Stuff (33 page)

The University of Florida study found that hoarding kids also experienced more anxiety and somatic problems and displayed more aggressive behavior than non-hoarders. All of these themes were present to some degree in the four children described here. Whenever anyone touched or moved their possessions, or even threatened to do so, they responded with intense emotion that included fear, anger, sadness, frustration, and guilt. Interestingly, these are the same emotions we see in adults with hoarding problems. James, Eric, and Julian were all anxious, easily frustrated boys who had great difficulty recovering from emotional upset. Eric also displayed aggressive behavior. Storch and his colleagues think that children's lack of insight into their problems might explain their aggressive behavior. The hoarding kids in the Storch study had a harder time seeing their symptoms as problems than did the kids with other OCD symptoms. If they didn't believe their hoarding was a problem, their parents' attempts to prevent their acquiring and to make them throw things away were more likely to be met with anger, resentment, and aggression.

For all four children profiled here, hoarding was one problem among many, and usually not the most serious one. But it was one the parents could control with some clear rules and careful planning. Perhaps parents' ability to control this problem explains why so few clinicians have seen hoarding in children. When kids are brought to therapists for help, it is usually for other problems, such as OCD, ADHD, or Asperger's syndrome. Hoarding is often not mentioned at all. In addition, mental health clinics do not ask questions about clutter and saving possessions as part of their routine diagnostic interviews.

Julian's hoarding was episodic and seemed to occur mostly when he was upset about something—such as his broken arm or his new math class. For most adults, however, hoarding is chronic and unremitting. In our study of the course of hoarding, for instance, less than 1 percent of the cases reported that the hoarding became less severe over time. Other OCD symptoms, such as compulsive cleaning or checking, fluctuate over time, but hoarding remains stable. Among children, the situation may be different. Some parents, especially those whose children had other OCD symptoms, have reported to us that their children had clear starting and stopping points for their hoarding. Perhaps by adulthood, hoarding that began as a reaction to stressors solidifies into a chronic habitual response.

The strong emotional reactions by child hoarders to any interference with their possessions can wreak havoc at home. To preserve the emotional climate, parents often accommodate hoarding by allowing unusual collecting and saving. Similar family problems arise when parents hoard and the rest of the family must accommodate them, as we saw in chapter 11.

It seems that a number of children develop fears and rituals when they are young, only to outgrow them during their adolescence or early adulthood. Whether this is also true for hoarding, we simply don't know. We do suspect that when behavioral patterns are rigid, to the point of perfectionism and extreme avoidance of distress, a knowledgeable mental health professional can help parents mitigate the strong reactions.

Without these things, I am nothing.

—A hoarding client

Although there are a few societies in which notions of ownership are absent or downplayed, in most cultures the interaction between people and their things is a central aspect of life. As noted in chapter 2, we see cases of hoarding throughout the world, and references to it can be found as far back as the fourteenth century. But never has hoarding been so visible as it is today in westernized societies. Perhaps the abundance of inexpensive and easily accessible objects makes it the disorder of the decade. At the end of the 1990s, PBS aired a one-hour program called
Affluenza.
The program documented an American culture of materialism and over-consumption and defined "affluenza" as a contagious social affliction in which possessions take over our lives and drain us of the very things we seek by acquiring them.

As has been apparent to us from studying hoarding, we may own the things in our homes, but they own us as well. Objects carry the burden of responsibilities that include acquisition, use, care, storage, and disposal. The magnitude of these responsibilities for each of us has exploded with the expanding number of items in our homes during the past fifty years. Having all these possessions has caused a shift in our behavior away from human interaction to interaction with inanimate objects. Kids now spend more time online, playing video games, or watching TV alone in their rooms than interacting with family or friends. Possessions originally sold on the promise that they would make life easier and increase leisure time have done just the opposite. Often both parents work longer hours to support an ever-increasing array of new conveniences that lead them to spend less and less time together.

This is partly a function of the commercialization of our culture. Never has there been so much stuff for people to own and so many ways of peddling it to consumers. As pointed out by John De Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor in their book
Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic,
which followed the PBS show, there are twice as many shopping centers in the United States as there are high schools. A great deal of effort and money is invested in finding out just how to present objects to create a desire for them. More than a hundred professional journals are devoted to the science of marketing and selling consumer goods.

The success of this marketing has been remarkable. Increasing numbers of rental self-storage units cater to an apparently insatiable appetite for stuff. Forty years ago, facilities for storing unused personal possessions were virtually nonexistent. Now nearly two billion square feet of space can be rented for storage in more than forty-five thousand facilities, and most of that space is already full! In March 2007, the
New York Times
reported that self-storage unit rentals had increased by 90 percent since 1995 and more than eleven million American households rented outside storage space. According to the
Times,
the number of multiunit and long-term storage renters was increasing steadily. These were not people who had just moved and needed temporary storage. They were people who were simply unwilling to part with the beloved treasures that they "might use one day" and that their own homes could no longer accommodate. Alongside this growing appetite for rented storage space, the average house size had increased by 60 percent since 1970—although this trend may be changing since the real estate crash of 2008. Many of these oversize homes, often referred to as "McMansions," also come with their own storage sheds. Perhaps we are becoming a nation of hoarders.

A generation earlier, in 1947, the psychoanalyst and humanistic philosopher Erich Fromm forecast a society obsessed with possessions. He argued that humans can be characterized by one of two basic orientations toward the world, "having" or "being." These orientations determine in large part how people think, feel, and act. A person with a "having" orientation seeks to acquire and possess property and even people. Ownership is key to the person's sense of self and meaning in the world. According to Fromm, a culture driven by commercialism is doomed to foster the "having" orientation and result in hollowness and dissatisfaction. In contrast, a person with a "being" orientation is focused on experience rather than possession, and he or she derives meaning from sharing and engaging with other people.

