San Diego TV Interview: Children of Hoarders

Via Sidney at My Mother In Law Is Still Sitting Between Us comes word that two adult children of hoarders were recently interviewed for an NBC San Diego Special Report segment. Great job, Greg and Alison!

Lessons Learned by a Child of a Hoarder

Recently, one of the members of the Friends and Families of Hoarders and Clutterers group on Yahoo! wrote a truly spectacular note about what she had learned over the years about hoarding, getting help for a hoarder, and the impact of hoarding on the hoarder’s family and friends. It was as fine of a summary of the experiences of many children of hoarders as anything I have ever seen. I wish I had been able to read something like this twenty years ago.

The note, written in memory of the author’s mother, deserves a wide audience. With the author’s kind permission, it’s my privilege to share it here:

Hi, Everybody,

My mom passed away last month at age 87. She’d been having a lot of pain that was hard to manage, advancing dementia, etc. and it was her time and her passing was a blessing, but still, I miss her so much. She was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. She always thought the best of people; saw the good in them.

I want to share what I feel that I have learned through this group over the years. This is my own personal slant, garnered from years of personal experience and years of reading other people’s posts.

1. Hoarding is a brain disorder. Loved ones cannot change it. It isn’t merely a behavior; there is something wrong with the brain. We can’t expect hoarders to simply change their behavior, but we can and should expect them to seek the help that they need to make serious changes. There are treatment options, but the hoarder has to want to be treated. It is exceedingly rare for a hoarder to want treatment or to be willing to change.

2. Hoarding is a disorder, not a character defect. The hoarder can’t help it, there is something wrong with their brain and it is simply impossible for them to make well-reasoned decisions. However, character does play an important role. In order to make changes, the hoarder has to have the fortitude of character to admit that they have a problem, feel remorse about how their problem is affecting others, and earnestly seek change.

3. Don’t assume that medical professionals, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, Child Protective Services, Adult Protective Services, or other professionals truly understand this disorder or that they can or will take appropriate action to protect vulnerable children, elders, or adults or the hoarder him or herself. Hoarding is a disease or disorder that is in the early stages of research and effective treatment. Treatment/help is available, but you have to do your own research or reach out to this group or others like it and find a professional that truly understands that this is a disorder and not simply a character defect.

4. Protecting the children is the #1 priority. Over the years, many, many survivor/victims of childhood hoarding households have written in to tell how the hoarding has negatively and permanently damaged them. Also, children live what they learn, and many children who grow up in hoarding households grow up to be hoarders themselves. It is very important to find a knowledgeable professional that is willing to help the non-hoarding parent to ease the children into a healthy living situation, while maintaining regular or intermittent contact with the hoarding parent, if possible.

5. People who love the hoarder have to realize that it is nothing personal, but for every true hoarder the hoard will always be #1. You can’t live with a hoarder and be a happy person unless you are willing to consciously and willingly accept that you will always be #2. The hoarder’s children will always be #2 as well, even if #1—the hoard—is exceedingly unhealthy and physically and emotionally damaging to the children. Even if you, the loved one, had the looks of Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, and the charms of the most amazing TV cook/crafter/housekeeper/handyman, etc., the hoarder would still make you #2 and the hoard would be #1. If forced to choose between you and the hoard, or their child and the hoard, they will always choose the hoard. I think that for many of them, if they were forced to give up the hoard or die, they would choose death. Indeed, sometimes hoarders are killed by their hoards, literally being crushed under a mound of useless stuff, and this after years of warnings. If your loved one is a hoarder and you think that he or she is different, then you simply haven’t come the full cycle yet.

6. Loving a hoarder is much like loving an alcoholic. The principles of Al-Anon are very helpful and applicable to the hoarder-lover. The principles of codependency are 100% applicable. In trying to find healthy ways for us and our children to live, we would do well to turn to the writings of Al-Anon and various on-line and library resources from alcohol and drug treatment groups that offer information to family members on how to draw boundaries with love.

