Read The Secret Lives of Hoarders: True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter Online

Authors: Matt Paxton,Phaedra Hise

Tags: #General, #United States, #Psychology, #Case Studies, #Psychopathology, #Compulsive Behavior, #Compulsive Hoarding - United States, #Compulsive Hoarding, #Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

The Secret Lives of Hoarders: True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter (5 page)

BOOK: The Secret Lives of Hoarders: True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter
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Marcie just couldn't pass up a good bargain. She got a real “high” from the hunt-and-purchase process and couldn't stand the thought of a good sale item going to waste. She appreciated the value of that sale item and felt smart for grabbing it.
There's a reason why shopping has become what's called “retail therapy.” When Marcie bought yet another dress for her three-year-old granddaughter, who already had way too many dresses, Marcie wasn't thinking about the dress. She was thinking about the granddaughter: how cute she was, how she would love the dress and smile lovingly at her grandmother with those big dimples. Marcie might have been thinking about how she would have loved to have had a dress like that when she was three. And she was thinking that maybe her family would love her again if she gave the beautiful dress to the granddaughter.
In this case, the dress is really a stand-in for human interaction. And in fact, the dress probably won't ever get to the child. It will go on top of the pile of other shopping bags filled with gifts. Once Marcie got home, the rush was over, and she didn't follow through.
This high is just like what a junkie feels when doing drugs. Marcie was replacing deep-seated negative memories with short-term positive feelings through consumption. But the quick hit of happiness she got from buying would never fix the sadness from the past. The shopping high was enough to get Marcie through an afternoon, or maybe even a day. But that's the scariest part of hoarding—the deeper someone like Marcie gets into it, the more often that person needs a shopping-happiness boost.
▶
The Do-It-Yourselfer
Lucy was a crafter whose rooms were filled with four-foot-high piles of yarn, fabric, candy-making molds, Wilton cake pans, and baking accessories—and only narrow passageways gave her access through the house. Until she retired a couple of years earlier, she was an accountant, but her real love was making fancy cakes on commission from her friends and coworkers for birthdays and holidays. She was also a master maker of crocheted blankets and handmade holiday ornaments. When we met up with Lucy, her house was clean, just packed with unlimited craft supplies.
With her short hair styled and colored, decked out in matching pants and sweater sets, Lucy had lots of energy and was so engaged in many interests that she belied her seventy-one years. In spite of the clutter in her house, she didn't fit neatly into the Stage 2 hoarder profile. Lucy's daughter had called us for help, and Lucy agreed to have us clean. She was very personable and seemed genuinely happy to have our cleaning crew come to her house. When we arrived, she was thumbing through a pile of craft magazines and talking about the afghans she still intended to make. (I call these the “fixing to's,” as in “I'm fixing to make that blanket.”)
We sorted through her craft items and discovered that she had at least fifty cake pans and more than nine hundred rolls of yarn. She used about eighteen rolls of yarn to make each blanket, which took her about three months to crochet. At that rate, if she never bought yarn again, it would take her
twelve and a half years
to use up all that yarn. Of course, that doesn't account for the time needed for making cakes and other crafts, or for new hobbies or pastimes.
Do-it-yourselfers are distinguished from other hoarders by the emphasis they put on
future plans
. It sounds reasonable that a crafter would need a good supply of fabric or yarn, or a hobby mechanic would need a load of spare parts. Most DIYers buy ahead—on sale or when supplies like used parts become available. But the crafters and hobbyists who slip into hoarding are generally suffering from the “fixing to” blues.
While DIY work is rewarding, and it's exciting to try lots of different things in life, at a certain point there's just not enough time to do everything. Mechanics can easily turn into hoarders as they collect parts and cars that they plan to restore. One car project is enough to keep anyone busy for a long time, and in the meantime a hoarder's collection of items for future projects grows and grows. These hoarders are usually unable to focus on completing a project because they are distracted by plans for so many others.
Craft hoarders are usually very talented and receive a lot of compliments on what they make. Lucy's cakes were amazing, and she got a lot of positive reinforcement for that, which made it easier to justify collecting her pans and decorating supplies.
