33 Questions: Attachment and Identity

We're going to talk about emotional attachment first.

And this is one that is deep.

So you can go as shallow or as deep when you're asking yourself these questions as you like.

The first one is, am I keeping this because I genuinely want it, because I feel guilty letting it go? And that guilt might be self-imposed guilt where you're thinking, well, you should have thought about that more carefully before you bought it or now it's just going to go into landfill and, oh, my goodness, the world doesn't need more landfill and so you've got some environmental concerns.

It might be that you can hear a family member in the back of your head being like, Where is that thing? I gave that to you.

I intentionally bought that for you.

That was special.

Why did you get rid of it? Maybe it's just that you just feel guilty.

The kids have given you some random present from a Mother's Day stall or from a Father's Day stall.

And you're like, I don't even like it.

But you feel guilty getting rid of it.

Not because... not because of the item itself, but because of the relationship that you have with the person.

And so my reminder to you is that you can keep the item and still love the person and you can get rid of the item and still love the person.

So whether you keep it or not is not the defining factor of the relationship you have with someone.

The next question is, if the memory could stay without the physical item, would I still want to keep this? If the memory could stay without keeping the physical item, would I still keep the physical item? Now, some of you would say like, yes, but that's not possible because the way that I am triggered, the memories are triggered is because of the actual item.

And so let's get creative.

There might be other ways that you can do that.

You might have a whole dinner set that reminds you of your mother-in-law.

And I'm talking about a client situation that happened about 10 years ago.

They had this dining set.

They didn't like the pattern of it.

They didn't like anything to do with it.

They never used it.

It took up a lot of space.

They were just keeping it because it reminded them of a memory and they felt bad getting rid of it.