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basement Jungian archetype shadow

Throw it in the basement!

I’m going to go Jungian again with a funny story about cleaning the house. We’ve recently been getting things organized and cleaned up for our house to be on the market. Now I admit I don’t always keep my house clean and show ready so this is an adjustment for me to keep it to that level. But more on that later. So sometimes if you don’t know what to do with something you find a closet or a room to put it in until later. I think that’s pretty common. But 2 weeks ago when we started doing that I stopped and realized how symbolic this was. There were things we needed to organize or find a better place for but instead of taking the time we just tossed it in the basement. I then realized the whole time we have lived here that was our slow, steady process. If we didn’t want to deal with it, we just found some closet space or another shelf downstairs. Only this time I knew it was going to catch up with us.

So after all our projects were done and the house was listed, we kind of relaxed a bit because we felt we had some time to reorganize the basement before our first showing. I mean it’s not immediately you get a request. Well actually it was. So we then had to spend the evening rearranging the closets, straightening the storage areas and cleaning up the basement. How appropriate that when you really don’t want to deal with something at a particular time that events in life unfold which force you to face them.

Now the Jungian method would say that the closets and basement are the unconscious areas where we hide things in our mind. Sometimes if there are issues we don’t want to deal with we hide them or deny them in parts of ourselves that we rarely look at. In life though there seems to be a tendency to have those aspects make themselves known (many times indirectly) when we didn’t really see that opportunity coming. However, once you deal with them there is a tremendous load lifted.

So now that all the closets are presentable and the basement looks fabulous I don’t cringe when someone wants to walk through them. I can actually be proud to show off what we have because our place looks very good! In fact our place looks better than when we toured it and I feel good that we made the place look better than it originally was. I guess from this I learned that you can either deal with things in the now or in the future but if you choose to delay the process there will be more to clean up later.

Just wanted to share
-Jason