Stuff (13 page)

One of the worst experiences for someone with a hoarding problem occurs when another person or crew arrives to clear out the home, usually at the order of the public health department or a frustrated family member. It is easy for an observer to say that the hoarder is overreacting to someone discarding his or her stuff, since the piles seem like worthless trash. But because of the hoarder's difficulties with organization, the piles often contain much more than trash. In many such cases, the crew hired to clean will just scoop up the piles and cart them to the dump. But under the decades-old newspaper may be the title to the person's car or the diamond ring she lost years before. These scenarios almost always leave the hoarder feeling as if his or her most valued possessions have been taken away, which in fact may be the case. Beyond this, most hoarders have a sense of where things are amid the clutter. When someone else moves or discards even a portion of it, this sense of "order" is destroyed. We know of several cases in which hoarders have committed suicide following a forced cleanout.

The time, expense, and trauma of a forced cleanout are not worth the effort if any other alternatives are possible. Although conditions in the home may improve temporarily, the behavior leading to those conditions will not have changed. Moreover, the likelihood of obtaining any future cooperation after such a trauma is slim. One Massachusetts town in our survey of health departments conducted a forced cleanout costing $16,000 (most of the town's health department budget). Just over a year later, the cluttered home was worse than ever.

For Bernadette, who consented to the team cleanout and worked alongside the team to make decisions, the experience, though still very hard, was much more beneficial. She had come to trust her therapist and knew that the team members were operating with her goals and rules in mind. As the day wore on, more and more bags of trash and giveaway items accumulated on the front porch. Bernadette found the process exhausting, but she didn't give up. When her husband and their two children returned from a daylong outing (planned so that Bernadette could concentrate on the cleaning), he was so excited by the mountain of departing stuff on the porch and the now visible hardwood floors in the entryway, living room, and bedroom that he gathered everyone together in a circle in the entryway. Earlier in the day, such a gathering would have meant wading through three feet of clothes, newspapers, and boxes. Then he began to pray, his voice rising high in rhythmic chanting of his praise to God and his blessings for the crew: "Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!" Everyone held hands and swayed to the sound of his voice, basking in the pleasure of the moment.

If I throw too much away, there'll be nothing left of me.

—Irene

Debra began collecting magazines at thirteen.
Seventeen, Young Miss,
and
Life
were her favorites. They gave her a window into the world, and, for a precocious and inquisitive young woman, an entry into all the possibilities it had to offer. She wanted to know the world, "to learn everything," "to experience everything." As she got older, her collecting expanded to include travel, cooking, news, and women's magazines. There were always new magazines with more for her to learn. Before long, she was spending more time collecting than reading. As with many people who hoard, she planned to read them when she found time, but she couldn't afford to miss what was coming her way. The magazines and newspapers began piling up in her room as she found less and less time to read. At least, she reasoned, she had them for when she could find time.

Even when it became apparent to her that she would never have time, her intention to read gave way to a more dangerous motive. She stopped caring about reading the magazines and wanted simply to preserve them. She began to see herself as "the keeper of magazines." Keeping and protecting them would, she told me, "preserve the time in which we live." Soon this idea evolved into an identity. "Having, keeping, and preserving are part of who I am," she declared. Each magazine was its own time capsule, similar to those accumulated by Andy Warhol (see chapter 2). They preserved the time in which Debra lived and provided a physical representation of her existence, or at least what was going on when she was alive. She made a few attempts to fight off this motive. In an effort to convince herself that this sort of preservation was better left to the government, she visited the Library of Congress. She wanted to see if the library had all the magazines she did. "They didn't have half of what I had!" she exclaimed. At that point, she said, she wished she had started her work sooner.

