The Secret Lives of Hoarders_ True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter - Matt Paxton [22]
There are a few other classic yet rarer OCD symptoms that can lead to hoarding. A person with an obsession for cleanliness won’t touch anything that has touched the floor. So whatever falls there remains there—and accumulates exponentially. Some people develop a compulsion to save hair or nail clippings, feces, or anything they may have touched, and they won’t get rid of it. There can be process compulsions—the need to go through a long mental checklist before an item can be thrown away. Rather than go through this ritual, the hoarder will postpone the decision and the stuff piles up. I’ve also heard of OCD hoarders who become obsessed with buying sets of things, or buying things in even numbers.
When hoarding is driven by OCD, it’s all about perfectionism, indecision, and procrastination. You will see the hoarder get bogged down in making decisions about which items to donate, throw away, or keep. He or she will probably have to touch every item as it leaves the house, checking things off on a “mental inventory.” A hoarder with OCD can often handle the items leaving a home, but not knowing if the item is there or not messes up the inventory in his or her head and creates constant mental violence.
Children Who Hoard
DR. SUZANNE CHABAUD, who works with clients with OCD and hoarding issues, says a significant number of children with OCD are also hoarders and their hoarding is sometimes a very early symptom. Kids who hoard have a lower response to medication than OCD kids who don’t hoard.
Hoarder children exhibit pronounced tendencies of indecision, procrastination, and perfectionism. They don’t want to let things go, they can’t make a choice about what toys to keep and what to donate. Or the children get fixated on “just right.” For instance, they find the exactly perfect place for a stuffed bear, and then the bear can’t be moved. Moving the bear would upset the perfect order of things.
Not all children who become hoarders have OCD, of course.Their behavior may be learned if they are growing up in a hoarder house. Some children of hoarders never learn to set limits on their possessions, or basic cleaning and organizing techniques. On the other hand, children with OCD may react in exactly the opposite way, and always try to carve out a neat little space for themselves in a cluttered household.
▶ Anxiety
With her long denim jumper, huge blue eyes, and helmet of gray hair, Thalia looked every inch the kindly grandmother that she was. Thalia was also a Stage 5 hoarder whose incessant talking and constant fluttering of her hands were classic signs of high anxiety. Time and again during her cleanup, she became so agitated that she would suffer a meltdown and the entire process would come to a halt. She admitted that she was in therapy, and she had prescription medication bottles littered through the house. But if any of it was antianxiety medication, it didn’t seem to be very effective.
Thalia’s house was full of knickknacks like salt and pepper shakers and other china figurines. She also had lots of memorabilia from her volunteer work in local elections in her Pennsylvania suburb—banners, yard signs, photos of her with the candidates.
Thalia’s anxiety was so high that she was unable to make any decision—ever. A stack of campaign flyers would send her into a tizzy. One can only imagine what was going on in her head:
What if there is something important in that stack of documents and it gets thrown