This will sound contradictory, but hoards remove your sense of ownership. At least, they do when you’re living in someone else’s hoard. There are the obvious physical pitfalls of a hoard, such as a diminished ability to move freely, no space to put anything, dusty air, and dirty surfaces. There are intangible downsides as well. One of them is a lack of sovereignty over your possessions. When Your Space Is Not Your Own I’ve written before about how my family’s…
Hoards are composed of many things, including secrets. My family’s hoards were no exception. I haven’t posted in a long time. Mainly because I’m tired, y’all. It’s been exhausting to emotionally deal with the fallout from the shocking secrets that were hidden in the hoard. Secrets Frozen in Time It’s like a science article I once read about bacteria that were frozen in permafrost for thousands of years, only to thaw out and become deadly when a heat wave released…
Let’s talk about holidays with hoarders and how they differ from what you might imagine when you think of a “normal” family holiday. Let’s Get Real This was my normal: In our house, there was no gathering around the dining room table for Christmas dinner, because the table and all of the chairs were full of papers, books, and objects. The kitchen was crowded, with no room for cooking a large meal or baking tray after tray of cookies. (In…
What Do You Get the Woman Who Has Everything? Holidays can be tricky for hoarders. There’s an emphasis on giving and receiving gifts, plus there’s an abundance of cards, colorful wrapping paper, and other trappings that are easy to sentimentalize and justify keeping. Holidays are also tricky for the friends and family of people with hoarding tendencies. After all, you may want to express your affection with gifts, as is traditional, but you don’t want to make an already bad…
Become Mindful to Improve Your Hoarding Problem Today, let’s talk about what mindfulness can do to help you conquer your hoarding issues. I mentioned in my previous post how it took me decades to finally overcome a lot of my tendencies and put my hoarding ways behind me. When I became mindful, I could at last start living my Things Can Be Different way of life, which is so much more fun and healthy. The Graveyard of Good Intentions As…
Hello, friend. It’s been a while. Some of the delay in posting was due to my having way too much work to do with my day job, some of it was due to being sick, and the rest of it was due to trying to decide what would be the most useful topic to cover next. When I created this blog, I set out to provide resources and practical tactics to help you deal with your hoard or your hoarding…
Alrighty. You’ve done some hard-core thinking, you’ve gone through your cleanup planning checklist, and you’ve set your rules of engagement. Now it’s time to dive in. There are distractions aplenty in a hoarded home, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed or daunted by the sheer scale of the task ahead of you. Good news! You can split the cleanup into steps that will help you focus and be as efficient as possible. It helps to separate tasks like purging, cleaning,…
Here’s a hoarding cleanup checklist with 10 steps to help you prepare for your cleanup project. This checklist applies to houses where there is a mix of garbage and items that you want to salvage. If your hoarded house is one that’s too hazardous to enter, don’t attempt to clean it yourself. Call a professional crew trained in dealing with biohazards or mold remediation. If the house is full of junk that can’t be donated or that you don’t…
There’s an irrefutable connection between hoarding and one’s decision-making ability. “No duh, Rachel,” you may say. “Obvi, hoarders decided to keep way too many things. Case closed.” But as I read Stuff (by Dr. Randy O. Frost and Dr. Gail Steketee) and The Hoarder in You (by Dr. Robin Zasio), I realized that the relationship between hoarding and decision-making isn’t as simple or straightforward as I’d initially thought. You see, hoarding isn’t solely about choosing to buy or obtain more…
In case you had any doubt, I love my family, y’all. This blog is not to cast aspersions on them. This whole exercise is to share some insight that I picked up along the way about hoarding and one’s relationship to one’s things. You see, I know I’m partly responsible for the state of our house. We all had some habits that unwittingly contributed to a much bigger problem. Can’t See the Hoarding Forest for the Trees When you’re focused…