Criticalmas,

Ha, yes,we could be sisters! I do have the gym membership, a nice gym buddy, a car, and I still don't go. My buddy and I started out the summer doing really well. Then, I had an appointment and she was babysitting and we broke our pattern. I procrastinate going to the gym, but once I am there, I do pretty well. I really like doing the stretches and the weight room. The elliptical and treadmill can be hard for me due to my foot and knee pain. My friend and I also do water aerobics, which is great for my joints. I keep thinking if I could drop ten pounds, I could do it for a little longer.

I am trying to have patience. It's hard because I go back to work in a few weeks. I will go from having all day to dig through my stuff to having no time at all. The whole month of September is usually so busy for me, and probably all teachers. I usually look forward to school starting, but now I'm thinking, "What if I never finish organizing my house?" I really need to learn patience! Thanks for the reminder.

@mshope2012:

Wow, we sound like we could be sisters! I'm glad the medicine is working so well for you. I think what I need is exercise. It helps with my depression and ADHD. I'm just waiting for my finances to permit more driving to the gym where I can get a really good workout. In the meantime, I do accompany a friend on dog walking most every evening, which has been good just to keep my body in the active mode.

I'm really going through a lot of transformation spiritually on the "stuff." My frustration as I may have mentioned is that I would be ready to do the whole paring down in a week if I had money and helpers. But there, I guess the Lord is saying "patience, my daughter." After several years of this I'm like "Patience! But Lord, I've BEEN patient!" LOL. I'm sure He knows things about me that I don't, that would trip me up if He let me have it my way. Humility. Wow. A whole slew of virtues to cultivate.

Hi Critical Mass,

Thanks for the response! I did add another response, but I have now experienced the "missing posts"-sadly! Anyway, I hope that future research will reveal many things about our genetic code and brain chemistry. My entire life I struggled with overeating. Until my doctor put me on a prescription drug called Belviq, I never knew what it was like to live without intense cravings. Belviq targets parts of the brain that cause this cravings. For the first time I forgot to eat a meal. Yet I still binge at times, not like before but I am in the "habit" of overeating or even eating when I am not hungry. Like the compulsion for me to hoard, I think I need to retrain my brain in multiple ways.

I also had a bit of a materialistic meltdown last year when I was going through my shoes and found hundreds of pairs that took up an entire closet. I decided to just stop buying clothes, purses, and make up. I would go to the mall and not even see anything I liked. It started to feel good. As a Catholic also, I used to picture myself giving away all my belongings to the poor and living like a monk. Although that is extreme, it would be so much better than the materialistic life I led.I would think of the "It is harder for a rich man to get into heaven than a camel to go through a needle's eye" and think, "I'm not going to make it." I have friends who wear $800 shoes and $1200 purses. They married husbands who make a lot more than I do. I realized that those things mean nothing to me anymore. I have changed. I learned not to shop. I stopped and I loved it. Now, if I could just stop eating too much. I think I even have the clutter under control. I did the first sweep and now I'm going back and being more ruthless.

Life is truly a journey. Thanks for your insights!

Quoting mshope2012 so I can respond

This is a thread of great interest to me. On both sides of my family, we have family members who are OCD clean and hoarders. Now, except for my late father, none of the hoarders are dirty, just "collectors" with jam packed houses. Also, it seems like the cluttering parent has kids who now live in bare houses with nothing on the walls and zero clutter! I also noticed that the hoarders are on the heavy to obese side, with the sterile house people having issues with being underweight and anemic. It's really strange.

Is there some kind of link? For myself, I'm an overweight, well-organized hoarder who is in debt. Really, I verge on being a workaholic and quit spending money a year ago. I tend to try to keep people away from me so I can pursue my "hobbies," like playing with my clutter. I have always been obsessed with dieting and trying to lose weight, while clutter was on the back burner. Now, I am obsessed with getting rid of everything I don't need or want. I always thought these were my own problems that I created. However, I am seeing major patterns. I hope I can break free and learn new habits. I am trying to wake my family up that they need to clean up and stop spending too.

Thanks for the information!

I, too, have struggled with weight as a yo-yo dieter and now my metabolism is pretty messed up. I am also a picky eater due to my sensory issues tied in with ADHD I suspect. In my earlier post I mentioned all the crazy stuff my family tree is riddled with!

