Stuff (6 page)

After college, Irene lived at home with her parents for a year and took some additional courses at a local college. She planned to start graduate school the following year. This was the first time she remembered living in a messy room. She saved all her college books and notes and packed them in "clean" paper bags that nearly filled her room. The room had two twin beds, but only one was visible. She recalled someone looking into her room and not being able to tell there were two beds there. Thirty years later, she still had those books, papers, and clothes.

The following year, Irene entered graduate school in library science. She had no problem categorizing, cataloging, and organizing library materials, as long as they did not belong to her. If they were hers, she struggled and failed to keep things organized. She lived in an upstairs apartment filled with books and papers. She described the room as very messy, but her landlady was blind and did not know. Her hoarding behavior became noticeable when she began carrying large paper bags wherever she went. The bags contained books, papers, and anything else she thought she might need—her "just in case" items. They became such a part of her image that the other students jokingly called her "the bag lady."

Her concerns about contamination also became stronger during this time. When teachers gave handouts in class, Irene licked her fingers before and after she touched them to neutralize the germs. This ritual became one of her primary "decontamination" strategies later when her OCD became severe.

At the end of graduate school, Irene married her boyfriend, and they moved into an apartment together. Clutter was a feature of their household from the beginning, although it didn't seem to affect their relationship until much later. Most of the clutter was in the form of boxes filled with books and papers. Irene began work at the college library and was put in charge of "weeding" the vertical files, a job that involved discarding newspapers, magazines, and books. Many of them came home with her and greatly expanded her developing hoard.

Just how much of Irene's history is relevant to her hoarding is uncertain, but particular features appear again and again in the histories of hoarders. From an early age, she was sensitive, anxious, and perfectionistic. Though highly intelligent, she felt afraid of adults and disgusted by physical contact. She found stability and comfort in her possessions. Perhaps these features led her to use things to give her life meaning and connect her to the larger world. Her hoarding took years to develop; getting rid of it would be hard.

Plastic bins, most stacked and empty, littered Irene's home. The containers were clear so she could see what was inside. Lids for the containers had migrated elsewhere. Irene had purchased the materials over the years with the intention of using them but had been unable to do so. Instead, they only added to the clutter, as did numerous books on how to organize. Invariably, people who suffer from hoarding problems fail to maintain even the most rudimentary organization of their stuff—but not from lack of effort. Like Irene, most have spent countless hours trying to organize their possessions, with little success. Deficits in executive functions such as planning, categorization, organization, and attention leave them lost amid a sea of things, unable to figure out what to do next.

Irene and I worked to create a filing system for her papers. Despite the fact that she was a librarian and could do this easily with things that didn't belong to her, the work was difficult. Each possession had too many meanings to be categorized in only one way, and cross-referencing everything was exhausting. But before long, her new filing system began to pay off. The week after we finished it, she excitedly told me, "You know, I had to find the letter from my insurance company about my car accident last year. I went to the insurance file and found it right away. It would have taken me weeks to find it before."

Still, her lifelong pattern of organizing by piles was hard to break. She complained that when she needed something, she pictured the item in its last location. Even though the item had likely migrated elsewhere, the mental picture gave her the sense that she knew where things were. Now, with a filing system in which she put things out of sight, she couldn't do that, and she felt lost. We had to help her not only to develop a filing system but also to use it enough to create a feeling of comfort and confidence.

Much of the work we did involved conducting experiments to test the nature and strength of Irene's attachments to her things. When she had difficulty discarding the scrap of paper containing an unidentified phone number, I suggested an experiment to clarify how important this was to her. "Why don't we throw it away just to see how it feels," I said. She agreed and threw the paper into the recycling box. "I feel somehow incomplete," she said. "It's not earthshattering, but just nagging. I'm sure I'll get over it." She paused and then added, "But I could rectify it with a brief phone call." She looked at me pleadingly. I suggested that we continue with the experiment just to see what would happen, and she reluctantly agreed. She resumed her excavation, but just a few minutes later she stopped and said, "You know, it would only take a few minutes to make the call. It may be important." At this, she reached in and pulled the paper out of the box.

Most hoarders are capable of discarding things if they can convince themselves that the object will not be wasted, that it will go to a good home, or, as in this case, that the opportunity it presented is no longer available. But the amount of time and effort involved in attaining this certainty makes it impossible to keep up with the volume of stuff entering the home. Eventually, most hoarders give up and simply let the piles accumulate again. Irene could have called the number and perhaps realized the opportunity it presented was lost. Then she may have felt comfortable discarding the number, but she would have learned nothing about how to give up on opportunities that have passed her by. One goal of the experiment was to teach her how to tolerate uncertainty regarding unrealized opportunities. We talked some more about this, and she agreed to keep going with the experiment. She put the paper back in the recycling box but couldn't keep from glancing at it every few minutes. Each time she did, she reiterated her urge to make the call and how it would make her feel so much better. Finally, she said, "Having the paper in sight, it's like a beacon. It pulls my eyes and then my thoughts. I'm going to cover it up so I can't see it." She covered the paper and never brought it up again.

The more experiments like this she did, the more her thinking about things changed and her ability to make decisions improved. In the beginning, Irene could tolerate very little of the work I asked her to do. "Can we stop now?" she asked just five minutes into our first treatment session after she had discarded one scrap of paper. But Irene persevered and worked very hard for a year and a half to clear out her home. Each step brought her more of a normal life. When her kitchen table was cleared, she and her children started sitting down to eat together. When her whole kitchen was cleared, she resumed cooking, and it began to feel normal to be in an uncluttered room. By the time we stopped working with her, the majority of her home was virtually clutter-free.

