As you may already know, a key ingredient of my Clutter Challenge was my relationship with my parents.

Both my parents have insecure attachment issues because of their families and life experiences. My brother and I inherited it from them too, and for both of us it was then accentuated by our own life experiences. So, it’s no surprise that my brother and I both struggled with clutter which is strongly linked to insecure attachment.

In fact, over the last 10 years I’ve come to accept that one of the key reasons why I’m estranged from my parents is because of our insecure attachment issues and my desire to have healthy, secure attachments.

When you have insecure attachment, you find it difficult to connect to others. You try to avoid commitment and intimacy (physical, mental, emotional), you become clingy in relationships, you struggle to make friends, and you struggle to accept criticism. You avoid showing your emotions, usually because you struggle to identify your emotions and don’t have the skills to manage them. Indeed, when you are insecurely attached, when you feel vulnerable you can often appear selfish and/or controlling.

I first became aware that there are different attachment styles, and particularly my inherited insecure attachment, when I did my LIFE Timeline at the start of my Journey. I could clearly see the pattern of going from one extreme to the other in my relationships, whether that was with my parents, brother, friends or partners. It was all or nothing for me. I realised that because of my fear of rejection, I also had a habit of staying in relationships even though I didn’t fully trust the other person. I learnt through therapy that was mirroring the unhealthy, insecure relationship I had with my mother.  

My LIFE Timeline enabled me to see how I had never developed a strong, emotionally secure foundation of unconditional love, especially with my mother due to inherited insecure attachment she had to her own mother, and events and experiences in her own life.  I could see how my attachment to my mother had become even more insecure because of multiple examples of her lack of emotion, compassion and unconditional love towards me when certain negative events and experiences happened in my own life.

For example, when I was 13, I told my mother I had been interfered with by a male babysitter when I was 6. Without showing any emotion, my mother told me that it didn’t matter because it happened a long time ago. She then got out of the car we were in at the time and walked away. I felt abandoned.

On my return from my trip to South America, the vicar’s wife told me that when I was in hospital with food poisoning and malaria, when my mother had arrived at church that Sunday it was clear she had been crying. When church members tried to comfort her, she was so scared of appearing emotionally vulnerable, that she told them she hadn’t been crying, she just had something in her eye. The vicar’s wife told me they didn’t believe her.

Later in life, after I had been at university for just a couple of weeks, I told my parents I wanted to leave. My parents’ response was to stop the conversation when I started talking about how I was feeling. Instead, they sent me to see a therapist.

When I broke off my engagement to a man from West Africa and told my mother with tears rolling down my face, she didn’t hug or comfort me. She asked me what I wanted her to tell people, then left the room.

When my relationship with them started to deteriorate, a family friend told them to go and sit on my doorstep and insist on talking to me to resolve it. Their response was ‘we don’t do things like that’. I wasn’t surprised. Their insecure attachment doesn’t allow them to be vulnerable or uncomfortable.

Years later I told my mother my husband and I couldn’t have children. She responded not with hugs and comfort, but by saying that I was lucky because she believed she would have been happier if she hadn’t had children. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before.

Yes, there was plenty of evidence of being an insecurely attached, unloved daughter in my LIFE Timeline that I had chosen to ignore or justify in my past. There was also evidence that I had a mother who avoided and dismissed her own feelings and avoided vulnerability at all costs. Therapy came to provide me with the emotional support I needed, and that my mother wasn’t capable of providing.

The emotional void in my life was huge, and it wasn’t just evident with my parents. Looking at my LIFE Timeline I noticed that all my friendships and relationships were very short-lived, which I had always justified by saying that when I realised that I was making more effort than them, I wouldn’t waste any more time. In truth, that was my excuse for avoiding emotional intimacy and vulnerability because I didn’t know how to manage my emotions, it felt unsafe to be open and vulnerable with anyone, and I didn’t want to risk getting emotionally hurt like I had in the past with my mother. I knew I didn’t have the unconditional, emotional support that I needed at home. I would only get practical and financial support from my parents.

I also realised how I had often misinterpreted other people’s kindness and interest in me. I could never tell whether a man liked me, and I assumed that if he wanted to see me more than once, he must be interested in me romantically. Then when I started seeing them regularly, I became clingy and needy. My people pleasing never seemed to make a difference to how people treated me, and only made me vulnerable to frequently being taken advantage of financially, emotionally and practically.

As my therapist Meg pointed out, I was choosing people who mirrored the insecure relationship I had with my parents, especially my mother, because that was part of my comfort zone. Oh yes, there was hard evidence in my LIFE Timeline. I had either chosen to ignore it in the past or assumed that what I had experienced was ‘normal’ and what everyone experienced. This new awareness gave me a choice. Continue the pattern or start getting uncomfortable and build some new secure relationships into my life.

Although I became aware of my insecure attachment when I cleared my clutter over 20 years ago, it would take much longer to change my habits of thinking and doing to reach a point where I felt that I had achieved safe, secure attachment in my relationships, especially my marriage. Unsurprisingly, I married a man who also had insecure attachment issues. That’s why we get on so well and decided to work on it together.

After my estrangement from my parents, I subconsciously transferred my insecure attachment to my mother-in-law. I was desperate for her approval which she would give me in waves. It would take years for me to finally break the habit of seeking her approval. When I finally did, it was met with anger and hostility because we were no longer mutual enablers.

My husband and I have worked hard on building secure attachment with each other and those around us. When we met, we were both people pleasers, a classic sign of insecure attachment. We both struggled with our self-esteem, and we both struggled with healthy boundaries with family and friends. With the help of therapy early on in our marriage, we’re now able to openly and honestly share our feeling and emotions with each other without fear of being vulnerable, dismissed or judged, something neither of us experienced in childhood.

Insecure attachment, whether it’s inherited, triggered in childhood, or triggered and intensified by trauma and events throughout our lives, can sabotage more than just our homes and our clutter. It can sabotage our ability to live our Best Life.

If you can acknowledge and accept you have insecure attachment, you can turn things around and start to build secure attachment into your relationships. I know from my own experience this will enrich your relationships, your life, and make your Best Life even more incredible than you ever imagined it could be.

You can clear your clutter fast, or you can clear your clutter forever, but you can’t clear your clutter forever, fast.

To find out how Clare can help you clear your clutter Forever, without the need for an expensive home visit, click here now: https://www.clutterclearing.net/clares-help-centre/