And I really think science is going to find many answers as the human genome continues to be sequenced - and that the brain's role in odd patterns of behavior such as hoarding is going to be much more understood. Perhaps there will even come to be a hoarding vaccine, LOL! Or something that will help get to the root of the problem.

I think it is very possible for a careful, perceptive observer to see in families what you have observed in your own. When a man and woman have kids, each brings his/her own genetic history to the mix. Often people with similar patterns tend to find one another, but at the same time there are going to be differences. And each child conceived - each egg and sperm - are going to carry variations. So it's a crapshoot, yet within certain parameters.

One final thing - neuroplasticity. We can by determined and mindful effort, change some of what our brains have dealt us. That is what I'm attempting to do in my own case, is "rewire" my hoarding brain. I do this by accepting that the hoarding addiction is probably going to try to hook me in, but calling upon my higher will to kindly but firmly put my mental foot down and say, No, this does not belong in the new vision I am creating.

It's not metaphysical mumbo jumbo, just positive determination, goal setting. Finally, I'm a Christian (Catholic), and I feel that last year I had a spiritual awakening about materialism. I had been aware I had a problem, but my eyes were really opened. I "hit bottom" and came to realize that God wants me to be happy in a more genuine way, which means not being a slave to STUFF. So I focus on that freedom that I'm going to have in the letting go, and that helps too. :)

This is a thread of great interest to me. On both sides of my family, we have family members who are OCD clean and hoarders. Now, except for my late father, none of the hoarders are dirty, just "collectors" with jam packed houses. Also, it seems like the cluttering parent has kids who now live in bare houses with nothing on the walls and zero clutter! I also noticed that the hoarders are on the heavy to obese side, with the sterile house people having issues with being underweight and anemic. It's really strange.

Is there some kind of link? For myself, I'm an overweight, well-organized hoarder who is in debt. Really, I verge on being a workaholic and quit spending money a year ago. I tend to try to keep people away from me so I can pursue my "hobbies," like playing with my clutter. I have always been obsessed with dieting and trying to lose weight, while clutter was on the back burner. Now, I am obsessed with getting rid of everything I don't need or want. I always thought these were my own problems that I created. However, I am seeing major patterns. I hope I can break free and learn new habits. I am trying to wake my family up that they need to clean up and stop spending too.

Thanks for the information!

Hello there. If your brother isn't drooling from the mouth, it's because he hasn't had psychiatric medications. Therefore he still has a chance to recover, because his brain wasn't mortally damaged and turned into oatmeal.

The reasons for any specific hoarding behaviors always relate to the cause quite exactly. The cause is not to be found through a strictly linear, or "logical", or intellectual examination of the hoarder's life. I suspect it usually goes back over many lifetimes.

I know my position is a controversial one, and offers no easy solution for either hoarders or those who had to live/work with hoarders. I only want to point out that there is a huge difference between managing a chronic condition and curing it. I personally am willing to do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to achieve the latter. I do realize that not everyone has the desire or resources to take this stand.

CriticalMass,

Ironic that you bring up the Hughes example. My brother works on a former Hughes property. He has seen Hughes' office there. He has idolized him a bit as a successful man. I tried to point out the fact that if a billionaire like Hughes could get mentally ill, why not him?

But he is in severe denial. It is as if there is an unwritten rule of the universe that states that he, being the older brother and a "leader" (as he calls himself), can never get mentally ill.

I also think he doesn't really understand that term. He sees the mentally ill as people locked up in psychiatric hospitals, drooling from the mouth, speaking incoherently. He doesn't realize you can be basically sane and still mentally ill at the same time.

Yes, I was even raised by a neatnik mom, and I can't believe how trashy I got to - I didn't go out and collect garbage, but kept too many scrips and scraps of paper, ribbon, magazines, and other bits and pieces "for crafts someday" LOL! I finally saw the light.

It's still time-consuming getting rid of it all. Try to be patient with your friend or loved one. Have you ever read about Howard Hughes or see the movie "Aviator" with Leonardo DiCaprio? Hughes was a very intelligent man, yet he had some kind of severe OCD/hoarding thing going on that defied normal logic. Some of the things he did were downright gross. He needed help but since he was rich he was able to conceal his condition, and never got help. Very sad.

Thanks Tille and CriticalMass.

I didn't know about the chromosomal connection.

I know there are always excuses and I know there are biological or environmental reasons, I just don't understand on the levels of logic and rationality. But then that's like fitting a square peg into a round hole. It's mental illness. It's SUPPOSED to be irrational.