7. In order to get healthy, friends and family of hoarders have to be brave. We should be loving, but draw lines in the sand and declare that there are certain unhealthy living choices that we simply will not tolerate. When we do this, we have to be willing and able to stand behind the threat. Sometimes, the hoarder will refuse to get treatment, or to make healthy changes. This means that we may have to leave them in order to find a healthy life for ourselves and/or our children. We may lose everything and have to start all over from scratch.

I want to thank all of you for being my support in these last years as we moved mom out of my parents’ home of 50+ years, moved her into independent living and then into assisted living. Fortunately, she’d been a clean hoarder; in fact, she had a little touch of germ phobia. As her dementia progressed, we were able to exercise more and more control over her life. We managed to move her into an independent living apartment with the promise that she could move back to her home (and her hoard) if she felt that she needed to. Interestingly, this transition was made easier for her because being free of all of that junk and starting out in a clean, tidy apartment was very comfortable and liberating for her. She lived only a block or so away from a dollar store, but as her dementia progressed, one of us would take her downstairs to the dining room while the other daughter did a quick purge of junk from her apartment. Her dementia saved us—she didn’t seem to notice that her precious things were missing. After about a year, we three daughters spent nearly every weekend over a whole summer emptying out her house, and then we finally were able to sell it.

This group helped me so much as we processed the emotional impact of her hoarding. Before dementia set in and we were able to take some control, there were many years of hurt as she consistently chose the hoard over us, her family. In fact, she never really developed a relationship with my now teenage daughter, her last grandchild, because of the hoarding. She’d become so annoyed and afraid that I’d try to get rid of one or more things when I came over that she essentially forbid me from entering her house—politely, always with an excuse. She didn’t want to drive the 40 miles to my home, and I think that her increasing isolation was part of the hoarding behavior, too. I couldn’t go visit her and she wouldn’t come visit me and my family. We’ll never be able to reclaim those lost years, but it helps me enormously to have had this group, which has helped me over the years to understand that it wasn’t that her love for me or my daughter had lessened, but that her love for her stuff just continued to grow and grow, that it was a sort of brain disorder and a disease, and at some point it just overtook her and crowded everything else out of her life.

—Jeanne

Thank you so much for writing this, Jeanne, and thank you for letting me republish it here. I am sure that it will help many people to gain a better understanding of hoarding and the impact of hoarding on the friends and families of hoarders. Please accept my condolences on your mother’s passing.

The Slumber Party We Never Had

Check out a new blog by my new friend (sibling?), The Hoarder's Daughter!

Tracy's Story

A bit of COH history: one of the people mentioned in the recent New York Times article about children of hoarders, Tracy Schroeder, had a galvanizing impact on the Children of Hoarders community.

She shared her heart wrenching story about her mother's death in squalor in the private COH Yahoo Group, and she was kind (and courageous) enough to allow her story to be republished for everyone to read at the COH website. She also was interviewed on television for a local news program.

While my own mother survived her health crisis, it was a very close call, and my story very easily could have been the same as Tracy's story. Unfortunately, many children of hoarders have similar stories to tell.

Some Comments on the New York Times Article

In addition to the New York Times article that I mentioned earlier, its comment thread is rather interesting and worth a look. I chimed in as follows:

While much of the focus is properly on finding ways to treat hoarders themselves, there seems to have been very little attention paid to the treatment needs of the children of hoarders. Indeed, children of hoarders are often mentioned by professionals as being obstacles and problems, rather than as being people in their own right who are hurting and need support at least as much as the hoarders. From the Children of Hoarders website (childrenofhoarders.com), it is plain that many COH (myself included) have been raised in conditions of harrowing squalor, and such children often suffer from social isolation, social anxiety, poor self esteem, and many other issues that can last far into adulthood. Given that hoarders tend to be rather refractory to treatment, as well as the lengthy time typically required for treatment of hoarders, I'd really like to see clinicians and other professionals thinking more holistically about the entire family, particularly since, from a utilitarian perspective, family members may well be far more open to and benefit more from therapy and support than the hoarder is likely to benefit, at least in the short term. The short term is particularly important here, since, for a child of a hoarder, the short term may well encompass critical development periods such as early childhood, adolescence, etc.

