Stuff (19 page)

As usual, Ralph was delighted by our visit and eagerly showed us some of the things he had just collected. He had apparently forgotten his promise to show me what he had cleared out since my last visit. When the caseworker first mentioned the court date and cleanout, Ralph said that he would fight anyone who tried to take over his home. The caseworker tried to convince Ralph that this needed to happen because he couldn't get rid of the things clogging his house by himself. He said he just needed some help and proceeded to look around for things he could get rid of. He handed me a box with a pair of half-worn-out shoes, to which he added a book about needlepoint and a few other odds and ends that he was willing to discard. But he got stumped while looking at a ten-year-old book about computers, unable to convince himself that he could do without it. He sat down and looked pleadingly at the caseworker. "I won't survive," he said. She commiserated and promised to do what she could to save important things, if she could tell what they were. "I won't survive," he repeated, more to himself than to us. And he may have been right. In 2007, the Nantucket, Massachusetts, Health Department abandoned forced cleanouts when three consecutive hoarders died shortly after being returned to their cleaned-out homes. Although it's not clear whether the cleanouts caused these deaths, the trauma of losing a lifetime of possessions may have contributed to them.

Ralph's interest in the utility of objects is common among hoarders. In a way, his devotion to utility was much like Irene's addiction to opportunity. Once Ralph imagined how he could use or fix an object, he felt committed to the plan, though he rarely if ever executed it. During one of my last visits, he eagerly showed me his latest acquisitions, a nearly working band saw and table. A chrome pipe from a bathroom sink sat on the saw. His eyes lit up as he described his plan to drill a hole in the casing of the saw, fit the pipe into the hole, and attach it to a vacuum cleaner. The result would be a sawdust-free band saw that he could operate inside without making a mess. His life was filled with ever-expanding possibilities for construction or repair, but he never got further than collecting the pieces.

While some hoarders, such as Ralph, become captivated by the possibilities in things, others are trapped by the fear of wasting them. Both types would save the rusty bucket with the hole in it, but for different reasons. For Ralph, imagining uses for the rusty bucket brought him joy. Anita, a participant in one of our treatment studies, spent little time thinking about possibilities, but a great deal of time worrying and feeling guilty about waste. For her the bucket would bring pain as she thought about what a wasteful person she would be if she discarded it.

Anita was a former schoolteacher and author who impressed me immediately with her insight into her own thought processes. She knew that she had a problem, and she could see it unfolding before her—and articulate it, step by step—but she felt powerless to stop it. Her plight was embodied in the "story of the gloves"—her own painful (and unsuccessful) effort to throw away a single pair of holey gloves.

Anita already had six overstuffed drawers of gloves, but these were her favorite kind—soft wool that fit perfectly and came high up on her wrists. They were striped, which she thought was cute. They didn't show age like white gloves, and they were especially soft. But one of them had a hole in it. She couldn't mend the hole, she knew she'd never wear the gloves, and she knew she should throw them out.

Then she paused and thought that perhaps she should find someone to mend them. But the hole had developed quickly, which meant that the gloves were poorly constructed and probably not worth mending. She thought maybe she could put them in the rag bag, "then I could get rid of them without really getting rid of them." But her rag bag was already overflowing with better rag material. As she pondered this, she finally said, "I hate to put them in the trash. I know it's stupid, but ninety-nine percent of the glove is still usable! They're perfect otherwise, and they're so cute, it seems like such a waste. I've read articles about how wasteful the average American is, and here is this perfectly good fabric that I'm wasting!"

As she continued to talk, she again came to the conclusion that she should throw the gloves out. She also thought that it might help her to write down some of the arguments she'd generated so that she could remember them for the next item she confronted. Her first argument was for things she found cute: "The argument is that there are other cute things, and I don't need this." She went on, "And if I
think
I might use it, in reality I won't."

