The Secret Lives of Hoarders_ True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter - Matt Paxton [14]
Food hoarders are in hard-core denial, although when confronted they tend to be more embarrassed than pack-rat hoarders because food hoarding is just so messy. Interestingly, it has been my observation that food hoarding prompts more family fights than any other kind.
▶ The Clothes Hoarder
Nika is typical of a major subset of hoarders—she couldn’t get rid of any clothes. She was a carefully groomed, fortyfive-year-old plus-size woman whose weight had fluctuated pretty regularly as she yo-yoed on and off various diets. When she was heavy, she kept her “skinny” clothes because she was convinced that she would lose weight. When she was lighter, she stored her “fat” clothes—just in case. She kept really old clothes because she thought they might come back into style. She even had a cache of clothes, many of which were barely used or even unworn, because she was planning to donate them to charity—when she got around to it.
Nika had clothes stored in the bathroom, where the shower curtain rod had long ago turned the tub into an extra closet. She had so many shoes that they were stored in every room, in their original boxes. She had a collection of more than five hundred purses that she couldn’t even get to because they were all buried under bags of clothes. In fact, what Nika had was the Great Wall of Clothes, stacked so high and so solidly that it would have held up the ceiling if the house’s support beams ever gave out.
For Nika, having a house full of stuff meant she had “made it.” Her husband, Andre, didn’t agree. And even though the two lived together, Nika admitted that they barely talked. Her hoarding had all but driven him away.
Like many clothes hoarders, Nika had also fallen victim to television home shopping shows, buying the same item in many colors or sizes “just in case” she ran out. The UPS man knew her by name, and even arrived to deliver more packages during Nika’s cleaning.
The predatory behaviors of these home shopping networks make it difficult for hoarders to avoid making purchases. The sales techniques target compulsive shoppers in the most insidious ways. For example, they call viewers “friends” and invite them to take advantage of special “insider” opportunities, which appeals to an isolated hoarder’s need for friendship and connection. Hoarders like Nika make a choice to buy things, and they are responsible for their actions, but television shopping tactics create a particular challenge that’s hard to overcome.
▶ The Memory Keeper
Roxanne lived alone in a trailer home, spending most of her day in dirty sweat suits, sitting in a recliner and chain smoking. She wore her brown hair in a long braid down her back. Her skin was sallow from a liver ailment, and she coughed constantly. Roxanne’s adult daughter hadn’t been to visit in almost a decade. Roxanne was completely alone—no family, no friends, and no close neighbors. Roxanne didn’t have any real relationships, but she did have lots of reminders of her past: She had saved almost every item from her daughter’s childhood.
There were two rooms filled five feet high with her daughter’s dolls, toys, crafts, and clothes. Roxanne had strollers, a crib, and other old baby equipment that she was convinced her daughter might use one day for her own kids. Roxanne kept saying that her daughter was coming back to pick her things up, but the truth was that her daughter wasn’t coming back. In fact, her daughter told us that she’d been happy when she was finally able to move out of that cluttered house and was so fed up with her mother’s hoarding that she hadn’t returned in ten years.
Hoarders who focus on toys and other childhood possessions are caught up in the past, either their children’s or their own, or both. This can spill over into shopping hoarding, but these hoarders aren’t buying for themselves; rather, their shopping is