Hoarding is an issue that we at ABT run into quite often.
Typically, the act of hoarding itself is acquiring possessions compulsively, either by buying or collecting free items, along with the disorganized, unkempt saving of all these things, and never discarding anything.
People who hoard are just like the rest of us in a way, and they keep things for the same reason that you or I may keep a belonging including sentimental value, for utility value, and for aesthetic value.
A study of hoarders found that the most likely justification for keeping an item was future need (“I might need this someday”), followed by lack of wear or damage (“This is too good to throw away”), sentimental saving (“This means too much to me to throw away”), and lastly potential value (“This may be worth something someday”). The difference between people who hoard and people who don’t, is that hoarders apply these values to a far larger number of items.
A hoarder will also be very concerned about maintaining control over their possessions. Well-meaning family members who try to help by sorting and purging the clutter on the hoarder’s behalf are likely to find their good deed has an unanticipated result: an increased effort on the part of the hoarder to protect their stuff from “unauthorized touching” and thus resulting in pulling away from family or society as hoarders begin to understand that their behavior is not generally acceptable.
A hoarder can have problems categorizing – necessary for organizing – and seeing each item as unique. The result is chaos and clutter that causes stress and isolation.
Part of the problem for hoarders is that they find it hard to make decisions about what to do with their possessions – e.g. whether to keep something or throw it away. A hoarder may feel that something bad will happen if they discard an item or it may feel like a part of their identity will be lost. If a hoarder has a past experience of throwing something out and regretting it later, this is likely to increase their distress.
To avoid these uncomfortable feelings, or distress, a hoarder is likely to choose the “safe” option – postponing the decision, or saving everything. However, by never discarding, the doom and gloom theories are never disproved, and the behavior escalates.
Hoarding is a public health and safety risk.
Hoarding increases the risk of fire because piles of newspapers, magazines, clothing and rubbish provide a plentiful supply of combustible material. At the same time, the piles make it more difficult to escape from a fire by blocking possible exits, as well as making it harder for rescue workers to reach the victim.
In fact, one home that we were called out to remediate after the homeowner passed away(at a local hospital), leaving the grieving family with one heck of a messy surprise back that the home they hadn’t seen in 10 years, had so much stuff piled up in it that one of the second floor rooms was literally caving into the house below it.
This San Jose home was filled to the max with everything you can imagine, even a kitchen sink which sat in a corner of the living room. Boxes and piles of trash or newspaper stacked up to the ceiling in a few rooms, and in the kitchen, the fridge had been completely obscured by the rubbish. It was unreal.
The labyrinth of a home took about a week to entirely remove all possessions from the home and then sort through them for anything that might be salvageable. Luckily for us, this woman had not been a human waste hoarder, or an animal person, so the usual odors were not present which made my job ten times easier.
Once we had the home completely empty, actually, the job was pretty pleasant. A few days more spent deep cleaning, sanitizing for good measure, as well as repairing some structural damage that had resulted from the sheer volume of stuff contained within the home, and we were handing the keys back over to the relieved family member who told us that the home was being put on the market for resale later that week.
No word on what they planned to do with all the items that we were able to save, but judging by the woman’s apparent addiction to QVC, I’d say they probably made out like bandits.
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