This is about a topic that’s not often discussed. It’s about the loneliness of hoarding.
It begins with a person feeling that their home is not tidy enough to invite people round, and can get to the stage where there is so much clutter they are too embarrassed even to let workmen in to repair broken appliances.
One woman I’ve been working with has lived like this for over twelve years. Every room in her 3-bedroom house is piled high to the ceiling with clutter, and the only place she can now sleep is in the hallway near the front door, on a small mattress that she keeps propped up against the wall during the day. Her two dogs sleep next to her, which means she doesn’t get much rest because they move around and fidget all night long. Her heating, hot water system and toilet packed up long ago, so now the only functioning plumbing she has is a cold water tap in the kitchen. She uses this to wash her dishes and bathe herself. To flush the toilet, she uses a bucket of water that she carries up the stairs to the bathroom.
Like many hoarders I’ve met, she’s an intelligent, well-educated, warm-hearted person. She’s appalled at the situation she has got herself into but feels powerless to do anything about it. The first time she invited me to visit, she repeated over and over as she showed me round, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this,’ meaning she couldn’t believe she was actually letting someone see the truth about how she lives. She has so much shame about it that she has chosen to live in lonely isolation rather than reveal her problem to anyone. She only let me in because she had become so desperate for help.
Some people theorise that hoarders have an inability to form relationships with people so they gather objects around themselves instead. In some cases this is true, but for many it isn’t. A significant part of the depression they feel may be because so many of their friendships have slipped away. When helped to sort through their things, this type of hoarder will create huge piles of items they want to give to people they know, in an attempt to foster whatever tenuous relationships they have left. But unless their friends are hoarders too, the gifts are usually in such poor condition that they are likely to be thrown straight into the bin by the recipient.
So there they are, trapped in their home with all their possessions around them, realising how lonely life has become. Abandoned by family and friends, shunned by neighbours, and largely ignored by local authorities, many are utterly alone in their predicament. An estimated 3% of people living in the West have hoarding problems, so there could well be someone like this in your street.
It’s a sad state of affairs and one there is no easy answer to. I don’t profess to have a sweeping solution. Each person is unique and requires an individually tailored approach. But if my writings in some small way can help to change the toxic stigma attached to hoarding and replace it with some measure of insight and compassion, perhaps more people stuck in this situation will feel able to seek help, and perhaps more help will be forthcoming.
One thing I do know. Trying to change a hoarder doesn’t work. They have to want to change, and some would rather die with their clutter than go through the distressing process of dealing with it. Ultimately, the best help of all is spotting hoarding behaviour before it becomes too entrenched. Support given at that early stage can often be very effective. But for that to happen there has to be more public awareness and more reaching out from the local community rather than ignoring the issue and hoping it will go away.
Copyright © Karen Kingston 2013
Resources
Help For Hoarders (UK)
Hoarding Cleanup (USA)