Hoarding Disorder (Part 2)

It was an eye-opener to me when I realized that hoarding disorder can affect any and all ages, sizes, nationalities, and income classes. Some of the symptoms of compulsive hoarding and clutter hoarding are universal, while other nuances of the condition can vary from person to person. There really is no blanket diagnosis that you can set over people where they can fulfill a certain number of symptoms on a checklist, and therefore they have this or that type of obsessive compulsive behavior. No, hoarding is more extreme in one person than it might be in another, and people have varying degrees of attachment to various types of objects. Some people have no problem throwing away old utility bills or receipts from various purchases, while others wouldn’t dare to even think that way. And the same people that may have no issue throwing away financial records would freak out if you asked them to throw away their birthday card collection that they’ve had for 20 years. It’s amazing how much stuff we THINK we need, but the truth is, there’s so much occupying our minds on a daily basis that all the things we’re “saving” for some future time when we supposedly are going to sit down and go through all of our clutter to reminisce or be nostalgic about this or that memory that these items are attached to, in actuality, we’ll probably never look at again. And even if we know that we won’t look at most of those items ever again, we still keep them based on this abstract fantasy that someday we’ll have all the time in the world to actually sort through all that stuff. I’m slowly coming to a reality check that, while spending my time going through old items and enjoying the fond memories of all that they represent sounds great, with a wife & two children, a full-time job, and probably way too much time on the computer, I doubt I’ll EVER actually have the time to fulfill that wish.

I was watching “60 Minutes” this past Sunday, and I almost fell out of my chair when I saw the legend himself, Andy Rooney, talking about his own idiosyncrasies where clutter hoarding is concerned. He was talking about how he keeps old appointment books, old files of things that he intends on reading (article clippings from magazines, etc.), and other “piles-o-files” that he admitted himself he’ll never actually do anything with. I laughed to myself, and my wife said “Sounds familiar?” (trust me, she’s well acquainted with my hoarding tendencies). He said something to the effect that even though he knows he’ll probably never do anything with those stacks of papers and files, it just feels comforting to have them around. I know exactly what he’s talking about. Some people are so tied to their stuff that they have their identity wrapped up in their possessions, and for them to throw away their stuff, it’s almost like every piece they discard is also throwing away a piece of themselves. Even though I have been negatively affected by hoarding disorder, I can be objective enough to step back and say that this is some pretty fascinating stuff.

Hoarding Help

Today I came across a fascinating news story about hoarding disorder that really startled me, intrigued me, and at the same time saddened me. It was a recent news story (January of this year) according to the Sun, a very popular UK newspaper, about a man named Gordon Stewart, 74, who literally died of malnutrition in a maze of his own clutter. He lived in Broughton, Bucks, and evidently was a pretty peaceful citizen who didn’t really bother anybody, and that may have been one of the reasons why nobody even knew about the incident until too late. He piled trash so high in all of the rooms of his house that he literally created a labyrinth of trash that he eventually had to learn how to navigate around in order to get through his house. Trash, papers, old electronics parts, etc. were piled from floor to ceiling in this gentleman’s home, and evidently it got to the point to where he couldn’t even figure out his own way around the maze, so he died of dehydration. The newspaper called him a “human mole”, because he literally had to BURROW his way through tunnels of garbage to get from one room to the next.

This is an astounding thing in my mind, and it got me thinking about my own (much milder) struggles with compulsive hoarding, and why in the heck this condition even exists. From what I understand based on the news article, Mr. Stewart had no next of kin, was an elderly man, and was somewhat eccentric and reclusive. I guess you could call him a “loner” of sorts. What I started thinking was that a person who is a loner and has little to no contact with other human beings can become susceptible to these types of impulses because deep down, they do desire human companionship. But maybe due to insecurities, bad experiences with people, lack of trust in people in general, or a host of other psychological issues, they push people away and opt for clutter to be their companion instead. Basically, the clutter becomes their “companion” in a weird sort of way. It gives them a sense of security and comfort, knowing that if they don’t have another human being to rely on in this world, they have their clutter to “insulate” them from the realities of life. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an expert on the psychology of hoarding, but this is just an observation I’ve been mulling around in my head for quite a while. All in all, that was a very sad story.

As to the causes of hoarding disorder, they can be as varied as the people that suffer from the condition. One thing I’ve seen pretty much across the board is that hoarders suffer with issues of safety and security. They feel “exposed” without their clutter, almost like an agorophobe feels vulnerable in open spaces. I noticed in my own life that I would get this extremely insecure and anxious feeling any time I would walk in a very open space where there was a lot of distance between me and anything else, such as certain areas of shopping malls that are out in the open. I would feel like I needed to find something to hold onto. I know it sounds weird, but it’s true. This same feeling of vulnerability or lack of security is probably one of the roots to the hoarding symptoms I’ve dealt with. I can say that even as a young child I just remember that the more “clutter” I surrounded myself with (stuffed animals, toys, etc.), the more safe & secure I felt. I remember many times I would even take all my toys out of the toy box, lay on the floor or on the bed, and then pile all of them up around me and on top of me, and once I was done, it felt good to be surrounded by all that junk. LOL.

