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TALKING TO HOARDERS

The hoarder is a critical part of the goal-setting process, but those conversations can be tricky. Often a late-stage hoarder insists on living alone, but the family questions whether or not that’s safe or even possible.

Sometimes, running the numbers can help make the decision. Look at what it will cost to fix up the house and make it safe. Often that’s a huge amount. A family can put that in front of the hoarder, asking if the hoarder would rather spend money on that, or on a comfortable retirement home. The hoarder should make the decision. Usually there’s not even a discussion because the cost to repair the home is more money than the hoarder has.

Both Roger’s sister and Jackson’s partner understood that in the beginning they had to set goals cautiously. Mike knew that Jackson’s house could be clean in a few days, but he gave Jackson three months. Kathy set modest expectations for what Roger’s life would look like after his cleanup. If a goal isn’t achievable, then it becomes another failure for a hoarder (and the cleaning team and family). Instead, the cleanup needs to be their first success on the road to a new life.

Jackson, like most hoarders, didn’t reach out for help himself. More often it’s a concerned family member, friend, or social worker who calls a therapist or cleanup expert. When that happens, the hoarder generally isn’t ready yet to start the process, and things play out with ultimatums, secret cleanups, ambushes, or interventions.

The best chance of creating a collaborative effort is to engage the hoarder early on. It’s important that the right contact person (or people) talk to the hoarder. Since some kind of discussion may have already taken place, it’s likely that the person closest to the hoarder has a sense of how open the hoarder is to talking about it. If those early conversations don’t go well, then someone else might have to come into the picture.

It rarely works if a family member talks about how the hoarding affects others. Hoarders just tune out the chatter about how embarrassed others are, or how the hoarding affects property values. They already know that, but it’s not enough to make them take steps to deal with it. Just as with fighting an addiction, the desire to change has to come from within.

▶ Starting the Conversation

In hundreds of hoarding jobs, I’ve never had one where a family member said, “Hey, I’m worried about you,” and the hoarder responded, “You’re right. Let’s clean up!” There is always more than one conversation. The early ones may not go well, and the hoarder is probably going to respond with a lot of denial. It’s important to just keep coming at it with the same message of love, concern, and offers to help.

Jackson told Mike about his “messy house” early in their relationship, but he never let Mike see it. They dated for about a year before Mike decided to begin pushing Jackson to open up about his issues. Although his hoarding was a big issue in his life, it didn’t define who he was. Still, Mike’s approach was the best. By confiding in Jackson that he cared about him and that he was concerned about the direction the clutter was going—and offering to help however he could—he acknowledged the problem but didn’t force the issue prematurely.

Even with an early-stage hoarder like Jackson, it took a good six months of conversations for him to get comfortable talking about a possible cleanup. Mike would mention the house, and tell Jackson that they needed to deal with it to move forward. Jackson would agree in theory, but not set a date or timeline, and then Mike would back off. Or Mike would ask to see the house, but Jackson wouldn’t commit. They were both nervous to press the issue because they didn’t want it to interfere with their new relationship.

Mike kept working on Jackson. The two watched programs on television about hoarding, and they even came to hear me give a talk on hoarding at a home show in their town. Finally, Jackson agreed to talk to a professional cleaner. In the meantime,