Stuff (15 page)

Debra described herself as feeling like a mother bear with cubs: "I'll do whatever it takes to protect my things." No one dared to touch her stuff. She allowed her husband to move her things, because she trusted him. Her mother could move them, too, but only a little. She tried to describe this to me one day: "Picture a cartoon with thought bubbles. I have a hundred million bubbles. Junk mail is one of them. If I throw it away, it's out there without me, out of containment. I want a bubble around me and all my stuff to keep it safe. I don't want any of my things out of containment."

When Debra left the house, she took only what was necessary with her. She emptied her purse and her car before going anywhere. Her car looked very different from those of hoarders who can't resist the urge to fill that space. If she went on a trip, she made a list of everything she had with her. This allowed her to keep track of her things and contain them as much as possible.

To get a clearer picture of Debra's experience of not allowing things out of containment, we did an experiment. I sent Debra a postcard with nothing on it but her name and address. Her task was to throw it away and keep track of how she felt. I called a few days after she got the card. She was not happy. She insisted that she had not had enough time with the card. She wanted to get a mental picture of it, to absorb it so that it was easier to remember. She described the stamp it had and the date. Then, as we spoke on the phone, she walked to the kitchen and threw it in the trash. "I hate this feeling," she said. "Why can't I keep it just a bit longer?"

As she sat back down in the living room, she said that she could picture the angle of the postcard sitting in the trash. She thought she would have to write down the details of the postcard, since she hadn't had it long enough to commit it to memory, although she remembered quite a few details: a Martha Graham stamp; a double postmark, including one from Smith College; her name written in blue ink. "I can still pull it back up in my brain, so it's still sort of contained," she said. She rated her distress as 80 on a 100-point scale. She said that the rating would go up as soon as another piece of trash or food from the kitchen was thrown on top of the card, because it would be tarnished—it would no longer be the same as it was when it entered the house. Her rating would go up again, she said, when the trash got removed. Her distress remained high for the rest of our interview. She insisted it would never go down: "I will never forget this card as long as I live. It will never go down to zero. This is a big deal for me. This is the first thing I've thrown away in years, at least the first significant thing, especially because it's personal."

A week later when I called, she told me that other things had occupied her mind and she hadn't thought much about the card since her husband had taken out the trash. At that point, she had still felt anxious, which she rated at about 80, but once it was gone, she was okay. The worst part was actually throwing it away. One week after getting rid of the card, her rating was down to 40. She did not remember saying that the distress would never go down.

But Debra confessed that she had cheated a bit on the experiment. She had written down everything she could remember about the card. She said that she was afraid that she would completely forget about it, and that, to her, would be like an emptiness. "I don't want to lose what was," she said. Cheating on the experiment limited her discomfort, but it may have prevented her from learning that the empty feeling was fleeting and the details of the card meaningless. She was, in effect, keeping the card in symbolic containment. The description went into her storage unit, and although she would probably never look at it again, she was left with the feeling that she had not lost the experience.

About a year later, I spoke with Debra again about the experiment. Despite her previous prediction, she said that "losing" the card had little impact on her now. "It's so minor that it's irrelevant," she said. I wondered whether this fact had caused her to change her beliefs about the necessity of saving such things. She said that there had been some shifts in her thinking about junk mail, but she insisted that the card was different than all her other mail. She had thrown it away only because I had asked her to. She would never have done that on her own. That made the experience different. She admitted, however, that now she knew that if the conditions were right, she could get rid of something important to her without dire consequences. Unfortunately, she had not yet decided to try this herself.

In describing her experiences, Debra said that she thought it might feel good if she could just destroy all of her stuff. That way, she said, no one else could touch it. Whenever anyone but her husband touched her things, she felt violated. This held for everything that was associated with her, even junk mail. She explained, "Whatever comes into my life has come for a purpose. I'm supposed to have it. It's a part of me—an extension of me." She described her panic at the thought of discarding these "extensions": "It's like asking me to throw out my children. They'll be dead. I'll kill to prevent that." If her things were thrown out, she said that she would probably kill herself. Suicide would be a better option than facing the grief. Even junk mail that had nothing of interest except her name on the envelope was significant. Her name, written on an envelope by a machine from a computer list, had become a tendril. "It's a fragment of me," she insisted.

Similar reports from many of our hoarding clients link their possessions to their sense of themselves as well as their past. Irene, for instance, had a difficult time discarding anything that represented past events. One day as I was working with her, she was going through the many pieces of paper covering her couch and trying to decide whether to keep or discard them. She picked up an ATM envelope that was five years old, on which she had written the date and how she had spent the cash contained in the envelope. There was nothing unusual about the purchase: drugstore items, groceries, and a few odds and ends. She said that most of the things were long gone, although she thought she might still have one or two of them. When she threw the envelope into the recycling box, she began to weep. She said, "I realize this is crazy. It's just an old envelope, but it feels like I'm losing that day of my life." A bit later, she elaborated: "If I throw too much away, there'll be nothing left of me." Her sense of herself had become so bound up in her possessions that she felt a little piece of her would die with each thing she discarded. We have seen many such cases in which the person likens the experience to the loss of a family member or a part of himself or herself.

Debra's obsessions with preservation and perfection have become her identity. She is "the keeper of magazines." If she were to stop collecting or to get rid of them, her sense of self would be lost. When I asked her about this, she said, "To stop would make all those years a waste of my life. It would make my existence invalid." At the same time, she realized the cost. "This has ruined me," she told me recently. "I'm smart and creative, and I could have been happy. But I'm not anything. I have done nothing. I'm collecting life without living it. My only hope for making some kind of positive contribution is if my story can prevent this from happening to someone else."

