An average woman, hounded by her housework, asked her therapist, what could she do about her fear and loathing of the unwashed dishes? The therapist came back with a surprising, simple answer. One which the woman was at first unable to digest…
Does this haunt your dreams?
Danielle Wunker, a Licensed Professional Counsellor and Supervisor, shared a story from her psych-otherapy experience that illustrates how worry about chores, recipe outcomes and other everyday kitchen-related issues can literally drive a person nuts…
It was extracted from a reply from Kate Scott on Quora to the question: “Has a therapist ever told you something completely unexpected?”
What’s eating you?
“When I was at one of my lowest (mental) points in life, I couldn’t get out of bed some days. I had no energy or motivation and was barely getting by. I had therapy once per week, and on this particular week I didn’t have much to ‘bring’ to the session. He asked how my week was and I really had nothing to say.”
“‘What are you struggling with?’ he asked. I gestured around me and said, ‘I dunno, man. Life.’ Not satisfied with my answer, he said, ‘No, what exactly are you worried about right now? What feels overwhelming? When you go home after this session, what issue will be staring at you?'”
The crux…
Scott felt silly saying so, but she knew full well what was aggravating her. Her pile of dirty dishes. Which she just KNEW wouldn’t come out of the dishwasher completely clean.
“It’s stupid, I know, but the more I look at them, the more I CAN’T do them,” she told her confessor. “Because I’ll have to scrub them before I put them in the dishwasher. Because the dishwasher sucks, and I just can’t stand and scrub the dishes.”
She began to explain to the therapist that the dishwasher maker says not to scrub the dishes before you put them in the machine.
The epiphany!
“Why the hell aren’t you supposed to? If you don’t want to scrub the dishes and your dishwasher sucks, run it twice. Run it three times, who cares? Rules do not exist.”
RULES DO NOT EXIST.
“It blew my mind in a way that I don’t think I can properly express,” Scott relates. “That day, I went home and tossed my smelly dishes haphazardly into the dishwasher and ran it three times. I felt like I had conquered a dragon.”
The takeaway
I can relate to Scott’s dilemma. And I’d love to feel the relief she says she did after her breakthrough therapy session. But I’m still some way away from mental and emotional freedom about the state of my life. And I get particularly freaked out when a recipe flops or the dishes get behind, because I’m making dirty ones, testing recipes, faster than I can washing them.
And when I’m in a ‘work’ frenzy, the rest of the housework gets behind. I keep thinking of the lament of Marvin, the paranoid android, in The Hitchhiker’ Guide To The Galaxy: “Life. Loathe it or despise it, you can’t get away from it…”
The main influences who dumped their rules on me are long gone: my mother-in-law 20 years ago, and my own Mom last year. But I’m still guilt-bound by their standards.
My take
Okay. I’ll admit I still have some work to do, freeing myself from my life’s arbitrary rules. But now I at least have a sense of how to go about it. Life’s too short to pre-wash dishes. I’m going right upstairs and running the dishwasher as many times as it takes to wash the guilt out of my soul…
~ Maggie J.