• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Those frustrated family and friends, who mostly find themselves excluded from a hoarder’s life, may wonder why their loved one can’t just throw away those ten years’ worth of newspapers piled up in the garage, the piles of old and never-before-worn clothes, or the junk that seems to grow organically in every corner. Wouldn’t a sane person just recycle, toss, or give away this stuff—and move on?

But while a hoarder may not be certifiable, his or her brain does work differently. Hoarding specialist Dr. Renae Reinardy often compares hoarders to parents with dyslexia who wish to read bedtime stories to their children, but no matter how desperately they want to do it, their brains simply will not cooperate.

I’m not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, although I do work alongside therapists and other health care professionals with many of my clients. But one learns a lot about a person in such intimate circumstances as a cleanup. I’ve found that it is important not only to help the hoarders get rid of stuff, but also to really talk with them—swapping stories and sharing experiences as we do the cleaning. The issues, both physical and psychological, they are wrestling with quickly become clear during this process.

I’ve learned that most hoarders love their families deeply and long to reestablish lost or strained relationships. Hoarders are truly in pain from losing their connection with loved ones—and the world at large. Ironically, the only way they see to ease that pain is to literally and figuratively bury themselves more deeply.

The more time I spend with hoarders, the more I wonder what propels them down this path. Everyone has issues. Bad things happen. The clues to why people hoard are not so simple or straightforward to decipher but may be discovered in the complex interaction of personality and circumstances, in an individual’s ability to respond to life events in a certain way, in genetics, or in more serious psychiatric issues that manifest themselves in classic hoarding behavior.

IT’S ALL IN THE FAMILY

One thing that has become fairly obvious to me when I work with clients and their families is the likelihood that the hoarder is not the only one with an issue. As with other medical and psychological conditions, there’s much discussion concerning the genetic roots of hoarding. And if my experiences and observations have shown me anything, it’s that hoarding—like blue eyes or curly hair—can be a family trait.

One of my clients, Pat, had the help of her mother during her cleanup. Pat and her mother, who were both overweight and wore similar sweat suits with lots of gold jewelry, looked more like sisters than mother and daughter. They even bickered like sisters. Every time Pat chose an item to donate or throw away, her mother would move in and say something like, “That’s nice, maybe we should keep that.” By the end of the first day, Pat’s mother had loaded her own car and had even more of Pat’s castoffs in a pile by the front door. Pat told me that her mother’s hoarding problem was even worse than her own, which is something I hear all the time: “If you think this is bad, you should see my mother/grandfather/aunt!”

A report published in Behavior Research and Therapy found that hoarding appears to run in some families where OCD is also present. And a study done at the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders Clinic at the University of California in 2009 found that up to 85 percent of people who are compulsive hoarders have a close relative who is or was also a hoarder. A Johns Hopkins study found significant linkage to compulsive hoarding on chromosome 14 in families with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

It’s not surprising that as I’ve dug into my clients’ backgrounds I’ve discovered a pattern of hoarding along with other family traits.

TRIGGERS

While there are clearly links to other mental disorders, several of which I’ll discuss later in this chapter, from my observations it seems that every hoarder has had an event, or series of events, that either marked the start