All my life, I took care of people. I felt needed but not loved or appreciated. The animals have filled a void inside me. I'm the only one who can love and care for these animals. I am saving them from a life on the streets.

—A woman with sixty-six cats

In her twenties, back in the 1950s, Pamela was a strikingly beautiful woman. Her work as a documentary filmmaker put her in contact with the fashionable elite in New York City. She loved to party, and she loved sex. When she entered the room, she picked out the man she wanted to sleep with and seldom went home alone. She estimated that by the age of forty, she had had more than one hundred lovers who spanned the globe. She lived briefly with a fiancé in Istanbul before their relationship ended. She followed a Peruvian lover to Buenos Aires, only to be abandoned there. She spent much of her twenty-fourth year in Rome studying the Renaissance and having a torrid affair with a plumber/gigolo.

When Pamela was in her thirties, her career took off. She filmed an interview with the Beatles on one of their U.S. tours. She won film contracts around the world and had the kind of adventures she had dreamed of as a child. She was making lots of money and gaining a reputation in the film business. She shot a documentary in Vietnam during the early years of the war. The suffering she witnessed there, especially that of the children, moved her deeply.

A decade later, her career was over and her love life nonexistent. She was struggling to care for the more than two hundred cats she had collected and the more than six hundred cats hoarded by her psychiatrist. At age fifty-two, she found herself running through the streets of Manhattan in the middle of the night, exhausted and skeleton thin, trying to get away from her psychiatrist and the cat hoarding cult that had developed around the doctor.

Pamela was referred to me by a colleague who worked for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) in New York City and who guessed that I would find this case enlightening. In her seventies when I interviewed her, Pamela provided an in-depth and articulate account of her years as an animal hoarder. Her story is unusual even in the annals of hoarding case studies, with her nearly Dickensian childhood and an adult life fit for the tabloids. Still, it is illustrative of some of the key elements in this particularly damaging form of hoarding.

Whereas the majority of hoarders collect and save inanimate objects, for a small number animals serve as a source of safety, emotional attachment, and identity. Animal hoarding cases are often dramatic and well publicized. The bond between animal hoarders and the animals they collect is a special form of intense emotional attachment. People who collect large numbers of animals, particularly cats and dogs, often see their behavior as part of a mission to rescue animals, and they frequently believe themselves to possess special powers or abilities to do so. But they are usually unaware of the poor health and terrible conditions in which their animals are living. According to the officials we surveyed in our health department study, hoarding cases involving large numbers of animals are the toughest to deal with. Less than 10 percent of animal hoarding cases are resolved cooperatively, and in most both the animals and humans are living in deplorable conditions.

Most neighborhoods have had "cat ladies" in their midst at one time or another, but there is very little understanding of what drives this kind of hoarding. Although there have been dozens of studies of people who hoard possessions, studies of people who hoard animals are almost nonexistent. The few studies that do exist have relied on information from sources such as animal control officers, humane society officials, court records, and even news reports. Rarely has any information come directly from the people doing the hoarding. It is easy to understand why. By the time most animal hoarding cases come to light, the hoarder is in big trouble with the health department, the humane society, the city, and the neighbors. Graphic pictures and personal information have been splashed across the news—hardly an incentive for the hoarder to discuss the case further.

Pamela was born into a wealthy family and lived in luxury as a child, but her emotional life was impoverished. Her mother had been forced into marriage by her family following a lesbian affair that threatened the reputation of her status-conscious clan. After Pamela was born, the reluctant bride had little to do with her daughter, leaving her in the care of a series of governesses. Pamela's father, a playboy who had been happy to marry into the moneyed family, was seldom around. Her parents weren't malicious, Pamela said, but rather like children themselves: "[My brother and I] were like seeds tossed over the fence" and expected to grow.

Most of Pamela's early years were dominated by a sadistic French governess who terrorized her, unbeknownst to her mother. "Mademoiselle" repeatedly told the little girl that she needn't bother saying prayers before bed because she was evil and going to hell anyway. Every day she told Pamela, "You're a pig, you're dirty, you're evil." Pamela often hid from the woman, but Mademoiselle always found her; she would chant, "Evil creep, evil creep," as she pulled the frightened girl from under the bed. At times the abuse turned physical. Without anyone to protect her, Pamela withdrew into a fantasy world of Greek mythology, her own brand of Catholicism, and a burning desire to "grow a big body" to escape her tortured life.

When she did "get big," she sought freedom and adventure, but she suffered from the aftereffects of having been physically and emotionally abused. At age twenty, she had a nervous breakdown and sought the help of a highly respected psychiatrist. "The Doctor" practiced an early form of psychoanalysis originated by Dr. Wilhelm Reich, which emphasized the release of pent-up energy by first breaking down "character armor." She introduced Pamela and her other patients to karate, tai chi chuan, and breathing exercises. She encouraged them to scream, cry, and gag as ways of releasing energy and curing everything from emotional distress to allergies and colds.

The Doctor seemed larger than life—highly intelligent, charismatic, strong willed, and emotionally charged. She held rigid views of right and wrong. She demanded absolute honesty and responsibility from her patients, and she was ferocious and punitive when they failed. She believed that she had outgrown her colleagues, most of whom, she concluded, were unable to understand her brilliance. In the beginning, Pamela thought that the Doctor was brilliant. Her insights and teachings transformed Pamela from a frightened young woman into a confident and capable adult. As time passed, however, the Doctor became increasingly isolated from the professional community and moved into uncharted territory with her patients, most of whom had been in treatment with her for decades. Pamela met with her several times each week, sometimes every day, seeing her on and off for thirty-two years. Since the Doctor's patients often attended group therapy together, they came to know one another well, almost like a family.