The Secret Lives of Hoarders_ True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter - Matt Paxton [37]
Their plan even specified where the items coming out of the house would be staged while Jackson made decisions about them, or while waiting for someone to take them to a donation site or sell them. Jackson’s house didn’t have much trash, but the plan addressed where things would go, who would haul them to the dump, and when.
Writing down these details was helpful because Jackson and Mike could refer to them during the cleanup in case there were misunderstandings. If Jackson suddenly decided to keep all of his Versace shirts, Mike could point to the list and say, “See, we agreed to sell those.” They also shared the written plan with the cleanup crew before cleaning day so they could decide how to structure the job.
Sometimes a job is so big that it is like staging an event, and the logistics can be as overwhelming as the clutter itself. That’s where a professional can help organize and carry out the cleanup.
▶ Goals for Health and Wellness
Wendy and Sam were an elderly couple who met late in life and started living together in Wendy’s Stage 3 hoarded house. Wendy was a pill hoarder, and they both had multiple medical issues requiring pills, so the plan for them included health-related assistance. Since their medical concerns were being handled poorly, they needed a private duty nurse to help figure out what to do and how to schedule ongoing health care. Physically, they required clear access into and through all the rooms in the house, and they needed to have safety equipment installed, like grab bars in the bathtub. Of course, Wendy required some kind of counseling for her hoarding to ensure long-term relief.
Daisy, another aging hoarder, needed a plan that included counseling, advice about insurance, medical treatment, and medication. As with many elderly housebound people, Daisy, Wendy, and Sam potentially required home health care, and their places needed to be clean and safe enough to allow visits from medical aides and other helpers.
▶ Goals for Living
Kathy and Roger let the cleanup crew handle most of the logistics of their de-cluttering. In their plan they focused more on setting life goals: where Roger would live, what his life would look like, and how to get there. The goals were specific, like putting their parents’ house on the market within four months, finding a new place for Roger to live by then, and having Roger apply for at least one job within a month after moving.
Deadlines are often essential to motivate people to get things done—whether it’s the hoarder or the support group. But they should be reasonable. If a hoarder feels trapped by unrealistic timelines, he or she may shut down the whole process before it really gets started. (We’ll discuss more about setting start dates in Chapter 6.) Even a Stage 5 hoarder house may take a professional crew only a few days to clean out, but this kind of short deadline increases a hoarder’s stress level—and the risk that he or she will sabotage the whole enterprise. The hoarder isn’t prepared to think in such a short time frame for such an emotional undertaking. Thirty to sixty days is easier to accept, and if the house gets clean faster, then everyone wins.
A late-stage hoarder in particular, who has been withdrawn from the world for years, isn’t going to jump right back into the stream of society just because the house is clean. Life goals take time and patience to achieve. Advanced hoarders need help getting back into society, which may mean creating a structured setting in which they can learn to socialize again, such as volunteering their time and talents for a limited amount of time each week. Or encourage the hoarder to host a coffee at the house two months after the cleanup. The simple act of sending out the invitations reconnects the hoarder with lost friends, and commits