There is this new show I have started watching called Hoarders. Don’t ask me when or what channel as I couldn’t tell you (I DVR everything). Anyway I was watching it last night, and this woman goes to a store and just shops for stuff. She finds stuff she thinks are deals, especially on clearance and just buys them. Then she takes them home and her house is just piles and piles of stuff. Some of the stuff is still in the bag from the store. And this was no small house. The basement was full as was the two car garage. It got so bad her two children were taken away from her and her husband. There is stuff everywhere and mice are rampant. So in comes the Hoarders shows and they bring in this psychologist and a team of cleaners. They work with this women to clean out her house, but instead of throwing it all away she get these portable storage things and fills four of them. Because she couldn’t get rid of the stuff, even though it was in the storage pods DCFS wouldn’t give them their child’s back because she hadn’t dealt with her hoarding problem. This women’s husband ended up filing for divorce so he could get custody of the kids.
Another episode a family was going to be evicted from their home if they didn’t clean it up. So again in come the Hoarders show and the psychologist. The husband was the hoarder in this situation, but it was exacerbated by the wife who was a shopper. She had shopped so much she had put the family into major financial problems. As the woman is showing the psychologist around the house and they are climbing over stuff they are standing in the hall of this house on a pile of laundry. The psychologist asked the women what it was, and she said “it’s my laundry basket”.
The first episode I saw a woman had to clean up for one reason or another and she would freak out over everything they would throw away. The psychologist was talking to her about a vacuum cleaner that didn’t work and the women said she was going to fix it and sell it at a yard sale. The psychologist then asked her how many yard sales she had ever had and the answer was zero. Apparently this woman’s hoarding had been seriously affecting her relationship with her daughters, and the psychologist asked the women what was more important the broken vacuum cleaner or her daughters, and the woman couldn’t answer. I was flabbergasted.
There was a woman who hoarded food. Now as a Mormon, I can appreciate this to a degree, but she was hoarding perishable food, even after it was rotten. These houses were so full of stuff you couldn’t even sit down and in some cases there are not even pathways because there is so much stuff.
There are two reasons I am so focused on this phenomenon. The first is for work occasionally when we do a search warrant on a house we have to go into situations where the people are hoarders. Talk about a nightmare, a warrant that should only take a couple of hours turns into an all day event and sometimes late into the night because you have to go through all the stuff. This one time the house we went into had piles of stuff everywhere. There was no flat surface in the house that did not have something on it piled high. There were pathways through the house and there was no place to sit and the bed had two strips of bear space where they slept. Even the garage was full of stuff with pathways one to the left and one to the right. The closets were packed full and sometimes overflowing. And a lot of it was garbage and old mail, I mean really old junk mail from the nineties most of which was unopened.
My second reason for being fascinated with this phenomenon is I honestly believe I could be a hoarder if I allowed myself to be. Watching the women shop last night for stuff and bargains I saw what I could be. When I go to Target for instance I could wander around there for hours and I see so many things I would love to have or that I think are neat. When I was a kid my mom says you couldn’t even see the floor in my room. I wonder what happened to me to make that change. Now clutter drives me nuts and if my surroundings are a mess, I have to clean them up before I can relax. There are several people we know when we go to their house I struggle with being there. You go to the bathroom and there is so much stuff on the counter around the sink you can’t even turn around without knocking stuff over. When I come home from doing a search warrant on a cluttered house, I go into spring cleaning mode no matter what the season and things start getting thrown out of the house and the vacuum goes into overdrive.
Overall I am amazed at peoples need to hold onto things which are of no importance. Sometimes these things are broken, unusable, unsanitary and just taking up space and they can’t even get to most of it. The women who couldn’t decide what was more important her daughter or the broken vacuum really made me sad. For whatever reason I am able to control my compulsion to hoard I am grateful because I would hate to think I was letting “stuff” control my life.
Another episode a family was going to be evicted from their home if they didn’t clean it up. So again in come the Hoarders show and the psychologist. The husband was the hoarder in this situation, but it was exacerbated by the wife who was a shopper. She had shopped so much she had put the family into major financial problems. As the woman is showing the psychologist around the house and they are climbing over stuff they are standing in the hall of this house on a pile of laundry. The psychologist asked the women what it was, and she said “it’s my laundry basket”.
The first episode I saw a woman had to clean up for one reason or another and she would freak out over everything they would throw away. The psychologist was talking to her about a vacuum cleaner that didn’t work and the women said she was going to fix it and sell it at a yard sale. The psychologist then asked her how many yard sales she had ever had and the answer was zero. Apparently this woman’s hoarding had been seriously affecting her relationship with her daughters, and the psychologist asked the women what was more important the broken vacuum cleaner or her daughters, and the woman couldn’t answer. I was flabbergasted.
There was a woman who hoarded food. Now as a Mormon, I can appreciate this to a degree, but she was hoarding perishable food, even after it was rotten. These houses were so full of stuff you couldn’t even sit down and in some cases there are not even pathways because there is so much stuff.
There are two reasons I am so focused on this phenomenon. The first is for work occasionally when we do a search warrant on a house we have to go into situations where the people are hoarders. Talk about a nightmare, a warrant that should only take a couple of hours turns into an all day event and sometimes late into the night because you have to go through all the stuff. This one time the house we went into had piles of stuff everywhere. There was no flat surface in the house that did not have something on it piled high. There were pathways through the house and there was no place to sit and the bed had two strips of bear space where they slept. Even the garage was full of stuff with pathways one to the left and one to the right. The closets were packed full and sometimes overflowing. And a lot of it was garbage and old mail, I mean really old junk mail from the nineties most of which was unopened.
My second reason for being fascinated with this phenomenon is I honestly believe I could be a hoarder if I allowed myself to be. Watching the women shop last night for stuff and bargains I saw what I could be. When I go to Target for instance I could wander around there for hours and I see so many things I would love to have or that I think are neat. When I was a kid my mom says you couldn’t even see the floor in my room. I wonder what happened to me to make that change. Now clutter drives me nuts and if my surroundings are a mess, I have to clean them up before I can relax. There are several people we know when we go to their house I struggle with being there. You go to the bathroom and there is so much stuff on the counter around the sink you can’t even turn around without knocking stuff over. When I come home from doing a search warrant on a cluttered house, I go into spring cleaning mode no matter what the season and things start getting thrown out of the house and the vacuum goes into overdrive.Overall I am amazed at peoples need to hold onto things which are of no importance. Sometimes these things are broken, unusable, unsanitary and just taking up space and they can’t even get to most of it. The women who couldn’t decide what was more important her daughter or the broken vacuum really made me sad. For whatever reason I am able to control my compulsion to hoard I am grateful because I would hate to think I was letting “stuff” control my life.
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