Her preservation expanded from magazines to TV shows. At first she taped only entertainment shows. She didn't watch them: seeing them didn't interest her; preserving them did. She began to spend hours studying
TV Guide,
planning and programming three VCRs to run continuously so that she could tape not only entertainment but news and talk shows as well. Her compulsion to tape these shows was powerful. Shortly before the last time we spoke, Debra had been in a car accident and ended up in the hospital. Her doctors were worried that she might have a serious spinal cord injury, and they put her in a special bed to restrict any movement. Debra could not control her panic at not being able to tape her shows until her husband agreed to go home and program her VCRs.

The
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
published by the American Psychiatric Association is the bible for defining psychiatric disorders. The most recent version lists hoarding as one of eight symptoms of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD). There it defines hoarding as "the inability to discard worn-out or worthless objects even when they have no sentimental value."

After speaking with Debra, Irene, and so many others, we found this emphasis on non-sentimental items puzzling. It is a subjective term, after all, and our research indicates that many objects in the homes of hoarders carry intense sentimental value. Sentimentalizing objects—giving them emotional significance because of their association with important people or events—is not unusual. We all do it—ticket stubs from a favorite concert, pieces of a long-ago wedding cake, a scrap of paper with a child's first drawing. In this respect, what happens in hoarding is not out of the ordinary. The difference for Irene and Debra, as for many hoarders, is that intense emotional meaning is attached to so many of their possessions, even otherwise ordinary things, even trash. Their special ability to see uniqueness and value where others don't may stem from inquisitive and creative minds and contribute to this attachment. The desire to "experience everything" may expand the range of attachments hoarders enjoy.

Getting rid of ordinary things upset Irene greatly. As soon as she put her decades-old history book into her sell box, she started to cry. "I just feel like I want to die. This is one of my treasure books. I know I haven't looked at it in thirty years, but it feels like a part of me." Irene's reaction to purging these things was grief, as if she'd lost a loved one. Clearly, strong and wide-ranging sentimental attachments to objects are defining elements of hoarding, contrary to the official description. Hoarded objects become part of the hoarder's identity or personal history. In a sense, they come to define his or her identity.

Most of us keep the things we use regularly and discard the rest. We derive pleasure from using objects and, in this way, determine their value. But Irene kept things she didn't use. It was not their use that she found reinforcing, but the idea of having them. Their
potential
appealed to her. For instance, she had, by her estimation, more than three hundred cookbooks, and she also saved the cooking section of every newspaper and all the recipes she found in magazines. But she almost never used them. In fact, her stove and kitchen counters were inaccessible due to clutter. The mere possession of the cookbooks and recipes allowed her to enjoy thinking about the image of herself cooking and to imagine a potential identity as a cook. Indeed, much of her hoard allowed her to imagine various identities: a great cook, a well-read and informed person, a responsible citizen. Her things represented dreams, not realities. Getting rid of the things meant losing the dreams.

Debra was in her late thirties when I first met her at an Obsessive Compulsive Foundation meeting several years ago. She attended our workshop and volunteered to take part in a "non-acquiring trip," as described in chapter 3. Her story reveals much about how possessions and identity can be fused.

Debra and her husband lived with her mother and stepfather in a modest home. Although her husband worked and they could have afforded to live on their own, most of their income went to paying rent on three large storage units and purchasing the magazines and other things that Debra collected.

The main living areas of their home were relatively free of clutter when I first met Debra. She confessed at the time that this was because of the efforts of her mother and husband. They maintained control over those spaces and moved anything Debra left there, despite her grumblings and occasional tantrums. In contrast to these areas, wall-to-wall stuff covered the bedroom she shared with her husband. A fortress of papers, books, magazines, videotapes, and more surrounded the bed and reached nearly to the ceiling. She and her husband had to clamber over piles of stuff to get into bed. Amazingly, though we've seen many a person who had to sweep stuff aside to sleep at night, the bed itself remained clear. At the end of the upstairs hallway, Debra's childhood room overflowed with the remnants of her youth. Even if she had allowed it, no one could squeeze into that room. In addition to all this, Debra rented three ten-by-forty-foot storage units, all packed to the ceiling.

