The Downsizing Cover-up

For years, those of us in senior move management have talked about the difficulty of downsizing one’s home, and how sorting through belongings that have accumulated over decades unleashes memories. Making decisions and letting go of the past is hard. But recently, I have begun to see the angst of downsizing as something else.

More and more, my clients are talking about their deeper fears of moving. Will I be happy? Am I doing the right thing? Will I be able to make friends? How will I deal with change? These are deep feelings—so deep that many people are unable to articulate them to themselves or to others. It’s much easier to transfer this anxiety to concrete objects such as our possessions, and make those objects the focus of our moving angst.

I wonder if we wouldn’t be more successful in helping our clients downsize if we facilitated their talking about the fears that lie beneath the surface, and not dismissing their concerns or blithely assuring them that “everything will be all right.” What if we just offered empathetic listening, allowing them to feel truly heard? I think we would find that our clients are far wiser than we suspect, that beneath their fears of change, they really do believe the move is the right thing to do. They just need to talk about it, at the deepest level. And once they do, once we remove the “downsizing cover-up,” I believe the decisions about china, towels, clothes and bric-a-brac will all be much easier, because the burden of anxiety that weighed them down has been alleviated.

Posted in Downsizing How-to's, Downsizing Your Home, Senior Moving Solutions