I was walking my dog early in December. I noticed a very sad Jack-o-lantern sitting on the front porch of a home in our neighborhood. It appeared moldy and its Halloween grin had become a collapsed grimace. This pumpkin had been carved as a part of a family’s Halloween celebration, and the children in that home had probably been delighted with their Jack-o-lantern. But cherished as it may have been on Halloween night, the time had come weeks ago for that pumpkin to be thrown away.

The moldy Jack-o-lantern got me thinking about the issue of keeping and throwing away. How can I decide reasonably what to keep and what to discard? What am I hanging onto that should have been thrown away long ago? I regularly face keep/discard decisions when I am in a de-cluttering, organizing, cleaning-out mode, dealing with all the stuff that sits on shelves and in boxes, in closets, the attic, basement, and garage. It feels like a minor victory every time I carry a box of seldom/never-used items out of the house, to be contributed, recycled, or discarded.

When I am in a reflective mood, I face keep/discard decisions about more important, less tangible parts of my life. I ponder my life and the choices I have made on New Year’s Day, on my birthday, or in a season of preparation for an important religious holiday. Which of my habits are good and should be kept? Which parts of my character are negative and should be discarded? Which of the traditions I inherited from my family should I honor and preserve for future generations? Which errors of the past should I let go?

My clients find that a part of the work of counseling is a similar process. They need to identify and make choices about the parts of their lives that caused them enough distress for them to seek help. Perhaps they recognized that some people find life to be more pleasant or achieve more success than they do. Or, they found themselves in pain, physical or emotional, and want relief. Or, they did what seemed right, or necessary, or fun, and people close to them responded negatively.

As clients join with counselors in therapy, we seek to understand the deeper meanings of these unhappy experiences. Clients explore the influences of the past and the present-day situations that contribute to their uncomfortable feelings and unfortunate choices. They identify personal strengths and weaknesses, good and bad formative experiences in their families, positive and negative aspects of their current life experiences, and their character traits that work well or badly.

Even before the problems are completely identified or the underlying factors fully understood, clients start to make keep/discard decisions about what is working in their lives and could be strengthened, and what needs to be discarded to make room for new behaviors and responses.

Depressed clients learn what makes them feel better or worse. Many of them decide that they must keep every chance to exercise, even when they don’t have much energy. They must discard thought habits of pessimism and negativity.

Anxious clients learn what triggers their anxiety and panic attacks. They often decide to keep and cherish moments when they can relax. They discard useless worrying and exhausting hypervigilance.

As clients in individual therapy learn more about keeping the positives and discarding the negatives, they find themselves less burdened by symptoms, their mood brightens, and they begin to vision a future in which they can enjoy life more fully.

Couples in marital therapy go through the same process on another, interpersonal level. We are all taught about being married when as little children we observe the behavior of married adults. Children in those formative years are uncritical as they absorb information about what husbands and wives do and say and feel. Years later when we get married, that ceremony changes us from boyfriend and girlfriend to husband and wife. We reach back into our childhood experiences, and in many ways we behave as spouses based on the lessons we were taught.

Some of those traditions about marriage work well, and we thank our parents and other influential adults for their example. Others ways of behaving as a husband or wife don’t work at all, even though they come naturally and “feel like home.”

If a couple’s distress becomes acute or their affection withers over time, work with a counselor consists of identifying their strengths, so they can keep and enhance those parts of their life together. And, admitting their negative behaviors that have diminished their love, they discard them and choose new ways to rekindle their romance and strengthen their partnership.

Keep/discard decisions are not easy. It feels disloyal to admit that a keepsake is really just junk, or that a tradition no longer works. It takes attention to notice a moldy pumpkin, and it takes energy to put it in the trash. But if we don’t do the work of making keep/discard decisions, about our stuff and about our lives, we will find ourselves burdened with things we don’t use and a way of life that doesn’t work.