In the time I knew Debra, conditions in her home got worse. Her mother and husband got worn down by her never-ending pressure to put her stuff in other parts of the house. When we last spoke, her things had spilled out into the upstairs hallway, and the parts of the house normally cleared by her mother and husband had become cluttered. The corners of her mother's bedroom and the living room now contained growing mounds of videotapes. The dining room had been completely taken over by newly acquired magazines, and the porch now resembled her bedroom.

DEBRA'S PARENTS DIVORCED
when she was two, and she lived with her mother and grandmother until she was eight. She had limited contact with her father and knew little about him until after his death three years before we met. It was then that she discovered that he also kept storage units filled with pieces of his life. In sorting through his stuff, all of which he left to her, she found that he had taped and transcribed all of his conversations with her and kept copies of every letter he wrote, just as she did. He had accumulated literally tons of magazines, grocery bags, and papers.

Debra believed that her hoarding began at around age eleven or twelve; at least that was her earliest recollection of significant collecting. Her mother insisted that it began much earlier, closer to age seven or eight, around the time of her grandmother's death. Debra was close to her grandmother and felt safe and comfortable with her. Her grandmother had a calming influence on her, gently encouraging her to keep her room clean. When Debra first learned of her grandmother's death, she locked herself in her room and spent hours in frenzied cleaning, hoping that following her grandmother's advice would somehow bring her back.

The death of her grandmother meant that Debra and her mother had to sell the house and move, although they did keep a small piece of land connected to the property. Debra felt lost and clung to everything that had belonged to her grandmother. These things were now, as she explained, "extensions of me." (Her uncle's plan to sell the remaining property from her grandmother's estate had her crazed with grief. "If it happens, I'll cry forever!" she exclaimed. "I'll never be happy again.")

Just a few years later, Debra's mother remarried and changed her name. Debra felt that she had lost her mother to a man she did not like, and she blamed him for the beginning of her hoarding. He was, by her description, an angry man who disliked children and wanted to send her away to boarding school. She claimed that he stole things from her and tormented her by getting rid of the newspaper before she had a chance to read it. She began trying to rescue the papers from the trash by bringing them back into the house. Her stepfather thwarted her by taking them to work. She resorted to stealing newspapers from the neighbor's trash. (When I met her, she still had many of these stolen newspapers.) Over time, the ongoing battle with her stepfather made her more guarded and secretive about her possessions, and she was careful to keep her room locked.

Just out of school, Debra took a job at a bookstore, which seemed ideal because it allowed her to be around the things she loved. She worked hard as a shipping clerk, staying late every night. Quitting for the day when there were still things to do bothered her. At the end of her shift, she would think,
Let me do this one more thing before I go home.
But one thing led to another. Toward the end of her time at the bookstore, she fell asleep and spent the night at the store on several occasions.

Part of her job involved maintaining lists of all the books in the store and all those on order. Soon these lists became sacred: possessing them gave her a sense of mastery, as though she had read the books themselves. She began duplicating the lists for herself when the thought struck her that she should try to make a list of every book that existed. (When I met her, she still had boxes and boxes of paperwork from this project.) Finally, exhaustion overtook her, and she quit her job.

Debra's own personal history also fell under her preservation net. Ever since she could remember, she had feared change. "I don't like forwards; I like backwards," she complained. The biggest changes in her early life were losses—her father, her grandmother, and, in her mind, her mother. The losses left her uncertain about herself and her identity. It seemed as though she could never quite get a grasp on who she was or where she wanted to go. Instead, she turned to activities that would freeze time. For instance, she photographed nearly everything: "Every second of my life I can document. If I want to remember it, I'll take a picture." She even photographed the trash. In the month before our first talk, she took nearly thirty rolls of film. Her photography began as a coping strategy, a way to get rid of things she couldn't keep—perishable things. By taking a picture, she could keep something of the essence of each item.