At some point, DIY hoarders switch from focusing on the actual compliments to
perceived
compliments. Those are the compliments that they know they will get when they finish a project. They skip right over the step of actually making anything and instead just collect supplies and give themselves lots of positive reinforcement with those imagined compliments.
After retirement, Lucy wasn't making cakes anymore. But she continued buying pans and accessories. The mind game in which she was engaged made it very difficult for her to part with her baking tools, for example, because letting those go meant giving up the anticipated rewards—by way of compliments and recognition—that she hoped to get, no matter how unrealistic her expectations might have been.
▶
The Collector
Jackson, a tall, muscular, and well-dressed man in his late thirties, always made eye contact when he talked, a skill that he used effectively in his job as a city social worker. To the outside world, Jackson seemed confident and successful.
At home, Jackson hid an obsession with the rock group Blondie. His memorabilia collection had begun to overflow from his two spare rooms into the entire house. Jackson had spent years buying Blondie items at auctions and online, including T-shirts, ticket stubs, albums and CDs, DVDs, posters, pins, and signed prints.
Blondie represented a time for him when he was young, carefree, and happy. But in his attempt to hang on to that time of his life, his mania had taken over his spare time and space. He was living in the past, and wasn't free to explore happiness in the present.
Like many hoarder collectors, Jackson rationalized that there was real value in this memorabilia aside from its emotional value. But it is rarely the real value of the stuff that makes collectors flip into hoarders.
Most famously, William Randolph Hearst was a hoarder obsessed with collectibles. Certainly his vast collections of art, antiques, and furniture that filled his beautiful mansion in San Simeon, California, were valuable. But he collected so much that the overflow went into storage, never to be seen again after he purchased it. Today San Simeon is a museum, with so much to see in the rotating exhibitions that there are five different tours.
▶
The Food Saver
Janelle had a kitchen full of cans that were twenty years old. She guessed that her refrigerator hadn't been opened in sixteen years—there was too much clutter stacked up in front of it. As soon as we cracked it open, two of my workers started vomiting.
The bins and drawers were full of dark liquid and two inches of green black muck that had once been lettuce. We found black eggs, which at first we thought were carved stone eggs. The food was so moldy that it had all grown together into one gnarly mess.
On the pantry shelves, a lot of the cans were empty. When we looked at them closely we discovered holes gnawed in the bottom. (Rats can get into a can, and once they're in, they'll clean it out. And because they'll stay in a house until there's no food left, Janelle, like most food hoarders, had a severe vermin problem.)
In her mid-sixties, Janelle had raised a family of five boys, all of whom had long since grown and moved away. Her husband had died several years ago, but Janelle was still shopping for bulk food bargains. Her habit continued to spiral out of control, even after her kitchen became all but unusable because of the clutter.
Food hoarders are some of the most reluctant to admit they have a problem. They are often very defensive, arguing that it's not a big deal. Maybe that's because everyone eats, so a food hoarder seems to be collecting something “sensible” that anyone would want.
Food hoarding is exacerbated because hoarders are big on buying food very close to or past its expiration date. Their excuse is that marketers just make up those dates to get customers to buy more food. Even when the cans on Janelle's shelf were bulging, she sometimes ate the contents anyway because she figured the food was safe after it had been cooked. Not surprisingly, her sons were becoming increasingly worried about her health.
The more I work with food hoarders, the more I think their problem may come from a mentality that has something to do with “beating the system.” Janelle, for example, took pride in her individuality, and valued her independence. Ignoring food expiration dates was an easy way for her to rebel against authority.
Food hoarders are in hard-core denial, although when confronted they tend to be more embarrassed than pack-rat hoarders because food hoarding is just so messy. Interestingly, it has been my observation that food hoarding prompts more family fights than any other kind.
