Why people with Hoarding Disorder Hang on to Objects

Carolyn Rodriguez, MD, PhD, explains why people with hoarding disorder (HD) hang on to objects.

[Fa-geik]

I came here to find a solution to my mom’s hoarding issues and found everyone in the comments suffering from the exact same issue with their moms mostly, I don’t feel alone in this anymore thank you everyone this was a quick therapy 😂

[mikel]

Hoarders are eternal optimists. No matter how unlikely it might be, a hoarder is fully convinced that one day they'll have the time, energy, creativity, or necessity to use every single item they've held onto.

[hilossrt]

I also feel that poverty plays a role in developing hoarding tendencies. I come from a family of hoarders and I myself was a hoarder and and in some respects still hoard to some extent. I feel that it derives from the need to acquire resources when one doesn’t really have the wealth to just go out and buy what we need when we need it. We feel like we need to keep everything that we could possibly use in the future because we may not have the resources to acquire the item in the future when we would need it. I have noticed that over time as my income level has increased my tendency towards hoarding has decreased significantly because now the space things take up out way their potential future value.

[toosense]

It’s a never ending bottomless pit that can never be filled because the need is not material but emotional. Each item, regardless of its significance, was a shot of dopamine and in that moment was a relief. When you ask a hoarder to get rid of stuff, you are asking them to surrender their methods of coping and that makes them extremely vulnerable.

[has]

This describes my wife exactly. She saves paper bags, egg cartons, toilet paper rolls, etc. always telling me "I have a plan" - but nothing ever materializes, it just accumulates. This is probably the most cogent description of this problem I've heard.

[pukasmom]

I have a hoarding issue that I've struggled with for years, maybe I can help some of you understand why the people you love struggle with this horrible disorder. My hoarding comes from loss and It's painful to even talk about but I want to overcome it so I will attempt to explain. When I was 18 and just had my son my Mom died suddenly and My whole family fell apart after the first year without my Mom we were evicted from our house they gave us 3 days, to move and I had nowhere to go with my son who was 10 months. I was left alone with the responsibility of packing up all My Mom's things and all of our things with nowhere to put them. There was no storage at that time and long story short it was traumatic. I had to decide what was worth keeping and what to throw away or give to my neighbors. I managed to save the things that meant the most to my Mom and managed to keep them for years I even shipped them to Hawaii from California when I moved here. Something happened and I had everything in storage here and there was a bookkeeping mistake and someone wrote down I owed $400 when It was only $40 I owed, they auction off my storage without my knowledge and I lost all my things, my kid's things, and my Mom and Dads pictures and personal family things that meant so much to me. I felt as if someone I loved had died all over again. I lost everything and when I started over again I noticed it was hard to throw anything away, weird things like envelopes and stupid things. Later I lost everything again and I started over and still find it almost impossible to get rid of things I don't need or want. I've been working with my therapist doing a new therapy called "brain spotting " I believe it's working and I will continue doing it. I believe when you face a loss that is really painful your subconscious remembers and if associated with the pain of losing someone with the pain of losing things it will prevent you from letting go of anything. It's a very difficult thing to deal with and it's just as hard on the people who love the person suffering from this disorder. If possible try to get your loved one to try Brain spotting with a therapist. It's new, it's proven to work and it's shockingly easy to do. From what I understand It rewires your brain to process the trauma of the loss associated with the root cause of hoarding. You use it for all kinds of trauma and PTSD. ALOHA 🙏💖🧘‍♀️🕊🌎

[aafkgirl]

This is a thing im really ashamed of, because people can be so mean instead of showing love 😢
So, im gonna say it.
I'm.. I'm a hoarder..
And I've finally asked for help ❤

[richellepeace]

Because becoming attached to an object is usually more reliable than attachments to people. Objects do not betray, gossip, judge, sabotage, etc.

[Blarnix]

It all seems like a coping mechanism. A fear of missing out or of abandonment. They’re afraid of losing things or losing people, so they hold on as tight as they possibly can.