So for those who are seeking help with hoarding, I would say that the first step is to examine your own sense of security. Do you feel unsafe without being surrounded by a lot of stuff? Just some food for thought…

Clutter Hoarding

Accumulating stuff that has little intrinsic value and then assigning it a disproportionate amount of value is one major symptom of clutter hoarding. One of the worst ones for me was keeping practically every birthday card, Christmas card, Thanksgiving card, and any other type of card that anyone had ever given me, even if it was for a birthday that I had 10 years ago. I always felt guilty at even the thought of throwing those cards away, so I had a shoebox full of cards from over the years. This is yet another symptom of a hoarder; they attach such a sentimental value to everything that they feel it would be doing the giver of a gift an injustice if they were to throw it away, even long after the usefulness of the gift was obsolete. This attachment of “sentimental value” actually runs pretty deep; it’s a way to preserve your sense of sameness and normalness, and is actually an offshoot of the fear of the unknown. You’re afraid of letting go of things because of what they “mean” to you, and it’s always based in the past…it’s almost as if you believe that the way things were in the past is the best your life was ever going to be, so you want to keep the things that remind you of the past. You basically short-change yourself right out of believing that anything good (or even—gasp—BETTER) can happen to you in the future.

So in a sense, that old saying is true: “The human fear of losing something is greater than the human desire to have more.” This is an offshoot of a poverty mentality, one that says you have to hold on to everything you’ve got (or ever had), for fear that you may not get anything else like it again. That, my friends, is broke-minded thinking. A lot of what I’m learning about this hoarding disorder stuff is basically helping me to see how much my upbringing has had to do with my current state of living. Growing up, we never had anything more than just enough to stay afloat. There really was no such thing as having “disposable income” in our family; it was basically “Let’s rob Paul this month to pay Peter instead, since we owe him from last month.” So it was ingrained into me to hold on to whatever I had, because there may not be enough to make it next week. It’s really hard to let go of stuff when you’re not sure you’re going to see the likes of it again. This has obvious drawbacks, namely the fact that you’ll go into “hyper-accumulation” mode and not want to let go of ANYTHING. So, you begin to hoard and accumulate and clutter up your living space with all of these items that are basically worthless now, but will be “worth something” in the future (a little side note: That future date where these items all of a sudden gain in value by leaps & bounds never happens).

It’s amazing how as you go along, you begin to peel back layer after layer of this stupid hoarding disorder mentality, almost like an onion. I’m determined to eliminate the whole clutter hoarding way of thinking out of my mentality, and hopefully shed some light to help others along the way as well.

Hoarding Disorder

Well, this is my second post dealing with compulsive hoarding, and as I do more and more research, it’s amazing how much this condition has affected me without me even knowing it half the time. It’s amazing how you can see life through a “lens” of a sort, where you think that the way you think is just “normal”, when in fact it’s anything but. I have since learned that many of the thought habits and patterns I have developed have reeked of hoarding disorder and I never would have detected it, had I not started doing research on some of the symptoms of compulsive hoarding.

One of the most tell-tale symptoms (for me, anyway) is when you keep things that have little value, but in your mind you have trumped them up to have a great amount of value, even though everyone else can see that they’re nothing but junk. Or, you’ll begin accumulating certain things, claiming that you’re building a “collection” that you may believe may be “worth something someday”. Most of the stuff I ended up accumulating, man, it would be hard to find a buyer anywhere for that crap. I actually have a Hershey bar wrapper collection from the 1980’s. I have an Altoids tin collection. I had a collection of melted VCR tapes from when I worked in a videocassette production place…I’m not kidding you. By the way, I finally got the guts to throw those videocassettes away. All of this stuff is crap, and yet I would just collect it and collect it like it was gaining in value every year or something. The truth is, all it was doing was cluttering up my house and my mind.

I even had this stupid habit of keeping old pens that didn’t write anymore. Yep, I would just have a desk full of pens without caps that had dried up completely or just barely wrote at all. What did I think was going to happen? Was I expecting some kind of supernatural change? Were the pens going to resurrect one day and all of a sudden begin to start magically flowing with ink again? Freakin-A. I guess what I’m trying to say with all this is that hoarding disorder can cause you to see things in a distorted manner, and you don’t even realize that your perspective has been skewed.