Cleanliness, Abuse, and Trauma

So, I am NOT a clean person. I mean, I am—I like a clean house. I find a clean kitchen to be very calming, and there are few pleasures as wonderful as beginning to cook a great meal in a sparkling clean kitchen. But cleaning for me has always been a source of serious anxiety. Growing up our mother used messes as an excuse to emotionally abuse and manipulate us, and there was a lot of trauma surrounding cleanliness. Us older kids in the family even got whipped with a belt sometimes when we made messes or didn’t clean up properly. So as an adult whenever I am confronted by a mess, especially ones I made myself, it always triggered fear, anxiety, and self-loathing, and being unaware of what was happening would just instinctually avoid messes if the anxiety was too great, which ironically would cause them to get worse and be even more difficult to address and cause even more anxiety.

In spite of this I did manage to keep my home from being a total mess, except for a period of time when I was struggling with a bacterial infection so painful it prevented me from bending over (and when I had cancer I also had absolutely no energy to clean). Whenever I was in a relationship I cleaned much more often because the presence of a loved one was generally calming and supportive, even if they weren’t supportive directly. But in one important, long term relationship my partner used messes and cleanliness as a way to hurt and control me, much like my mother, even though he was even less clean that I was and never bothered to do things like mop the floor or mow the lawn. Instead, he would overdraft his bank account paying cleaners to come to our house, and thought that because he hated messes and paid people to clean them up it made him a clean person. I would mop the floor every few weeks even when I could barely breathe because of the cancer and even while he would yell at me when the house wasn’t clean and he wasn’t cleaning.

This also illustrates one of the primary reasons people have anxiety around cleaning, is that it never is about cleaning. It is always about control and using the vulnerabilities of others to control them. Also coming from a conservative, hateful background my ex probably also had similar trauma surrounding cleanliness which was often tied to spirituality or self-worth for really fucked up reasons which have nothing actually to do with spirituality or self-worth, and unable to resolve such trauma in himself behaved exactly as was modeled for him which was to blame others for their vulnerabilities and exploit them for your own control behaviors.

Much of the anxiety which occurs surrounding cleaning can also be caused by other issues that aren’t related to cleaning at all. For instance, I realized a while ago that my anxiety about world affairs, political instability, and the persecution of minorities was a major distraction that was keeping me from cleaning. When we have fears and anxiety, whether they are rational or not, they can simply take up so much of our emotional and mental strength that we then have no space, time, or energy to devote to more mundane tasks like cleaning. The inventory therapy I developed in my book, The Perfect Child, helped me to overcome the great majority of my trauma which caused problems of this kind (it is also in FPC, albeit less thorough and TPC is specifically focused on childhood and experiential trauma, self esteem, and psychological health). Sometimes there are very deeply buried fears and trauma which require repeated exploration with this therapy, such as fear of government, persecution, financial instability, employers, loss, etc., because they can be so complex it is difficult to understand them through mere conscious reflection let alone actually resolve them. Agoraphobia and cleanliness were two that took me a few years of work before I was fully able to understand why it was such a problem, especially because it was other issues like fear of discrimination, social injustice, and financial instability which were getting in the way of me cleaning my house which had nothing to do with cleaning.

The opportunistic abuse of others using things like cleanliness is widespread and heinous, and people even use God as ammunition to abuse others about being clean. The phrase ‘cleanliness is next to Godliness’ is actually totally bullshit. God loves us even when we are messy and don’t, won’t, or can’t clean. It could be argued that God has more empathy for those who struggle with anxieties which originate from trauma, unlike the assholes who use such idiotic and callous catchphrases and the deficit of self esteem which is the reason why some of us find it difficult to clean. God is not vindictive nor petty, and is NOT the originator of that phrase, which instead was created by neurotic, narcissistic, and opportunistic abusers who probably also beat or shame their kids over meaningless things like messes.

Being angry over messes is NOT a virtue, but it does demonstrate an absence of patience, caring, compassion, and kindness, even for ourselves, all of which are actually Godly traits. At the root of anxiety about cleanliness is a lack of compassion for ourselves demonstrated by those who raised us who used things like cleanliness as an excuse to use children as emotional punching bags, and so when we are confronted by a mess, especially our own, we having been taught to withhold compassion for ourselves and thusly repeat this behavior to ourselves, albeit unconsciously, because of the way that trauma and abuse molds the human psyche. We often try to cope with this trauma by trying our best, trying to be disciplined, setting goals, and to change our behavior and move on in our lives. But in reality this simply ignores our trauma and our abuse, because we do not have the tools to actually resolve it, which gives it power over us and so it never changes because we never learn how to heal, which being disciplined cannot accomplish and instead is done through practices like inventory therapy.

It is actually okay not to clean. Contrary to what opportunistic abusers have taught us, there is actually nothing wrong with messes. Very often too a mess can make lonely people feel like there are other people in the home—a little bit of chaos that would normally come from the presence of others. Having compassion for ourselves and our anxieties should instead be our default, because self-compassion is first required to overcome these kinds of emotional trauma which get in the way of healthy adult behaviors and the reason for our inability to clean in the first place. The inventory therapy outlined in my book is a step-by-step guide and practice which purposefully accomplishes the healing of such experiences of abuse and trauma through finding compassion for ourselves, afterward which comes real confidence and competence in being an adult and ability to meet life’s challenges, because life really is hard and many of us were not equipped with healthy skills and tools to handle adulting. It is entirely possible to learn them, but not through discipline or willpower, which is instead found through self-compassion and self-care.

If you feel like not cleaning makes you a bad, you may like to know that You’re Not A Bad Person. Conditions like Chronic back pain can also impair our ability to care for ourselves. Even though things can seem stressful and depressing, joy is everywhere and we can thrive if we learn how to look for it. There is a new video on my YouTube channel for instruction on doing inventory therapy such as is described in my books.