At this point, she became tearful. "And if I think it's wasteful, the answer is that it's not my fault." She began to cry in earnest. Through her sobs, she continued, "I didn't make the gloves crummy, so I'm not being bad. I'm doing the best I can with a bad situation. If they were well made, and I wore them for two years, and they were worn-out all over, it wouldn't bother me." It took her some time to compose herself after the emotional outburst, and then her distress turned to anger. "It pisses me off at this store. When you shop, you should get things that fit, that are made well, so it's like I got tricked into making this mistake. It's not my fault."

Anita suffered tremendously from a very rigid sense of responsibility and severe perfectionism. She couldn't tolerate mistakes and almost always chose inactivity over the possibility of doing something less than perfectly. Early on in therapy, she had a massive anxiety attack when she thought that she had failed to do the homework properly. She expected me to criticize her and in fact reported that in every social situation she entered, she expected people to be critical of her. To prevent this, she carefully scrutinized her every action to make sure it was correct. Her first sign of progress in therapy came when she threw away a bowlful of pencil stubs. Immediately, she feared that her son would be angry with her, because she had thwarted his attempts to get rid of them in the past.

As might be expected of someone who searched everything she did for mistakes, Anita was influenced in most of her decisions about saving things by the possibility of error. In particular, she worried that throwing things away made her a wasteful person. "It's like I imagine in my head that someone walking down the street may have x-ray vision and can see how wasteful I am," she said. Living in a cluttered home violated her sense of perfection, but at least she was not being wasteful.

The gloves themselves mattered little to her; she just didn't want to give the impression to others—or to herself—that she was wasteful. She could think of other uses for the gloves, such as rags or toys for the cat, but she knew these weren't realistic. Keeping the gloves actually offered her little comfort: "When I see them, I feel guilty and stupid for having bought them. Then I feel guilty for having too many gloves and not being able to keep my drawer organized." Guilt was everywhere.

Anita's concern about wasting things extended to all aspects of life. She recounted feeling guilty for using a Band-Aid on a cut that she wasn't sure really needed it. She described encountering great difficulty one night when she went out to dinner, something she seldom did. She couldn't decide what to order and in the end had to pick something rapidly when the waiter came back for the third time. Before her food arrived, she concluded that she had ordered the wrong thing, and even though she ate the meal, she believed she had wasted it. "It was my responsibility, and I screwed up. I wasted the meal, and I hate that. Even saying the word 'waste' makes me cringe."

Anita, like Ralph, had problems judging how useful her possessions really were. When Ralph looked at his rusty bucket, he saw potential, and that made him feel good. When Anita looked at the holey gloves, she saw waste, and that made her feel bad. Both wanted to save the items—Ralph because of pleasing potential, Anita to avoid feeling wasteful. When Ralph was forced to get rid of his bucket, he got angry at his "privacy" being invaded. Even his attachment to Betty couldn't overcome his frustration. When Anita got rid of the gloves, she felt guilty for wasting them. Beliefs about utility, waste, and responsibility are common among people who hoard. Ownership seems to carry with it the responsibility for making sure things are used to their full potential and not wasted.

Anita saw her clutter as a serious problem and sought help. But her perfectionism and self-criticism got in the way of her treatment. "I have sensitive antennae," she said, referring to her fear of making mistakes and being criticized. Discarding something required perfect certainty that the item was no longer useful and would never be needed in the future. She could get rid of things that met this criterion, but the process was exhausting and didn't match the rate at which things entered her home. Despite my efforts, Anita would not allow herself to experience anything short of perfection. She hated the idea of being in treatment without some guarantee that it would work. She doubted her ability to handle the treatment program, and the prospect of failure frightened her. Her overwhelming priority was to avoid the pain she knew best—the pain of making mistakes—a self-defeating tactic that we'll explore in the next chapter. Anita terminated therapy without much improvement, although she reported some progress in being able to tolerate imperfection.

I just feel like I want to die. If you weren't here, I would avoid doing any of this [sorting and discarding].

—Irene

I first visited Nell's home on a January day when the temperature hovered near zero degrees Fahrenheit. When I knocked, it took some time before a small voice asked through the door, "Who is it?" I called through the door, reminding her of our appointment. "Just a minute," she said. I waited in the freezing cold for nearly ten minutes, listening to shuffling sounds on the other side of the door. Then the door opened just enough for me to squeeze through. Once inside, I was trapped in a space only big enough to stand in, with walls of stuff up to my waist. While I stood there, my hostess, a petite seventy-one-year-old woman with neatly cropped hair and an impish smile, repacked the newspapers and bags against the door, clearing a path into the living room.