[helenndow]

I have been accused of hoarding foodstuff but I cannot ever forget being painfully hungry at age 10 and having to queue up for over 2 hours for one potato in Berlin in 1946

[Ed-tykr]

Tell that to my mother, and she will tell you 10 excuses in quick succession, before she creates a verbal dispute over it. Watching her had made me realize anything you own or even plan on owning, always ends up owning you.

[Corinthians.]

If you personally struggle with hoarding, in a particular area (such as clothes or craft items for me), I have been practicing the therapy where you go to the store (for one specific item) and you don't buy anything just because you feel you "have to." Instead of talking myself into it or buying on impulse, I told myself all the reasons NOT to buy it....one of which is I am in the middle of decluttering. I am proud to say I have gone in three stores recently and come out with nothing, not giving into that urge to buy something because I "have to." If they don't have what I came for, I work on not buying something else just because then it's like a wasted trip to the store. Online shopping is the real problem, because then I can find the exact item I want and it's must harder to say "No."

Two other things that I have found affective is:

1) Start an IN and an OUT list (I keep it side by side in a stenographers notebook). IN is for what you bring in (not like mail or groceries), and OUT is what you get rid of. This way, you can try to make sure you are sending more out than you are bringing in, or at least, you are keeping it even....for everything I bring in, did something go out? Doesn't have to be big in size to be considered a "big" item you get rid of. Might just be something that was kicking around from pillar to post that you use occasionally, or might use some day.... Or might be something with strong sentimental value but you decide the memory of that event or that person is more valuble.

2) Write out your goals in life (one of mine is to live in house beautiful -- as in neat and clean -- and then anything that doesn't fit those goals has to go. I REALLY need to do this again. I do understand that to a true hoarder his or her goal is to use EVERYTHING they have...to fix it, revamp it, sell it, gift it, create with it....on and on. Or maybe their goal is to shut people out, build walls of protection around themselves or fill the void with for them, I'm sure it's much harder. But, if you just trend toward hoarder tendencies, this can really help.

When push come to shove, it's the old: What would you grab if there was a fire? Probably your loved ones would be about it. If you put it in that light, WHY do we have all this stuff?

Anyway, sorry for long posts, but writing some of this out, is some of my therapy. I DO NOT want to live in a full on hoard, and I have stuff with no place to put it, so I am working on paring Thanks for listening, if you read this far, and maybe this will help some of you to declutter as well.

[jcortese]

I feel like this is a bit of an oversimplification. The people I've known who could disappear under what they call "clutter" seem to almost index their memories by the objects they own. It's as if they can't remember things unless they have something in their hand that is associated with the event And hence throwing things out to them seems to feel like they are throwing out the memories themselves. I feel like we need to understand how the brain actually stores and indexes memories in the hoarder mind to grasp why they act like throwing out an object is as if they were throwing a part of themselves into the trash. It goes beyond "oh, this plastic cup makes me feel happy about remembering that day at the beach" and into "if I throw this cup away, that pleasant day at the beach will literally be wiped from my life."

[annehoskins]

You are spot on! Another phenomenon I have noticed while watching TV programs about this topic is that these people have a psychosocial need that is not being met. They could have suffered the loss of a loved one through death or divorce. I have a hoarding disorder myself. I have had trouble all my life with socialization. I always felt controlled by other people while having little control over anything myself. Inanimate objects do not leave you, you have control over them, they outlive people etc.

[smuirhead]

Many, if not most of our parents were raised by parents who survived the recession of the 1930s. Learned to hang onto things because even if you wouldn't need it, somebody might and you scrimp and save what you can. It's not that crazy, it's human nature. Letting go of things demands us to face our emotional past and that is the hard part.

