How to Get Over Your Messy-House Shame

Scrolling through social media, with its carefully curated images of beautiful, clutter-free living spaces, often has the effect of making you feel inadequate about your own home. Whether it’s the dishes in the kitchen sink, the piles of laundry you can never quite find the time to put away, or the scattered toys you keep nagging your kids to pick up, there can be a wide chasm between the picture-perfect images you see on social media and the chaotic reality of your own life.

Although it can be all too easy to devolve into feelings of inadequacy or shame—or to think that messiness is somehow a reflection of who you are as a person—there is a different, more functional ways of thinking about the value of a clean home that can help combat some of these feelings.

Cleaning is morally neutral 

As KC Davis, a licensed professional therapist and author of the book How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing, often reminds people, you should think of cleaning as being morally neutral. She doesn’t mean that it’s not important or that it isn’t helpful to have a clean space, but that the cleanliness of your house is not a reflection of your value, accomplishments, or struggles as a person.

For people who always have a clean home, “all that tells you about them is that they keep a beautiful home all the time,” Davis said. It doesn’t tell you anything about their mental health status, their successes, or their major struggles in life. It just tells you that they prioritize cleaning.

Removing some of these moral judgments about cleaning can help get rid of these feelings of shame and inadequacy. A clean home is just that: A clean home. It’s not a reflection of how good or bad you are as a person, and it has no bearing on your other accomplishments.

People deserve a home that functions for them 

Rather than ascribing a moral value to cleaning your home, Davis emphasizes approaching cleaning as being something that is meant to help you live a more functional life, rather than be a reflection of who you are. “You don’t exist to serve your house, your house exists to serve you,” Davis said. In practice, this means approaching organization and cleaning tasks with the mindset of making your space functional for your needs, rather than focusing on what it looks like.

Once this is the case, “then you can start thinking about ways of making your home functional for your brain or body,” Davis said. For people who have limited mobility, or who struggle with executive functioning, this can mean organizing your home in a way that allows you to reach everything you need, or to remember where everything is.

For Davis, she found herself getting frustrated by constantly needing to go upstairs to get a number of items, so she designed a server station in her living room, with containers for clean and dirty laundry, outdoor clothes, and diapers. By doing this, she no longer has to constantly go up and down the stairs to fetch various items.

For other people, this may mean prioritizing easy-to-clean surfaces, or putting important items within easy reach, or having everything clearly visible, rather than hidden away in drawers. “You deserve accommodations in your home that allow you to function,” Davis said.