For a hoarder, staying clean isn’t really about bins and labels; it’s about processing items that come into the house. A good organizer can help a hoarder develop methods for sorting mail, for staying on top of recycling, and for making sure donated items get to their destinations. The organizer teaches the hoarder life skills, and the follow-up visits reinforce those skills. An organizer is like a coach, a motivator, and, occasionally, a policeman.
The repetition of bad cleaning skills is usually what got the hoarder into trouble in the first place, so an organizer works on repetition of new, positive cleaning skills. That helps the hoarder build better behaviors over the long term.
STAYING ON TRACK
While every hoarding situation may have its unique characteristics, I’ve found there are a number of keys that help all hoarders stay clean. Certainly, all of the elements that were discussed in the first part of this chapter are critical—selfknowledge, therapy, having a support network, focusing on more positive replacement behaviors, and so on—but the day-to-day job of staying uncluttered often requires some practical guidelines and innovative thinking. Most hoarders need guidance on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis.
Many of the ideas and exercises that follow will fall to the helpers to carry out, but most will ultimately become the responsibility of the hoarders themselves.
▶ Positive Reinforcement
Family and friends, in fact anyone on the “team” that has a continuing relationship with a hoarder, needs to understand that, like a recovering addict, a hoarder is going to struggle for the rest of his or her life. The hoarder needs to move ahead one day at a time and revel in the small successes.
When two of my workers and I showed up to take Aimee out to a celebratory lunch after her cleanup, she tried her best to look presentable. Her lipstick was all over her teeth and halfway across her face, her hair was teased into a messy pile on top of her head, and her clothes were definitely out of fashion. Did we say anything? No way. We were celebrating her big moment and enjoyed our time together with someone who only a short while earlier was leaning off the edge of her bed to use the bathroom because she was too depressed to get up and walk ten feet to the toilet.
Nika and Andre sent us photos of the Thanksgiving dinner they hosted at their house a few weeks after the cleanup. Was the dining room pristine? Of course not, but we didn’t focus on the few boxes of shoes still in the corner, the worn carpet, or the peeling paint on the woodwork. We cheered them for finally inviting guests into their home.
When a hoarder first invites friends into the house, or chooses to throw away an old magazine, or tidies a two-foot-square space in the bedroom, those are all huge steps that everyone should recognize and celebrate. The goal is to build hope. There might be slipups, but positive reinforcement for even a tiny step forward encourages hoarders to realize that life can and will be better.
We leave notes around a house, in places like the bathroom mirror or inside the front door where the hoarder is sure to look every day. The notes read “You can do it!” or “You can stay clean!” This may sound corny, but hoarders tell us it makes a huge difference to be reminded that someone believes in them. The notes are a small way that we stay connected with hoarders, and they remember that we helped them clean up and that we know they can stay clean. We used to think that hoarders would eventually throw these notes out, but we have found that they keep them because they like to be reminded of how far they have come. Over time, I think the notes become small trophies throughout the home.
With hoarding, we are not just cleaning a home; we are teaching the hoarder that it is okay to love himself or herself again. We are encouraging someone who has felt worthless to feel that he or she has value and a life purpose. Positive reinforcement is about more than just giving compliments on how de-cluttered everything is. It’s about noticing and reinforcing the hoarder’s change in thinking and habits. It’s about the hoarder moving toward new life goals and becoming a different person.
▶ Task Reminders
Posting notes around the house also serves another purpose: reminding people what needs to be done.
Like most hoarders I’ve worked with, Katrina responded really well to positive reinforcement. She was also able to do many jobs on her own. But because she lived alone, there was nobody to remind Katrina of her daily tasks, and also nobody to give her praise and encouragement when she followed through. To make up for this, we posted small signs all over her house. For example, she had a tendency to stack paperwork and books on the basement stairs, so we put a note on the banister that said, “Do not put papers here! Take them downstairs!” We also put up positive reinforcement cheers to bolster her clutter-free habits.
Some hoarders need reminders of daily tasks. So, for Lucy, the crafting hoarder, we added more specific guidelines: We put a note over the kitchen sink that reminded her to finish the dishes every evening and another taped to the kitchen table prompting her to take any purchased items out of their bags immediately and put them away (a common problem with shopping hoarders). Many hoarders have trouble taking out the trash or recycling, so a note on or over the trash bin can remind a hoarder that when the kitchen garbage has been bagged, to take it immediately all the way out to the outside can instead of leaving it by the back door. A note by the front door can remind a hoarder to carry the donation box out to the car as soon as it is full. And a note in the car can remind the hoarder to drop the box off at the church or other donation site.
Some hoarders I know use a “chore” chart, just like the one parents sometimes make for their kids, with gold stars for a job well done. This may sound a little juvenile, but if rewarding a fifty-five-year-old woman with gold stars (or even a big red check mark) encourages her to keep her home clean and gives her confidence and self-worth for the first time in twenty years, so be it. Hoarding is not normal; sometimes it takes unusual tools to help people.