[odietamo]

Something she didn’t mention is simply procrastination and lack of time and energy. True, I’m rather a hoarder, I guess. I could get rid of quite a few things, but it’s a lot of work. I’m not as young and not as healthy as I used to be, so putting in the work to go through lots and lots of things in order to sort out what I can get rid of and what needs to be kept takes a lot of time and energy. It’s so easy to every day put it off until tomorrow. “I’ll go through that box over there later this week”, I tell myself. Meanwhile my apartment gets a little bit more out of control. It’s also not as if I have nothing else that has to be done.

[Georgia-Vic]

My Grandparents raised me.They were born in the early 1920's.My Grandpa saved tools, nuts, bolts, screws, nails and washers. He always fixed things and hardly ever threw anything away.My Grandma saved and refused plastic bags, jars and containers, bread ties, rubber bands, clothes and everything else. We only tossed things in the trash that weren't able to be reused or repaired.I am almost 55 and I still have a "collecting" personality lol. They grew up in a time where food, tools and clothing was scarce.I don't. I make excuses for hoarding like: "Oh this is useful, all kinds of things can be done with it, if I don't find a use for it, then it will be wasted and I am a careless person!"...all the while, it is only just an empty container.I have been known to wash out a soup can just so that I can make a "change jar" from it!🙀 I am learning that the world doesn't end if I throw something in the trash. Slowly my apartment is getting bigger and there are less fall hazards!

[joygernautm]

I practice Swedish death cleaning. Once a year I go through everything I own and I look at it and think “if I was to die today is this some thing I would want my family to have to deal with”.

[ericrodriguez]

My parents will literally fish things out of the garbage and defend its usefulness. Every time I try to confront them about it, they deny it.

[ideoformsun]

I noticed that once a hoarder comes into possession of something, it becomes part of their identity. Like a new body part. And any space that they have control of is like inside their skin. And that is why forcibly removing it from them feels to them like having surgery without any anesthetic. It's very visceral, and they truly feel pain. But it's not always pain from past trauma. They have had some kind of brain damage or brain disorder. It's not intentional. It can start in childhood, but it doesn't get diagnosed until later on when they are old enough to have space of their own that they can control, and have easier ability to acquire things.

There is some kind of visual problem they have that needs to be researched. They can't visualize spaces very well, they don't know what can fit where. They can't locate things right in front of them. For them, out of sight is out of mind. So as a new layer is added to a pile, the old layer disappears to them. So they can't find anything, and end up buying/bringing in another one. The walls close in, and all they notice is the edges of things.

There is this phenomenon that occurs when you loose a limb, that is called phantom limb. The missing limb still feels like it's there. It can feel pain. If you put a mirror to reflect the existing limb so it looks like the missing limb is still there, it can resolve this. I think this brain mechanism is a miswiring that happens in some people, so that any loss feels like a lost body part. Their identity is completely wrapped up in their body, and their body identity is completely confused with their sense of ownership of things they acquire. It's the complete literalization of identity and the literal interpretation of the abstract concept of what it means to own or be in control of something. I think that if more research gets done, they might find a link to Autism, which can be caused by brain damage, and faulty mirror neurons. And Autistics are very literal, have trouble with executive function, often have attention deficit, and OCD, and social anxiety. They often relate better to objects than people. They misunderstand people, and people misunderstand them, because even though they have emotions, they are unable to express them well, and are unable to manage their emotions.

I think that those people who seem to begin hoarding after a traumatic event, a huge loss, might have some hoarding tendencies that they were able to manage and overcome somehow, but after the trauma, couldn't. I think a serious loss can cause brain dysfunction, just like a mild traumatic brain injury. People have died of a broken heart. It's even a syndrome. It's like an electrical circuit that gets blown.

One hoarder had lost a young child and a father and a brother. But this only made the hoarding much worse. He didn't handle grief well. But he had been hoarding since childhood. And of his four other siblings, he was the only hoarder. As he got lonely, but mistrusted attachments to people, he spent more and more of his time shopping, and searching out treasures, because he had trouble making plans, and being organized enough to keep them.

I formulated these ideas while helping several hoarders clean out, one of which was an Autistic adult. And from parenting an Autistic adult, (who is not a hoarder.)