The Secret Lives of Hoarders_ True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter - Matt Paxton [68]
As a team, we try to find out a hoarder’s interests. Who was this person before the hoarding started? And who does this person want to become after the cleanup? What does the hoarder enjoy: Theater? Italian food? Old movies? The conversations that members of the team can have during the cleanup support the process because we discover what is meaningful to the hoarder, and what will keep the hoarder on track after we’ve gone.
During cleaning, the crew essentially has a hoarder’s whole life laid out in front of them and can look for clues about what hobbies the hoarder used to enjoy. Finding an old pair of hiking boots could be a starting point for conversation. Maybe the hoarder used to hike with a pet dog. Dusting off those old boots might be the first step in discovering a viable replacement therapy—and getting the hoarder out of the house and taking some valuable exercise as well.
Of course, there is always the risk that the hoarder may choose a replacement behavior that lends itself to hoarding. For example, a new hobby like cooking might trigger a hoarder to buy more pans, tools, and cookbooks than would ever be used in a lifetime.
The hoarders I’ve worked with who have addictive or compulsive tendencies aren’t able to shut those down completely, but many have been able to channel those tendencies into more positive behaviors. Helping a hoarder choose replacement behaviors needs to be done carefully as these behaviors can be life-changing or can lead to repeating unhealthy habits.
▶ Engaging a Professional Organizer
Ongoing psychological support will help hoarders understand what they do and help them to help themselves on the road to recovery. But, just as the one-time cleanup crew will assist the hoarder in making a fresh start, sometimes it takes a professional organizer to give the hoarder the tools and advice to stay clean.
Once Nika got her house cleaned, she needed help keeping her clothing under control. She knew that she was always going to have a lot of clothes and that she would probably keep shopping. It would have been unrealistic to expect Nika to scale back too far, but making sure she organized what she had and didn’t let it expand any further was an attainable goal.
Nika hired a professional organizer who set up a closet system that was tailored to Nika’s specific needs—appropriate storage for her collection of shoes and purses. She also helped Nika come up with set of guidelines for deciding what to keep and what to donate, and how often to go through and evaluate her wardrobe.
While Nika only needed a few sessions with her organizer to get her closet under control, a professional can be engaged to check in with a hoarder weekly or monthly to help keep the hoarder focused—and motivated to stick with de-cluttering.
For a hoarder, staying clean isn’t really about bins and labels; it’s about processing items that come into the house. A good organizer can help a hoarder develop methods for sorting mail, for staying on top of recycling, and for making sure donated items get to their destinations. The organizer teaches the hoarder life skills, and the follow-up visits reinforce those skills. An organizer is like a coach, a motivator, and, occasionally, a policeman.
The repetition of bad cleaning skills is usually what got the hoarder into trouble in the first place, so an organizer works on repetition of new, positive cleaning skills. That helps the hoarder build better behaviors over the long term.
STAYING ON TRACK
While every hoarding situation may have its unique characteristics, I’ve found there are a number of keys that help all hoarders stay clean. Certainly, all of the elements that were discussed in the first part of this chapter are critical—selfknowledge, therapy, having a support network, focusing on more positive replacement behaviors, and so on—but the day-to-day job of staying uncluttered often requires some practical guidelines and innovative thinking.