Thursday, March 28, 2024
Miles from the Mainstream
D. R. ZUKERMAN, proprietor
If You Know Someone Suffering from
Clutter-Based Anxiety…

JUNE 5, 2005 --

(With great thanks to some very good friends, and particular thanks to Howard and Debbie Jonas.)

Please be supportive--understanding, patient, encouraging. LPR has a hunch that an anxiety-sufferer greatly appreciates kindness (along with anti-anxiety medication) and might not be helped much by lectures.

Till now, LPR saw the film "It's a Wonderful Life" as an uplifting movie how a communuity rallied, on Christmas Eve, to support George Bailey, who was the target of a very nasty villain.

The movie begins with dialogue between one angel and Angel Second-class Clarence Oddbody who wondered if George was sick. "No, worse," was the reply. "He's discouraged." The cure for discouragement, encouragement. ("The It's A Wonderful Life Book," by Jeanine Basinger, at p. 112.)

LPR now appreciates this wonderful film as pointing to a cure, in part at least, to anxiety -- positive help from friends.

In George Bailey's case, the anxiety was from an external source. In cases of
clutter-based anxiety, the source might more likely be from within -- all the more reason lectures to the clutterer are not necessarily helpful.

Good friends will understand that this form of anxiety asks for a hand, perhaps being at a point where the individual cannot solve the problem by himself. Indeed, perhaps the anxiety is driven, in part, by the individual's sense of isolation.

LPR has a notion that in these cases,
the anxiety-based clutterer will respond quite favorably to a helping hand.

And no, LPR does not believe a certain situation equaled the case of the Collier Bros., although, other than by googling, LPR will not be able to quote from
newspapers of a few years ago to put some current reportage in context.



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