Reminders and rewards are forever being debated in education and parenting circles, with some experts saying that parents should not reward a child for something that the child simply is supposed to do for the greater good of the family. I like that theory, but when you are dealing with a hoarder, the circumstances are quite different. For one thing, a hoarder often has had decades of repeated bad behavior, while a child is starting off fresh. Reminders and rewards should always be personalized to each hoarder’s needs. We brought one hoarder her coffee each time we came to visit. If the house was clean, she got the latte; if the chores weren’t done, I enjoyed a really nice coffee in front of a very sad woman. I only drank the coffee once because the chores were completed on every follow-up visit after that.
▶ Personal Space
The challenge for Jackson was that he had moved in with Mike, and both of them were concerned that Jackson’s clutter might expand and take over the house they shared. Jackson was tidy; he just kept too many things. For him, the rule of “personal space” became his anti-hoarding mantra.
To establish hoarding boundaries, each family member should get a defined space in the house. For Jackson it was his closet and his own vanity and sink in the bathroom. Brad and Ellen implemented the same rule—Brad got his desk, and Ellen got the basement bookshelf. Their three children each got a large toy bin. Each family member’s personal space—where it is and how big it is—needs to be agreed upon by everyone in the household. Nobody should ever “loan” personal space to another family member, because once that happens, that space is lost forever and becomes potential cause for fighting.
Everyone should agree that there won’t be any arguments about what actually goes in a person’s designated space (unless it’s unsanitary). It doesn’t matter what is being collected, just as long as it stays in its space.
The rest of the house is shared space. For anything to stay in the shared space, the family (or maybe just the adults) must agree on the item. If they can’t agree, it either goes into someone’s personal space, or it goes out. This rule is all about respect and bou
ndaries.
Setting boundaries forces hoarders to live in the here and now and take responsibility for their stuff. It also prevents other household members from blaming the hoarder for all family dysfunction. Following the rules of both shared space and personal space forces the hoarder and other family members to communicate and to work together as a team to keep the home clean.
▶ A Place for Everything
Wendy had a lifetime of hoarding to overcome when Sam moved in with her. Once the house was cleaned, and their prescription drug bottle collection had been cleared out, the main problem was still that Wendy had never really learned how to organize a house. She just put things down wherever there was space, or wherever she happened to be standing. She didn’t see problems with food being in the living room or dirty clothes in the kitchen.
The Ten-Minute Sweep
CANDACE TENDED TO let clutter pile up because she wasn’t processing it on a daily basis. With her OCD and control issues she would put off emptying her shopping bags or clearing a table because she felt like she couldn’t do it in the most perfect way possible. The main issue for Candace was to just attack clutter daily, before it got out of hand.
For the “ten-minute sweep,” each family member (even children) chooses a specific small area to focus on. It’s important to keep the cleaning area small and achievable; I suggest no more than a two-foot-square area.The person sets a timer and spends ten minutes cleaning that area. This doesn’t mean just moving things from that space to a nearby chair or pile. All trash actually goes into the trash. Items to be donated need to go into the donation box. Other things that need to leave the house (library books or store returns, for example) go next to the front door, to be taken out the next day. Following through is the key. Simply shifting items from one room to another is a waste of time. Taking action and pushing through to completion is what gets an area clean.
Cleaning a house for an entire day is not realistic for most hoarders, but a ten-minute sweep is doable for even ADD hoarders who get easily distracted.The time limit gets them to micro-focus on a very specific task, and they can visually see great results immediately. Feeling good about what has been accomplished is a huge part of cleaning.
For Wendy and Sam, the best rule was “everything has a home.” We made a list of their main household items and where they went—for example, pill bottles in the bathroom medicine cabinet, laundry in the hamper, and food in the kitchen cabinets. This may seem like a fundamental rule that everyone learns as a child, but many hoarders didn’t pick that up either because they grew up in hoarder houses themselves, or they grew up in traumatic households where finding a meal or avoiding a beating was a daily reality. Cleaning was the least of their worries. Others may have learned but have forgotten after years of living in their own hoarder chaos.
It helps to add a guideline that like things go together. This means, for example, that clothing should be grouped: A dresser should be near the closet instead of being across the room. Bathroom supplies, like towels and extra shampoo, should be in a closet or on a shelf in or near the bathroom instead of in the kitchen pantry. A basket or drawer for incoming mail should be near the desk or table where the checkbook or computer is for paying bills. Batteries, car keys, candy, and my son’s comb do not all go in the same bucket and should all go to their separate homes.
This rule works well combined with reminders posted around the home that say things like “Pill bottles don’t go here—they go in the medicine cabinet.” Those notes can reinforce for hoarders where things are supposed to go, especially in the early days immediately after a cleanup when the hoarder is still learning the new layout of the house.
▶ In = Out
Lucy’s main issue was similar to Jackson’s: She just brought far too many craft and baking supplies into the house. After her cleanup, we made the attic her “personal space” to limit her craft items. But Lucy lived alone, so there wasn’t anyone there to enforce the space rule when things started to spill into other rooms of the house.
