The Compulsive Hoarding and Meaning of Things (Gail Steketee and Randy Frost) and The Secret Lives of Hoarders (Max Paxton of the show Hoarders and Phaedra Hise)
I admit it: I find hoarding interesting. I guess you could call it morbid curiosity but I swear I have empathy for these poor people living among trash, overridden with animals, unable to live normal lives. I also have empathy for the poor animals, many of whom suffer deplorable conditions. I learned so much from these books. I learned children can have problems with hoarding. I learned there is a strong connection between hoarding and OCD (which is personal because I have pretty bad OCD). I learned there are actually five stages of hoarding (the television show usually only deals with the dire cases).
Max identified different types of hoarding in his book. These included the “trash master compacter, the memory keeper, the clothes hoarder, the food saver, the collector, the do-it-yourselfer, the shopaholic, the information junkie, and the animal rescuer”. The animal rescuer is very sad because the hoarder doesn’t intend to hurt the animals, but they neither have the tools nor resources to care for all the animals they adopt and the animals get sick or go hungry.
Hoarding OCD is now considered a different disorder than hoarding disorder. For example, someone with a hoarding disorder will hold onto something because they think it is valuable (loose definition I know). Someone with hoarding OCD will keep something because they worry that something bad will happen if they throw it away or that there is a chance (however slim) they might need it again or that they might regret getting rid of it. I never had any problems with contamination. For example, I am not afraid to throw out trash or get rid of clothes because I worry I have contaminated them as some people with OCD do. Contamination has never been my problem. I have a really hard time getting rid of paper. Drafts of old stories that I wrote when I was five and aren’t even legible. Old Oprah magazines that I have cut up within a speck of their lives but hey, there could still be something valuable in there. Sometimes receipts for things I’ve used and obviously can’t return but what if I regret my purchase? I’m not saying I’m a hoarder, but I definitely do have OCD and I might have hoarding tendencies.
Because of this (and the fact that I got the smaller room), I don’t have a whole lot of room. Papers are constantly threatening to choke me (and so is my mother. Just kidding. She’s very patient with me). I also insist that everything I write goes into a fireproof box. Currently, I have Four. Giant. Lockboxes sitting in my closet, bursting with journals, binders and every psychiatric evaluation I have ever done on myself. Who am I to say something is undeserving of the Box? What if there was a fire? A hurricane? The apocalypse? Surely these lockboxes (which I don’t even lock by the way) would protect me from losing my creativity, my originality, my memories. The way to treat hoarding OCD is through exposure response prevention (ERP) therapy. Leaving a journal outside of the box for an hour. The thought may seem blasé to you but to me it's terrifying.
I also don’t want to get rid of old letters from family members even a random birthday card from relatives alive and well that still send me cards. Also, it bothers me if something is not complete. This does not mean I’m a collector. It means if I have three books in a series, I can’t enjoy them until I have the fourth. My bookshelf is a disaster zone. If I lose a book in a series, I literally won’t read the other books as…what? Punishment? OCD has rules and sometimes they don’t feel very fair.
Paper has a hold on me. Maybe because I’m a writer. More likely because I am mentally ill. I have to count journals. I have to doublecheck post-it notes. I have to…I have to… I am governed by compulsions. I am mastered by obsessions. I have empathy for all these hoarders I see on TV. When will I start to have empathy for myself?
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