As I got to know Irene, it became clear that she was a prototype. She possessed all the characteristics we had been observing in other hoarders: perfectionism, indecision, and powerful beliefs about and attachments to objects. Possessions played a role in her identity, leading her to preserve her history in things. She felt responsible for the well-being of objects, and they gave her a sense of comfort and safety. In addition, things represented opportunity and a chance to experience all that life had to offer.

Irene's recovery taught us a great deal about how these behaviors can change. Most significant was the fact that she made every decision about what to keep and what to discard. Such freedom might have been a license to do little. Yet Irene willingly challenged herself to experience the distress of discarding cherished possessions. Had she not done so, she would not have succeeded. Each possession held a story. Often just telling that story loosened her connection to it and allowed her to let it go.

It is clear that between what a man calls
me
and what he simply calls
mine
the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.

—William James

Recently, I asked the students in my seminar what things they owned that they considered meaningful. One young woman sheepishly admitted that she owned a shirt once worn by Jerry Seinfeld, which she had bought on eBay. All the students agreed that Seinfeld once having worn the shirt gave it value and meaning. Exactly what meaning they couldn't articulate. "But it was worn by Jerry Seinfeld!" was the best they could do.

"But if you didn't know it had been worn by Jerry Seinfeld," I asked, "would it have any special value?"

"No, absolutely not" was the reply.

"So the value is in your head and not really in the shirt?"

The students objected, saying that something of the essence of Seinfeld was connected to the shirt, as if he had left some part of himself there, even though the shirt had been laundered.

"Even if this was true, so what? Why would that give it value?" I asked.

"Because then you would be connected to Jerry Seinfeld" was the response.

After class, I thought,
Wasn't this what Irene was doing?
Perhaps she was trying to get connected to the world through her things—and to her, each one of those things was just like Jerry Seinfeld's shirt. They connected her to something bigger than herself. They gave her an expanded identity, a more meaningful life. It wasn't the objects themselves that she valued, but the connections they symbolized. And it's the same whether we collect celebrities' clothing, a piece of the Berlin Wall, a deck chair off the
Titanic,
or five tons of old newspapers. We can't help but imagine that some essence of the person or the event symbolized by the objects will magically rub off and become part of us.

At the end of the nineteenth century, a Scottish anthropologist named Sir James Frazer wrote an influential treatise on "magical thinking" and religion called
The Golden Bough
that shed some light on the lure of possessions. He described two forms of what he called sympathetic magic. According to this thinking, objects are in sympathy if they have properties that resemble each other (similarity) or if they were at one time touching or physically near each other (contagion). If two things are in sympathy, they have a continued and mutual influence on each other. The second definition of sympathy, contagion, seems to be at the core of our tendency to see magic in objects such as Jerry Seinfeld's shirt. One study, for example, found that children judged an object that had been touched by the queen of England to be more important than an identical object that had not been touched by her. The first object contained an essence not apparent from its physical characteristics.

Another way contagion may influence hoarding has to do not with the desire to be connected to someone or something else, but rather with the fear of being disconnected from a part of oneself. In many early civilizations, people took great pains to make sure that no one gained access to discarded parts of their bodies (e.g., fingernails, hair, teeth) or even pieces of their clothing. According to the laws of sympathetic magic, these items could be used to influence or control the person who lost them. For instance, someone who obtains another person's hair may be able to use it in a magical ceremony to make that person fall in (or out of) love. In some severe cases of hoarding, people show a seemingly irrational fear of discarding anything associated with their bodies, including nail clippings, used tampons, and even feces and urine (see chapter 11). This apparently delusional behavior may reflect magical contagion. Anthropologists consider this kind of thinking a precursor to scientific thought.

Irene loved only the things she owned or was about to own. Other people's stuff carried no such allure. She liked having her own "treasures" around her, preferably untouched by anyone else. Time and again, we have been struck by the idea that hoarding is not about the objects themselves but about ownership.

To understand hoarding, we must first ask a simple question. What does it mean to own something? It turns out that the answer to this question is not so simple. Philosophers have debated the nature of ownership as far back as Plato in the fourth century
B.C.E.
Plato was convinced that owning things was a vice to be avoided. He even argued that private ownership should be banned and that all property should be held in common. Aristotle, his student, held the opposite view: he believed that individual ownership was essential for the development of moral character. However, he thought that ownership should be reserved only for those who knew how to use the possession. In the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas took a middle path and spoke of "stewardship" rather than ownership, whereby people are merely the temporary guardians of God's possessions. In the seventeenth century, John Locke suggested that things should belong only to those who work for them, while a century later David Hume theorized that when we see an object in someone's possession and accept that object as part of that person, we are conveying ownership to the possessor—so ownership is in part defined by social consensus. These philosophers' interest in ownership stemmed from their interest in how society should be structured and economies should be run. It was left to more recent philosophers and social scientists to explore the meaning of ownership from an individual's perspective.

Jean-Paul Sartre insisted that we learn who we are by observing what we own. He argued that ownership of most tangible objects occurs with their acquisition or creation. Actively creating or acquiring the object is key. If something is passively acquired, ownership has to come from mastery over it or intimate knowledge of it. He suggested that ownership extends beyond objects to include intangible things as well. For instance, mastering a skill conveys an ownership of sorts. Also, by knowing something intimately, we come to own it, like a hiker who "knows" every inch of a mountain trail and comes to feel as if he or she "owns" the trail. Reflecting on the meaning of existence, Sartre wrote that "to have" is one of three basic forms of human experience, the other two being "to do" and "to be."