▶
The Clothes Hoarder
Nika is typical of a major subset of hoarders—she couldn't get rid of any clothes. She was a carefully groomed, fortyfive-year-old plus-size woman whose weight had fluctuated pretty regularly as she yo-yoed on and off various diets. When she was heavy, she kept her “skinny” clothes because she was convinced that she would lose weight. When she was lighter, she stored her “fat” clothes—just in case. She kept really old clothes because she thought they might come back into style. She even had a cache of clothes, many of which were barely used or even unworn, because she was planning to donate them to charity—when she got around to it.
Nika had clothes stored in the bathroom, where the shower curtain rod had long ago turned the tub into an extra closet. She had so many shoes that they were stored in every room,
in their original boxes
. She had a collection of more than five hundred purses that she couldn't even get to because they were all buried under bags of clothes. In fact, what Nika had was the Great Wall of Clothes, stacked so high and so solidly that it would have held up the ceiling if the house's support beams ever gave out.
For Nika, having a house full of stuff meant she had “made it.” Her husband, Andre, didn't agree. And even though the two lived together, Nika admitted that they barely talked. Her hoarding had all but driven him away.
Like many clothes hoarders, Nika had also fallen victim to television home shopping shows, buying the same item in many colors or sizes “just in case” she ran out. The UPS man knew her by name, and even arrived to deliver more packages during Nika's cleaning.
The predatory behaviors of these home shopping networks make it difficult for hoarders to avoid making purchases. The sales techniques target compulsive shoppers in the most insidious ways. For example, they call viewers “friends” and invite them to take advantage of special “insider” opportunities, which appeals to an isolated hoarder's need for friendship and connection. Hoarders like Nika make a choice to buy things, and they are responsible for their actions, but television shopping tactics create a particular challenge that's hard to overcome.
▶
The Memory Keeper
Roxanne lived alone in a trailer home, spending most of her day in dirty sweat suits, sitting in a recliner and chain smoking. She wore her brown hair in a long braid down her back. Her skin was sallow from a liver ailment, and she coughed constantly. Roxanne's adult daughter hadn't been to visit in almost a decade. Roxanne was completely alone—no family, no friends, and no close neighbors. Roxanne didn't have any real relationships, but she did have lots of reminders of her past: She had saved almost every item from her daughter's childhood.
There were two rooms filled five feet high with her daughter's dolls, toys, crafts, and clothes. Roxanne had strollers, a crib, and other old baby equipment that she was convinced her daughter might use one day for her own kids. Roxanne kept saying that her daughter was coming back to pick her things up, but the truth was that her daughter wasn't coming back. In fact, her daughter told us that she'd been happy when she was finally able to move out of that cluttered house and was so fed up with her mother's hoarding that she hadn't returned in ten years.
Hoarders who focus on toys and other childhood possessions are caught up in the past, either their children's or their own, or both. This can spill over into shopping hoarding, but these hoarders aren't buying for themselves; rather, their shopping is usually in an attempt to create memories by buying lots of baby clothes or toddler games for a nephew or grandchild. Curiously, much of what they end up buying is not age-appropriate, in what seems to be an unconscious effort to stop time. And, as in the case of Marcie, the shopaholic, many of the gifts never actually make it to the children but end up added to the piles.
▶
The Trash Master Compactor
Although Margaret is primarily an animal hoarder, she also hoarded trash. She was so overwhelmed that she never got around to taking all the junk to the dump. (Living as she did in a rural community, there was no regular trash pickup even if she'd had the wherewithal to get garbage to the curb.) Instead, the bags piled up around the house or got tossed out into the backyard. For longer than one cared to imagine, food wrappers and a lot of the other trash had just been tossed on the floor and walked on until it became a thick layer of sticky brown muck.
Margaret never consciously decided to save trash. She just fell behind in dealing with it—then got to the point where she gave up caring. Trash hoarding is usually a side effect of hoarding something else.
Information hoarders like Rick can also look like they are hoarding trash, because much of what they hang on to is junk mail or old newspapers. But to Rick, those items have value. Also, hoarders often keep items like paper towel tubes or plastic bags to donate or recycle, and big collections of these can look like trash to non-hoarders.
BOOK: The Secret Lives of Hoarders: True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter
5.69Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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