Modern-day social scientists describe the "having" orientation as "materialism" and have made it the subject of considerable research. Much of what Fromm predicted has been borne out by this research. Possessions play a central role in the lives of materialists. They are a means to self-enhancement, identity, and social standing, and the driving force in daily activities. Materialists expect possessions not only to enhance their sense of self but also to make them happy. Ironically, possessions seem to do the opposite. Many studies have documented the fact that highly materialistic people are less satisfied with their lives and less happy than people without such an orientation toward "having." It's not clear from this research, however, whether materialism leads to reduced satisfaction and happiness or whether people who are unhappy pursue materialistic goals.

The recently developed field of positive psychology, which is devoted to the study of personal virtues, is concerned with questions such as "What makes people happy?" Not surprisingly, positive psychology has turned its attention to the role and meaning of possessions. Surveys asking what types of purchases make people happier than others have found that purchases associated with an event or experience, such as going out to dinner or taking a trip, create more happiness than those associated with acquiring an object. Other studies asking people to describe their reactions to their most recent purchases have shown the same thing. Also, when asked to think about recent purchases, people usually report that they are happier when thinking about experiences than about objects.

Leaf Van Boven, a positive psychologist from the University of Colorado, says that there are three reasons why experiential purchases create more happiness than material ones. First, material purchases are not subject to recall and reliving in the same way as experiential ones, except perhaps among the avid collectors described in chapter 2. Recalling a vacation with the family creates a better feeling than recalling the purchase of dining room furniture. And with each retelling of vacation stories, the feeling gets better. Second, the appeal of material purchases fades as comparisons are made with similar purchases by neighbors and friends, but the effect of experiential purchases is not dimmed by social comparison. Finally, material purchases are often solitary actions, whereas experiential purchases tend to be inherently social events that more often engender lasting positive moods. Van Boven and a colleague took this idea a step further by asking people who didn't know each other to discuss a recent material or experiential purchase that made them happy. Following these conversations, participants rated people who discussed experiential purchases more favorably and as more likely to be someone with whom they would like to pursue a friendship. It seems that experiences carry more social potential than things, and "being" versus "having" brings people closer to happiness.

These findings suggest that our expectations for the happiness potential of owning objects has come not from our own experience but from clever marketing strategies emphasizing the "having" orientation. Scientifically developed ways of selling stuff largely emphasize utility, security, and identity motives. Interestingly, these are also among the most frequent rationalizations for excessive acquiring among people with hoarding problems: "I can use it," "It will give me comfort," and "It's part of me." Perhaps hoarders are the casualties of marketing—acquisition addicts who can't resist a sales pitch, like the compulsive gambler who can't pass up a lottery ticket or the alcoholic who is drawn irresistibly to the neon sign of a tavern.

But our research with hoarders indicates that although materialism is a part of the hoarding syndrome, there is a fundamental difference between people who are simply materialistic and those who suffer from hoarding. For materialistic people, possessions are outward signs of success and affluence. They are part of a persona designed for public display. Showing off one's material wealth communicates success and status to one's neighbors and is a major feature of materialism. In contrast, the typical hoarder will go to great lengths to hide his or her possessions from view. The hoarder's motivation for saving things is to create not a public identity but a private one. Objects become part of who the hoarder is, not the façade he or she displays to the world. As one of our clients put it, "Without these things, I am nothing." This quote is similar to Fromm's comment on "having": "If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I?"

Affluenza
—both the PBS show and the book—hit a nerve in American culture and prompted efforts to counteract this trend. The voluntary simplicity movement was born out of the concern that lives full of consumption were losing their meaning. The movement promotes a lifestyle minimizing consumption and emphasizing the enjoyment of life without a large number of possessions. It is consistent with the growing environmental movement to reduce each person's carbon footprint, or impact on the planet. Materialism produces a large footprint and fosters the tendency to replace perfectly good items with brand-new ones. Much of the stuff we collect is readily thrown away and replaced when a new model comes out or styles change. Many barely used items end up in landfills across the country. Based on the rate at which we are acquiring and disposing of possessions, the earth's natural resources will be exhausted within a few generations. Voluntary simplicity and green living are natural outgrowths of such dire predictions.

Ironically, many people who hoard do so partly in response to these concerns. Recall Langley Collyer telling his lawyer that he and his brother were simplifying their lives by living the way they did (see the prologue). Consider Ralph, who saw utility in worn-out things, and Anita, who was racked by guilt over the slightest waste (see chapter 7). Many hoarders see special value in society's unwanted trash and consider themselves custodians—even protectors—of things no one else wants. They are de facto archivists of objects others have left behind, inverted versions of materialists who crave the new. In our culture of collecting, hoarders hold a unique if unenviable place, wherein impairments of the mind and heart meet the foibles of the wider culture. As one non-hoarder once joked, "Every community needs a hoarder. Without them, trash would be everywhere. At least they gather it up in one place." Embedded in this comment is an irony that highlights the plight of both hoarders and our society.

Hoarding might be a behavior with a social benefit if the collected objects were used and didn't foul living spaces. Unfortunately, simply collecting things others throw out does not save material possessions from the landfill. Because few of these items are ever used, hoarders simply provide temporary way stations until they die and their stuff is hauled off to the dump. But some developments in the reuse/recycling world have improved the lives of people who hoard, at least among those plagued by guilt over wasting things. Many of the hoarding participants in our early studies told us that the advent of recycling in the 1970s allowed them to get rid of substantial volumes of stuff, especially newspapers. Both traditional organizations such as the Salvation Army and newer ones such as the Freecycle Network are great resources for hoarders looking to get their treasures back into circulation. Unfortunately, they are sources of new free stuff as well.