Dr. Randy Frost, the co-author of "Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things", responded to my comment as follows:

You raise a great point. Most of the research has focused on the people who hoard and not on family members. We've done one study of family members and have another under way, but virtually nothing has been done on developing treatments or support groups for them. I believe this will happen. There is such a great deal of research on hoarding now that it is only a matter of time.

Someday...

Murphy's Law and Children of Hoarders

In an excellent example of Murphy's Law or the malign effect of Friday the 13th, the day that The New York Times linked to my blog is the same day that Google/Blogger had major technical difficulties, and several of my posts and reader comments disappeared somewhere into cyberspace. Fortunately, it looks like most things have now been restored, though a few comments and sidebar links still are missing.

Children of Hoarders in The New York Times

A very exciting day here for Children of Hoarders! The New York Times just published an article about the experiences of people who were raised in a home with a parent who hoards. Kudos to Steven Kurutz for a fine bit of reporting, one that avoids easy sensationalism and that fairly presents our experiences.

I almost dropped my coffee cup on my keyboard when I saw that the article contained a link to my humble, sporadically updated blog, even though I wasn't interviewed for the article. Either Mr. Kurutz does his research very thoroughly, or some of the other children of hoarders (COH, for short) must have mentioned it to him. In any case, thank you, Mr. Kurutz, for mentioning my blog.

For those of you who are new to this site, here are some links to a few posts that have generated a lot of feedback from readers:

• An Open Door - My first post. It outlines the basics of the "children of hoarders" experience from my perspective. I wrote it less than a year after my mother had a medical emergency at her house, and her hoarding complicated her rescue.
• The Hallway - The post that has received the most attention, likely due to the linked video that described the experience of finding my mom collapsed from a stroke and near death in her hoard. It explains a potential consequence of the "go slow" method of trying to help a hoarder to improve their living conditions when they are very resistant to change. That's not to say that dramatic interventions involving municipal authorities are "good" solutions; it's just that sometimes there aren't any good solutions.
• A Trip to the ER - A post that gives an example of a curious speech pattern that many children of hoarders believe is related to hoarding behavior: just as hoarding seems to be driven by an inability to decide which objects are important/valuable and which objects are trash or unneeded clutter, many hoarders seem unable to identify which parts of a story are important, and which parts are incidental. As a result, what for most people would be a thirty second comment about going to the store or making dinner becomes a lengthy tale involving the neighbors, the cat, the guy down the street, and the green car that drove by the day before when told by some hoarders.
• There are also a few posts where other children of hoarders and I try to come up with advice to a fifteen year old child of a hoarder. What would we have wanted (needed!) to hear when we were that age? See the comments to the individual blog posts for some great ideas. (What Would You Say to a Fifteen Year Old Child of a Hoarder? and Advice to a Fifteen Year Old Child of a Hoarder)

...which raises an important point, I think. The comments on my blog posts are at least as interesting as the posts themselves, so I encourage you to read them and learn what other children of hoarders are thinking.

A lot has happened in the last couple of years, particularly involving providing elder care / medical care for my mom, as well as the logistics of addressing a house that has fallen into stark disrepair after many years of a hoarder refusing to allow anyone inside to fix things when they break. Look for more posts about these topics soon. Pictures and video, too!

Finally, as a child of a hoarder, I can't overstate how useful the online support groups run by Children of Hoarders, Inc. have been to me and many others. Please visit ChildrenOfHoarders.com or their public Facebook page for more info. If you are a child of a hoarder yourself, check out their private Yahoo Support Group. COH Inc is also on twitter. Hey, I am, too!

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope that you will visit again.

PS. Be sure to check out some great blogs by other children of hoarders: Tetanus Burger, Inheriting the Hoard, Navigating Chaos, Nice Children Stolen From Car, RareNest, Jessie Sholl's Blog, and many others listed at the Children of Hoarders site. Also, if you use Facebook, check out the Children of Hoarders Facebook Page!