Reply to Why are they hoarders but I’m not?

Forum Index » Family Relationships

Reply to "Why are they hoarders but I’m not? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My parents and siblings are hoarders, and I am not. Parents had a lot of storage space so their actual living space was clear and you could walk around. But storage spaces are PACKED. At least 150 boxes of junk, stacks of old newspapers, etc.

How did I “escape” this outcome?[/quote]

If you boil it down to essentials, serious hoarding isn't about having not enough stuff in childhood, or about the example you had, or anything like that. It's about being unable to make decisions. When decisions are overwhelming, you put them off, and off, and off. Watch the extreme hoarding shows and see how the holder can't make rational decisions like "everything in this room has to go, or I lose the house" -- they have to touch each item, deliberate, and mostly can't make the call to let go.

That's about things like OCD and anxiety. These mental health traits and disorders have some connection to heredity, but not every child gets them. You might not be great at paring down or housecleaning if you didn't have a good example, but it's not going to make you dysfunctional. You can learn. Your siblings probably are struggling with problems you can't see and have no empathy for, especially because those ways of being aren't yours.[/quote]

NP. A different way to look at this is reflected in my household. 
My DH gets one room and it is a hoarder's paradise. It creeps out but for the most part is contained to that room.  He is anxious and his anxiety results in this desire to not make decisions. 
I am also anxious and my anxiety propels me into action, like decluttering.
We're both working on our anxiety but our default is different.[/quote]

Oof, I have the exact same situation: I'm an anxious doer, he's an anxious not-doer, he has a basement room that's upsetting but that's our compromise. Thanks for laying it out so clearly.

I have an anxious parent who is a hoarder. I don't think their dynamic is the same. I would describe the hoarder as an anxious doer, usually, and that's how they accumulated the stuff. [b]They can decide to get rid of stuff, but there's a need for control about what happens to the stuff (sale for enough $, or to someone specific, or used in a particular way). It's time consuming or impossible to make those things happen, so the stuff stays. [/b][/quote]

DP. That's a way of not making a decision. You can see that, right? It's the excuse, not the reason -- or over time, they could have spent the energy to work out those logistics. They didn't. [/quote]

DP. Obviously they didn’t, but I think it’s important to note that they’re trying to change and feel helpless to do so because the problem is too big. I think it oversimplifies the issue to say they could’ve fixed it but chose to do nothing. [/quote]

All I'm saying is that the difficulty is in making the decision. People frame it in all kinds of ways and then go off expending energy on fixing those tangents, but that's all wasted energy. Really, it is. If you don't address the real core problem, then you are not addressing any of it in any kind of effective way.

My mother was a hoarder. I loved her before her death, and I still love her memory. I wasted so much time and energy chasing all the "reasons" while things got worse and worse, and when she was on chemotherapy, we had to physically remove her from all the goat-trails, mold, and dead things buried in the hoard. It was traumatic for all of us, and her most of all.

If they don't address their core problems, they aren't changing, and they aren't trying to change in anything like a remotely effective way. That doesn't mean it isn't hard, PP. I know it is.

It's hard. They need specialized therapy. That's hard to do, and hard to find. It's still the only thing that really helps.[/quote]

I’m so sorry your family went through all that. [/quote]

Thank you for extending the kindness. :) Sincerely.

Hoarding is on my list of things that if I develop superpowers, I would eradicate entirely. Your ability to deal with it is impaired so much by the pathology -- it's like needing to walk across the country to fix your broken legs. Such a cruel disorder. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics