It's Not Just The Hoarder's Fault
When my new client, Sarah, opened the door, the cluttered scene behind her showed me she was a hoarder
. The hallway was barely passable. Her kitchen counter as well as every nook,cranny and flat surface was piled hight with stuff. It was mostly paper but still included the other artifacts hoarders are drawn to: recylables, bags, bottles, books and junk sale goodies.Sarah was a cheerful, senior lady, walker bound but eagerly awaiting scheduled hip surgery and looking forward to "doing things for herself" once again. The Director of her senior apartment complex wanted to evict her for creating a fire hazard. She had to clean up her act.
My initial interview with Sarah gave me the insight I needed to know how to coax her out of some of her precious junk. This is a tender business - hoarding clients are usually emotionally fragile and obsessed with their stuff. Not so with Sarah - she was a decidedly atypical hoarder.
Sarah confessed that she had always been a clutterer and a saver and she came by it honestly - the child of a teacher and a scientist. Experience had taught me that academics are the most likely to become hoarders - they see potential and possibilities in everything!
In this case, however, there was a lot more to Sarah's "hoarding". Sarah had become the keeper of the family history and all the records required therein. Her myriad of boxes contained birth, death,and marriage certificates for her entire family as well as the forgotten artifact of lost loves and failed marriages. Why, I asked, did she have to keep her daughter in law's birth certificate? Sarah's reply, was that her daughter in law didn't want it. In addition, Sarah had done extensive research on the military career of a family member. She had become the keeper of neglected memories. She also confessed that she was keeping the "might want it someday" belongings of three of her adult children. They claimed they wanted it but didn't have room for it. So it was OK for Sarah to store it and navigate around it in her walker in a tiny apartment? I recalled a client who had kept the wedding dresses of all five of her married daughters because "they didn't have room".
So the purpose of Sarah's story is that hoarding, while a complicated issue, cannot always be placed sorely on the shoulders of the sufferer. How much of that stuff really belongs to other family members? If you are a relative of a senior who has a tendency to "keep everything", you might want to consider offering to take your stuff back - you don't have to tell them what you are going to do with it. Please just take it. You can be sure that Sarah's family is going to be given back their birth certificates and other items that really belong to them. If they don't want them, so be it. It won't be part of Sarah's "problem" any longer.
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