I cut myself in the kitchen last night with a paring knife.  Not a big deal (although my hand still throbs), but it made me think about a client experience that I had several years ago.  One that I don't think will ever leave me.

Before I became a professional stager, I was a professional organizer.  These two professions share a great synergy, and what I used to call professional organization is now known in the industry as "Staging for Living."  Regardless of what we choose to call it, it is all the same thing, and when we work with clients, we develop a relationship that often becomes far more involved than we as professionals would like.

As a professional organizer, I was called in to meet a client who needed me to get her grandchildren back.  Her son was separated and had moved back in with her.  He had two daughters by his estranged wife.  The wife didn't want the children in their grandmother's house because the house was a mess and borderline dangerous for small children.  Not borderline actually, way beyond the pale.  Enter me.  My purpose was to get things cleaned up so that when Child Protective Services did their inspection, they would find no reason to bar the children from visiting their grandmother.

This particular client was a month long project.  I was with her almost every day.  The clean-up was a monumental job, and we did it.  But spending that kind of time with a client, one is bound to get to know the client VERY well, and even become privy to details of a client's life that one doesn't really want to be privy to.  Strangely enough, being a professional organizer would be a dream come true for someone with voyeuristic tendencies.  However, the really good, successful professional organizers that I've known (and I hope to be part of this group) aren't voyeurs and make every attempt to learn as little about their client's inner lives as possible.

One particular day, in the kitchen, I found a plastic shoe box.  In the box were all kinds of sharp objects.  Knives, razors, awls, scissors, utility knives, folding knives and the like.  And the box was full to capacity.  I made an offhanded joke about sharp objects to my client.  We had been working together for a couple of weeks, and we had an easy rapport. She became very quiet, sat down and began to tell me the story of the box and its contents.

Her youngest son had been suicidal a few years prior.  The family had lost their eldest son to cancer when he was 22 (this was the first that I had heard of this; I had seen no evidence of another child in the house).  The youngest son had become suicidal, and my client had spent a year sleeping on the floor outside his bedroom so that he couldn't get out and do himself damage.  After about a year, the son's psychiatrist finally got the kid's medications right, and he was no longer in imminent danger.

Talk about a tailspin for me.  The lesson here is that when people's homes are truly a mess, there is usually an underlying reason.  Sometimes we find out what it is, sometimes we don't.  But we have to remain very sensitive to our client's lives, and especially to their inner lives.  They've invited us into their homes to do work on a very intimate level.  We have to acknowledge this, and we need to remain sensitive to it.