Hoarding and Overspending: When Your Stuff Emotionally Blackmails You

 Money is a tool to be ruled. A system to serve, not to rule you. When your mind is impulsing you to

get something ask yourself who is in charge, and who is giving the orders. Take back command. Run your castle smoothly, let it serve you. When you become a servant to it's desires, it's idolatry. And a  fine line.

If your stuff stops you from doing what you want, ask yourself what benefit does it give you daily? It could be holding you back without giving anything in return, or taking more effort to maintain it than the value it gives you as a tool. And when that object wants you to hold on to it because you wouldn't love it otherwise; it's emotional blackmail. 

The definiton of emotional blackmail from the general internet is

"Emotional blackmail is a form of psychological manipulation, employing a mixture of threats, appeals and emotionally punitive behavior to control an intimate. It may occur between parents and children, husbands and wives, siblings or close friends.

 Emotional blackmail - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia"

 I often hear threats from the objects of my desire that I can't do without it, that I would love this memory less if I got rid of x thing, as if I didn't value it. But that single memory of something, that is over and done with, is holding me back from my future. You cannot live in the past and make a
difference to the world. You can hold on to a memory without the object from the past taking up your present.

When I'm shopping, the impulse to buy something is very strong, for so many reasons. It could be threatening me that I don't value X if I don't "invest" in it. But like I told my brother, "Why invest in an oar if the boat won't float?"

Your impulses are emotional reactions to a situation of something you like. In any relationship, our first reaction to someone may not reflect our priorities with them. We love them, but we want to yell at them. So our impulses react to "cool new stuff" without really reflecting our goals and interests. Experience the feeling, appreciate the cool new thing for being interesting, and put it down.

"If you can appreciate something without the need to 

possess it, the world is yours."

            I have had so much stuff that I didn't have a place to sit. The piles of stuff were literally taking over my throne. I had to move it to have a place to sit. That's when I was serving the stuff. Sometimes I have to get rid of things that I paid a bit for, because holding on to it was taking up more effort than the actual project. So I have thrown out canvases with failed paintings, not because I can't salvage them, but because it's not worth my time.

  I've had enough of overspending and impulse buying to the point where I've become irresponsible. So I asked God to change me from the inside out; no new accounting systems, or banking programs. I know I'm too ADHD to stick to any new plan for longer than a few days. But being changed is something else. So this is what God told me.