So, in addition to the “every item has a home” rule, Lucy added “in = out,” meaning that whenever something new comes into the house—whether going into personal or shared space—something of equal size must leave. It doesn’t matter if that item goes into the trash, to a donation site, or into recycling. It just needs to go out of the house immediately. For Lucy, this meant that she could only bring home a new bag of yarn if she had already used up the same amount of yarn or donated the same amount the day before. This means she would always have roughly the same volume of stuff in her house.
Hint for Shopaholics
A SHOPAHOLIC HOARDER can slip into old habits easily; the familiar excitement of finding a bargain or the overwhelming urge to buy a special gift for a loved one is strong. I recommend that such a hoarder take a buddy the first few times the hoarder shops. The friend should be prepared to ask the hoarder the tough questions: “Do you need this or just want it?” “Will it make your life better?” “Does the person for whom you are buying this really need it or just want it?” “Where will it go?” “What will you get rid of to make room for this?” This is an opportunity to help hoarders change behavior by reminding them of their rules and boundaries and concentrating on the long-term goals. (Hopefully, they have to pay cash rather than using credit cards—an even better incentive.)
IGNORING THE RULES
Sometimes hoarders just flat-out ignore their follow-up rules, either feeling like they are silly or claiming that they can stay clean without them. This is really a form of denial, and if a hoarder gets stuck here, there isn’t much anyone can do. The only way a hoarder will stay clean is if the hoarder’s desire to achieve an overall goal is stronger than the urge to hang on to things. It sometimes works to keep reminding the hoarder of this goal, and how the rules are the only way to reach it. I will sometimes push a little bit, saying something like “I’m not judging you about this stack of mail, but let’s make sure we take care of it—right now.”
If a hoarder continually refuses help, then eventually there’s nothing more to do. Recovering from hoarding is a lifelong struggle, and unfortunately many people just don’t make it. The reality is that not all hoarders can be saved.
At that point it is still possible to stay involved in a hoarder’s life, but only if the family can stop focusing on the hoarding. The only things to do then are simply to get the hoarder out of the house frequently and work on building a relationship outside of hoarding, and continue to be positive and encouraging.
BACKSLIDING
Almost every hoarder I have worked with has had at least a few lapses back into old behaviors. I try to shut these down immediately. That means figuring out what the cause is and talking about that with the hoarder. The thing to remember is that recovery is a journey, one that the hoarder will be on for the rest of his or her life. Some backsliding is inevitable, but it doesn’t mean the cleanup is a failure. It just means you have to be aware of what caused it, jump on making a change, and stay supportive.
▶ Hoarder Hangover
Many of our hoarders go through our entire mental and physical process and do everything we ask. They work hard, they let go of beloved items, they put their families first, and the home gets cleaned. They are happy that the home is cleaned, but that can turn into an elation that’s just as excessive as the depression was before.
The born-again mentality is understandable because the hoarder has been paralyzed by this disease, and the cleanup and self-awareness have helped the hoarder be happy for the first time in years. Three to four days after our cleanup crew leaves, however, the reality sets in for the hoarder that all of his or her stuff is actually gone. That’s when the “hoarder hangover” kicks in.
The hoarder has lost the security that he or she felt from the stuff. Often the hoarder doesn’t know where anything is and freaks out. The hoarder starts to doubt the trust that was put in the cleanup crew people, and begins thinking that possessions have been stolen. The
hoarder feels foolish for believing that his or her life could be gotten back together.
This is also the point at which the hoarder comes to a painful realization: The rest of his or her life troubles can no longer be blamed on the hoarding. During the hoarding phase, the hoarder has been telling himself or herself that everything else—debt, relationships, health, job—will be dealt with once the house is clean. Now the house is clean, and those problems all come crashing down on the hoarder. The hoarder hangover starts with the hoarder wanting to know where one specific item is, but within an hour it can blow up into a pounding headache of self-doubt, anger, and insecurity.
The hoarder hangover is actually good. It means the hoarder is experiencing honest emotions and is taking the process seriously. I personally believe it’s a mental cleansing of all the negative feelings, just as the physical cleaning got rid of excess possessions. It’s the beginning of a new phase of the hoarder’s life. The hoarder phase was characterized by depression through years of living in chaos. The cleanup gave a brief high. The post-cleaning phase will hopefully be a steady rise toward a lifelong high of being clutter-free. But it will be a slow process as the hoarder deals with relinquishing bad habits, replacing behaviors, going through therapy, working with an organizer, and learning how to keep the home clean.
The hangover can last a few hours or a few days. With support and encouragement, the hoarder can usually come back to reality and keep working. I warn hoarders to expect the hangover, and tell them not to cancel any plans for the future when they are feeling anxious or low. I focus on the good that the hoarder has done.
The Secret Lives of Hoarders: True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter Page 16
