Reddit mentions of Digging Out: Helping Your Loved One Manage Clutter, Hoarding, and Compulsive Acquiring

Hey, tootiredtoclean. Love the user name; I know the feeling well.

I've posted this before, but I will post it again for you.

Here's what I would suggest doing:


First and foremost, learn about this disorder, so you can understand how your parents' minds work. Let me recommend some resources:

• For a fantastic overview of hoarding disorder, read Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things. Written by the two leading researchers in the field, it gives a great layman's explanation of what hoarding is, and especially how hoarders think. I saw a lot of my parents in that book, and it helped me understand their thought processes whenever they express the "need" to save something.
  
  
  
• There's a lot of books on how to organize your home out there, but you may not know that there's one specifically written for family members of compulsive hoarders. Check out Digging Out: Helping Your Loved One Manage Clutter, Hoarding, and Compulsive Acquiring. This book offers a step-by-step plan to help a hoarder clean up. It focuses on harm reduction (more on that later), and dealing with a hoarder who isn't ready to admit that there's a problem. My only criticism of this book is that the writer assumes that the family members do not live with the hoarder, which is something that can drastically affect the family dynamic, so keep that in mind.
  
  
  
• You might also want to look at Buried in Treasures: Help for Compulsive Acquiring, Saving, and Hoarding. This one is written for the hoarder looking for where to start. The section on behavioral experiments to reduce fear of discarding is extremely helpful, and may give you some ideas.
  
  
• Check out the Children of Hoarders web site and forums. The largest support group for adult children of hoarders. They've got a wonderful community there, and can provide lots of emotional support and advice from experience. They also provide support to younger people (teens, etc.) who are still stuck living at home.
  
  
  
• And you might read Jessie Scholl's memoir Dirty Secret, about growing up with a mother that hoards.
  
  
  Next, accept that you have to go at any clean-up very, very slowly. Your parents didn't get into this mess overnight, and they're not going to get out of it overnight. Unless you have a particularly urgent need--the landlord is threatening eviction, the Health Department called, your parents are getting fined massive amounts of money by the city for their hoarding, or some such--do NOT pressure them to get it all done at once. Focus on making progress, not on how fast things get cleaned up.
  
  
  Go slowly. Expect gradual changes. Excavate one tiny area at a time--one tabletop, one corner, one drawer, one shelf in the medicine cabinet. Even if they remove just one piece a day, or only spend ten minutes cleaning, remember that they are dealing with things. Their disorder means that they just have to do it in baby steps. Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint.
  
  
  Here's why you marathon this. Hoarding is often associated in the public's mind with OCD, but current research indicates that it has a lot more to do with anxiety disorder than anything else. One common feature that hoarders share is that they experience extremely intense emotional anxiety/pain whenever they part with any of their things. So, in order to avoid the anxiety, they keep everything.
  
  The solution to that is to have the hoarder learn to live with the anxiety for a while, so the hoarder can learn that it doesn't last.
  
  
  Take a look at this post. A hoarder trying to de-hoard gave away a saddle, and posted while she was in the grip of the resulting anxiety. As you look at the comments, you can see that she did eventually work through the most intense part of her anxiety in a couple of days. Now, the next time she gives something away she cares about, she won't feel the anxiety as intensely. Same with the next time, and the next time, and the time after that. And eventually, it will hardly matter if she gives something away she knows she doesn't want anymore.
  
  
  That's the lesson that your parents have to learn--that the emotional pain from the anxiety does pass, and that it gets less intense as they continue to de-hoard. This is why you go slowly. If you go too fast, the anxiety quickly becomes overwhelming, and they either shut down or lash out to escape it.
  
  
  Think of it this way. Imagine that, for every individual object you throw away/recycle/donate--even something as small as a gum wrapper--someone breaks your finger. You quickly realize that, if you through away five gum wrappers, that person will break all five fingers on your hand. For ten, he breaks your whole hand. For a garbage back full of trash? He beats you like Ike beat Tina, and breaks every bone in your body....
  
  
  That's what your parents experience. That's why they resist getting rid of stuff. Keep that in mind, and it will help you not push your parents too fast. It's frustrating, I know, but the fear and pain is very real to them. This also gets to the root of why they resist you--you become the person who's breaking their bones when you try to get rid of their hoard. And just because they can eventually learn that the pain fades doesn't mean that they enjoy getting their bones broken.
  
  (cont'd)