But as a therapist, I watched and appreciated the show on a whole other level because I found it – KonMari’ing or tidying up your home – to be a great metaphor for what we’re attempting to do in the therapy process.
To hear six reasons why KonMari’ing your home is the perfect metaphor for therapy, keep reading…
6 Reasons Why KonMari’ing Your Home Is The Perfect Metaphor For Therapy.
First, a little caveat: The point of my post today isn’t meant to over-simplify the act of therapy.
Therapy is a complex, unique, and in my mind, sacred and mysterious, journey that can lead to profound healing and transformation for those who undertake it.
The parallel between KonMari’ing your home and the therapy isn’t meant to oversimplify the process. Or undermine the complexity or mysteriousness of it in any way.
But, because I get asked so often, “What exactly is therapy?” and “What happens in the therapy process and how does this actually change my life?” combined with the fact that it seems like almost everyone has told me they watched Tidying Up, I wanted to use the show to illustrate some of the principles of therapy in the hopes that it might help you understand more what can make therapy effective.
So, without further ado, here are 6 reasons why KonMari’ing your home is the perfect metaphor for therapy:
1. Both therapy and tidying your home involve deliberate work to help you more consciously choose how you to live.
With tidying up, we’re clearly dealing with an external space that we want to adjust. To help us live better.
With therapy, we are, of course, talking about your internal space.
With your external spaces, you inventory your clothes, your books, your papers and your “komono” (miscellaneous items). Piling everything onto the bed and choosing what “sparks joy” to include in your future.
With your internal spaces, in the process of therapy, we do the same kind of “inventorying” work. Discovering what your internalized views and beliefs of yourself, others, and the world are.
We compassionately confront your patterns of behavior. Your defense mechanisms. Your unconscious introjects. And see what’s working well for you, and what may need to “go.”
With both kinds of inventorying work, I think the key here is the word “deliberate.”
Neither the act of tidying up your home nor confronting and working through your internal beliefs, introjects, and self- and world-views tends to happen automatically.
Both are processes that, most often, need to be undertaken deliberately in order to create big changes in our lives.
2. Tidying up IS work and sometimes it gets messier before it gets “cleaner.”
As the show’s participants undertook the tidying process, it often looked like they were making even more mess and clutter in their home by pulling everything out of the closets, nooks, and crannies.
