position.

You need to get all of you pulling in the same direction! EFT is the tool to do this!