18.3.13

10. Spinning furniture


The night before this session, Stella e-mailed:

‘The work we did in my bedroom last session has stirred up a lot of things for me and I haven't been sleeping. Rather than do any sorting or chucking out, I just want to move some of the furniture around.’

‘Right, furniture moving’, I said as I came through the front door.

‘What do you have in mind?’, I continued.

‘The sitting room layout is bothering me. I'm spending a lot of time in here since we did the basics. I want to move the bookcase over and put that chair where the sofa is. Then I want to bring the computer table down from my bedroom’

‘Okay, so the furniture is going into a blender spinning anti-clockwise with things moving around making space for the computer table?’

‘Yeah, that's it, with you and me doing the spinning.’

Once we had the space for the computer table cleared, we manoeuvred it out of her bedroom, down the stairs and into the sitting room. Although I didn't say it at the time, I was surprised that Stella wanted to go straight back into the bedroom. I was struck by the head-down courage. It was working there in the last visit which had been difficult for her. (Stella later said she had been most impressed when I said, of the computer unit, 'We'll throw it over the bannisters'. This worked!)

‘I wanted to do furniture moving because nothing we've done is irrevocable. If I don't like it and it isn't right we can always move it all back.’

‘That's a good way of thinking about it, I can use that with other declutter clients. Since you're expecting lots more visits, we don't need to push. It doesn't really matter what we do. We can always spend a session doing something small like sorting buttons’.

Back up in the bedroom, we then shuffled a small chest of drawers that had been blocking a doorway into the space the computer table had occupied. The result was astonishing. The whole room opened up and started to feel more like a bedroom. We opened the curtains.

‘I'm still looking for a window cleaner,’ Stella told me.

We did a small amount of paper before stopping for the day. Short session, only 3 hours

1 comment:

  1. I can understand this last point. I have just found a window cleaner after one year. Actually he found me. He cleans the flat next door, they were away because of the summer holidays and for the same reason I was at home. He rang my bell, gave me a card and the price, I shilly shallied and he did me a sample window. I arranged a visit for two days time. It is great, its been a couple of weeks and I have got used to the lovely shining windows. One can only cope with one thing at a time when you are living through stress but each step forward gives you such a boost.

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