I could see why it had taken her so long to open the door. The objects she piled against it were too heavy to allow it to open more than a crack. As the pile grew, I felt uneasy. By this time, I had been in many hoarded homes and gotten used to them, but having the exit barricaded this way was unsettling.

Nell was terribly embarrassed by the condition of her home and fearful of what I would think of her. She normally went to great lengths to prevent anyone from seeing her place. She had become a master at maintaining friendships without allowing visitors into her home. She would offer to buy dinner, suggest going places for coffee, or meet her friends somewhere for a movie. Keeping them from noticing her car posed more of a problem. Her excuses for not being able to give someone a ride usually involved car trouble or temporarily having to store things in her car. For each of her social events, she arrived early and parked at the end of the parking lot, well away from where any of her friends would be likely to park, in order to preempt the inevitable questions about all the stuff in her car. Still, if someone really needed a ride, she would oblige, but only after asking for some time to rearrange things in her car. Her desire to be helpful to others was the only motive that could outweigh her desire to hide her clutter. She knew she had a problem, one she had struggled with for most of her life. Her children knew it, too, and their not-so-subtle pressure on her to clear the clutter had seriously strained her relationships with them. Her son had read about our treatment program and had convinced her to call.

Much of Nell's home resembled her front hallway. In places where furniture should be, boxes teetered on boxes up to the ceiling. She was a Tupperware representative and received weekly shipments, but she rarely sold anything, and the boxes were everywhere. Narrow pathways were littered with cans and bottles, some of which had ruptured, spilling their contents onto the matted carpet. Getting from place to place required skating on top of the debris, and my feet were too big to avoid stepping on soda cans, vitamin bottles, or phone books. I worried about crushing things as I walked down the hallway into her living room. I also worried that she would fall and break a hip.

When we settled into the only seating space available (she on a tiny bare patch of the sofa, me precariously balanced on a stack of cardboard boxes), Nell apologized again for the state of her home and told me how ashamed she felt. Then she said something that astonished me. "When I come home at night," she confided, "I don't even notice the clutter!" In fact, she never noticed the condition of her home when she was there alone.

My visit made her acutely aware of just how bad her living conditions had become. The awareness, she said, depressed her. Noticing the clutter turned her thoughts to what a "worthless" person she was and what a horrible mother she had been. After several visits, she told me that when I was there, she desperately wanted me to leave. And when I did, she became her old self again, unaware of her clutter and back in the world of the worthy. When I showed up, she said, she got depressed, and when I left, she felt better.

There is a flip side to the pleasure hoarders derive from acquiring and owning things, but it is not merely the pain of discarding those possessions. Rather, it is the
avoidance
of that pain, or of any negative emotional experience at all. This is as fundamental to the development and maintenance of hoarding as acquiring things in the first place. The feelings of safety, identity, and opportunity described in earlier chapters also drive the effort to avoid psychic pain. Saving things allows hoarders to avoid the distress of being without their cherished possessions—and all the significant connotations those possessions have. Irene burst into tears one day as she got rid of a treasured art history book. "I just feel like I want to die," she said. She told me that if I hadn't been there, she would have put the book back on her pile and avoided the whole experience. In this and many other instances, saving helped her avoid feeling upset. For Anita, saving things helped her avoid the agony she would feel if she made a mistake about an object's utility. In her therapy sessions, she resisted working on discarding and instead tried to engage me in discussions about her life and struggles. In this arena, she was insightful, articulate, and interesting—but more important, she felt in control and successful. When I convinced her to discard (or even just sort through) possessions, she felt like a failure. Here she had little control and great distress; her perfectionism created consequences that she would do anything to avoid. Indeed, as we saw in chapter 7, it even overpowered her attempts at therapy. She was so afraid of "doing the therapy wrong" that she ultimately avoided the work altogether.