In any case, to me you don't fill up your childhood home with stuff found on the street. Stuff on the street, especially stuff found in back alleys, automatically equals garbage. The house is not a trash bin, especially for other people's things. Therefore, no stuff found goes into the house or is put anywhere on the property. Period. End of story.

Or at least it should be.

Steve, have you heard about the recent discovery of hoarding behavior being linked to a mutation on Chromosome 14? This might explain it in many cases. Here's a Livescience article about it:

http://www.livescience.com/7888-people-hoard-stuff.html

I've serious reason to wonder if I have this mutation - my dad's siblings include several moderate to severe hoarders. There are anxiety disorders as well. On my mom's side, she had anxiety and agoraphobia and I got it too. Cousins on that side have ADHD and autism spectrum, and I have the ADHD and some spectrum traits though below what it would be to have a diagnosis.

And as Tillie mentions there are other brain causes.

There also seems to be a pattern of trauma or grief setting it off or making it get worse. When I was in my 20s I had a horrible messy breakup with a boyfriend and I just crashed and burned. I emerged from it wanting to get away from what I'd been doing before and turned to artwork and crafts which would've been fine except that I accumulated so much STUFF! And since odds and ends can be used in collages, I saved a lot of junky paper and little trinkets. I think you get the picture.

I also read recently that although OCD (which I do have also) is related to hoarding, ADHD might be even more likely to bring it on - due to the trouble a hoarder has in making decisions what to keep or toss, executive functioning deficits in the brain, etc. I can SOOO relate to this when I set out all determined to purge junk and then end up feeling my brain has turned to mush.

Anyway, I hope maybe some of this helps you to understand what it's like to be inside the skull of a hoarder. It's like falling down the rabbit hole and if you're the person trying to help out I'm sure you might feel like it's trying to drag you down the rabbit hole too! But learn all you can and listen to the hoarder if they can try and articulate how it feels to them. Empathy goes a long way. Also, make decluttering sessions short at first so the both of you are less likely to become overwhelmed. Good luck to the both of you!

Hello Steve :)

The guy I have been living with since 1983 slowly started hoarding as an undiagnosed brain tumor was cluttering up his brain for 15 to 18 years.
Prior to this he was almost a minimalist back packing across the country.
Anyways, yadda, yadda, yadda, successful craniotomy, all over & done with but the hoarding behavior still remains.
He is a hard core dumpster diver.
All the inside of the house is clear and clean, except his bedroom, because I declared it a
"NO CLUTTER ZONE" but he has totally filled a huge 2 story garage, carport and half an acre of land with his treasures.
His reasoning is that he likes having it "just in case it comes in handy someday".
"He already has it right here, somewhere? so no going off to buy it if he needs it someday."
"He is saving money by not buying all this stuff."
"If somebody someday needs it, he can happily give it to them."
"People throw away valuable and useful things and he hates seeing it all go to waste."
"He can use it for it's parts to fix some other random thing he picks up."
"He who dies with the most stuff, wins."
I really could write a novel about all his reasons for why he does what he does.
What I think the real reason for his dumpster diving and hoarding is that it makes him feel safe and secure.
Prepared for whatever the zombie apocalypse throws at us and that he can use it as a nest egg in the future.


A couple of good books to read is "Buried In Treasures" and "Digging Out" to help you get a better understanding of the thought processes involved in hoarding behavior.

:)

I tried posting this the other day before Tillie let me know you had to post often a few times before what you wrote comes up.

I mean no disrespect because I know not all hoarders do this, but why would a person clutter their home with stuff they find on the street and in back alleys? A home should be considered too valuable to be brought down and stigmatized by this, especially if it is one's childhood home.

My childhood home is not a repository for everyone else's throwaway stuff. I don't care if my brother finds a Picasso! If it is found in an alley by a garbage bin, it's worth ZILCH as far as hanging it in the home. Sell it if you must, but don't hang it in the home!

If I were visiting someone and saw a nice painting on the wall and asked the person how they got it and they said next to a trash bin in an alley, saying that with a proud, smiling look on their face, I would think that person crazy. I would wonder what was going on with them. Wouldn't they know that that fact brings the value of the item down to ZERO for hanging in their home?

So why would a person degrade their own childhood home with stuff found in back alleys? Why don't they just do what everyone else does and buy such things in a store? Then one can be proud of it. I'd take a couch bought new from a store for $600 over a raggedy one found for free in a back alley any day.