The Secret Lives of Hoarders: True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter (6 page)

As we've discovered before, a trash hoarder's piles are as revealing as an archaeological dig. At the bottom are the possessions that may at one time have had some value: clothing, books, toys, household items, and collectibles. Then there are the junk mail, old magazines, and other printed papers that date the point when the hoarder gave up. The top layer is just trash of every sort.

A
t just over six feet tall, with long blond hair, Candace, fifty-nine, was an imposing figure. She had been a well-paid advertising executive who had also taught classes on marketing at the university near her upscale neighborhood. She confided that money wasn't an issue for her as she'd invested well and was able to retire from both her advertising job and teaching.

But years before Clutter Cleaner came into her life, Candace had slipped into horrible living conditions. In her house, my crew and I were faced with heaps of papers, clothes, books, and trash in every room, all but burying what I came to discover was a lot of fine antique furniture. One bedroom was so completely filled with junk that the door would barely open. Extension cords crisscrossed the rooms because the electrical outlets had been blocked ages ago. And the whole house reeked of dog feces and urine.

Candace hadn't been a lifelong hoarder, but a difficult divorce followed immediately by her mother's death sent her into a tailspin. She started drinking heavily—and the years of self-abuse were starting to show on her face—and in the way she lived.

Her mother had left everything to Candace, who took her mother's possessions into her own home but hadn't bothered to sort, give away, or discard anything.

And the more she drank, the less she cared about keeping a clean house. She started to fall behind on simple daily tasks like sorting through mail, taking the dogs out, or getting rid of old clothes. As a person who had been used to being on top of everything, she felt her frustration turn into depression and exacerbate what was already becoming an untenable living situation.

There were clear signs that Candace had obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Under the piles of things in her house were shelves and storage bins that had been put into place at one time to control clutter. Her framed pictures and other knickknacks were neatly labeled with notes on the back or underneath explaining what they were and who they came from. Her dresser drawers were marked “darks” and “whites” for her clothes.

Even her squalor was OCD. Although the dogs were going to the bathroom in the house, Candace had limited them to two rooms. Her piles were organized into categories—books, clothes, papers. The house was a mess, and whatever earlier attempts she had made to stay in control had been all but abandoned.

Candace admitted that once she fell behind on her organization, she
really
fell behind. She couldn't accept the middle ground of mild, occasional clutter that most people live in. For Candace, everything was black or white, just like the labels for her clothing. A house that had once been so precisely organized and labeled was now an out-and-out disaster area. She had simply given up the struggle.

Like almost every hoarder with whom I've worked, Candace also showed signs of what I now know to be clinical depression: She didn't smile or make eye contact; her voice was flat, without any affect. She admitted that she had trouble getting out of bed in the morning and struggled to make simple decisions.

Candace was clearly an intelligent woman. At one time she had enjoyed spending time with her family and friends, but her social life had tapered off years ago. She seemed to have made a choice: A house full of clutter with its piles of clothes, books, and papers was more important than living what would be by most people's standards a normal life that included family and friends, hobbies and pastimes, entertainment and travel.

Those frustrated family and friends, who mostly find themselves excluded from a hoarder's life, may wonder why their loved one can't just throw away those ten years' worth of newspapers piled up in the garage, the piles of old and never-before-worn clothes, or the junk that seems to grow organically in every corner. Wouldn't a sane person just recycle, toss, or give away this stuff—and move on?

But while a hoarder may not be certifiable, his or her brain does work differently. Hoarding specialist Dr. Renae Reinardy often compares hoarders to parents with dyslexia who wish to read bedtime stories to their children, but no matter how desperately they want to do it, their brains simply will not cooperate.

I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, although I do work alongside therapists and other health care professionals with many of my clients. But one learns a lot about a person in such intimate circumstances as a cleanup. I've found that it is important not only to help the hoarders get rid of stuff, but also to really talk with them—swapping stories and sharing experiences as we do the cleaning. The issues, both physical and psychological, they are wrestling with quickly become clear during this process.

I've learned that most hoarders love their families deeply and long to reestablish lost or strained relationships. Hoarders are truly in pain from losing their connection with loved ones—and the world at large. Ironically, the only way they see to ease that pain is to literally and figuratively bury themselves more deeply.

The more time I spend with hoarders, the more I wonder what propels them down this path. Everyone has issues. Bad things happen. The clues to why people hoard are not so simple or straightforward to decipher but may be discovered in the complex interaction of personality and circumstances, in an individual's ability to respond to life events in a certain way, in genetics, or in more serious psychiatric issues that manifest themselves in classic hoarding behavior.

One thing that has become fairly obvious to me when I work with clients and their families is the likelihood that the hoarder is not the only one with an issue. As with other medical and psychological conditions, there's much discussion concerning the genetic roots of hoarding. And if my experiences and observations have shown me anything, it's that hoarding—like blue eyes or curly hair—can be a family trait.

One of my clients, Pat, had the help of her mother during her cleanup. Pat and her mother, who were both overweight and wore similar sweat suits with lots of gold jewelry, looked more like sisters than mother and daughter. They even bickered like sisters. Every time Pat chose an item to donate or throw away, her mother would move in and say something like, “That's nice, maybe we should keep that.” By the end of the first day, Pat's mother had loaded her own car and had even more of Pat's castoffs in a pile by the front door. Pat told me that her mother's hoarding problem was even worse than her own, which is something I hear all the time: “If you think this is bad, you should see my mother/grandfather/aunt!”

A report published in
Behavior Research and Therapy
found that hoarding appears to run in some families where OCD is also present. And a study done at the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders Clinic at the University of California in 2009 found that up to 85 percent of people who are compulsive hoarders have a close relative who is or was also a hoarder. A Johns Hopkins study found significant linkage to compulsive hoarding on chromosome 14 in families with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

It's not surprising that as I've dug into my clients' backgrounds I've discovered a pattern of hoarding along with other family traits.

While there are clearly links to other mental disorders, several of which I'll discuss later in this chapter, from my observations it seems that every hoarder has had an event, or series of events, that either marked the start of that person's hoarding or made an already established hoarding habit much worse.

All of us face challenges in life. Divorce, death, job loss, relationship breakups, or medical issues—those are some of the hardest things anyone can go through. For hoarders, there are many common themes, the most compelling of which is abuse.

Roxanne, who had kept all of her grown daughter's stuff from the time she was an infant, is a not uncommon case. As Roxanne and I worked through cleaning out her spare rooms, she shared with me that she had been abused as a child. Roxanne realized that by saving her daughter's things, she felt like she was preserving and protecting her daughter's childhood. She was really trying to find a childhood that she never had. She didn't understand that hoarding her daughter's possessions had actually pushed her daughter out of her life.