why do people hoard? - is it due to perceived sentimental value? laziness? mental illness? extreme kleptomancy?

[Disco Inferno]

I can never find a direct answer. You'd think it'd be easier since hoarding has become mainstream and happens around the globe.
I don't personally know any hoarders. My only exposure to hoarders is via TV/internet.
I just can't comprehend how people can live in such conditions and be okay with it.
Do you folks know any hoarders? If so, what is their reasoning?

 

[Don Juan El Tardo]

Mental illness tends to play into it in many cases. In the ones that I have come in contact with personally it is an inability to cope with things changing around them and an inability to let anything go, though they never are quite the horror shows that we hear about online.

 

[mr.moon1488]

One of the theories I've heard for it is that it's a coping mechanism for failed social connections. A hoarder begins to develop emotional attachments to inanimate objects as a substitute for emotional attachments to other people.

 

[Red Hood]

It can be for a variety of reasons, all of them psychologically motivated and indicative that there's something broken in their psyche. It could be something similar to OCD in some, it could be a coping response to a trauma for others.

And now, some people are such consoomers that they've essentially become hoarders too. YA GOTTA CATCH EM ALL, YOU FUCKERS!

 

[Army Burger]

Mental illness tends to play into it in many cases. In the ones that I have come in contact with personally it is an inability to cope with things changing around them and an inability to let anything go, though they never are quite the horror shows that we hear about online.

Exactly. It's because people have attachment issues and can't beat to let things go. Even if said thing is a tupperware container filled with toenail clippings.

 

[Watermelanin]

I'm quite a bit of a hoarder and my house certainly is thrashed because of it.
What it comes down to for me is that I set up plans for a thing, life gets in the way, can't make time for said plans, new plans are made, place being thrashed makes getting task done more of a chore, chore gets pushed off more, and I develop of a sort of avoidance to it all.
Not to powerlevel too hard: but it's gotten to the point where I prefer to be at work than at home. I keep my occupational workplace tidy and can get everything I need to get done accomplished quite efficiently. When I'm home, there's all of this shit I WANT to do but because of the absolute state of things, I just get drunk and wallow in filth. This only compounds the issue because one of the things I've taken to hoarding is recyclables. I don't need the CRV money but in the past I've made it a point to give my recyclables to those that do. Now I sit here, surrounded by cans of malt liquor and empty water bottles, because jesus christ it would be a chore to to sort that shit out for the benefit of some bum and I'd rather just drink more and add to the pile of shit that makes all of the other stuff I want to do harder.

 

[hypnopedosnake]

You could ask Barbara Chandler. I am sure she has a very good reason to hoard

 

[RapeMan]

Some people are so frugal that they can't bear to throw anything away.

 

[Slap47]

One of the theories I've heard for it is that it's a coping mechanism for failed social connections. A hoarder begins to develop emotional attachments to inanimate objects as a substitute for emotional attachments to other people.

That would explain why hoarding crosses class barriers. However, poor hoarders seem to be more extreme. I suspect that being able to control stuff pushes alot of poor people to create rat-dens for themselves.

 

[Lex in tonne]

this might be a long reply not sure, will try to keep it short if possible

I worked with a hoarder for about 2 years. she was a customer at my place of work and we became friendly (she is in her 80's) and she told me about her house and asked if i could help.
at first i thought it would be a cluttered house and i would move some things around for her and help her for a few days. It was obvious from the first day that i was way in over my head. there was literally no place to walk on a floor between the rooms, the house was full of things wall to wall and floor to ceiling.
But she is so sweet and she reached out for help which hoarders don't normally do, they are usually forced into getting help. so i decided to help her
I went there twice a week, and from our many hours together i learned that she is extremely intelligent. she was a teacher for many years, her hoard contains A LOT of school worksheets and games that she has made herself to teach kids about math and basic alphabet. she taught blind children too and has a lot of sensory games and books.
I learned that the main 2 reasons for her hoard were 1) growing up with a strict mother who didn't allow her to have any materialistic things and was cold and resentful to her all her life. and 2) she married a man who treated her the same way on top of being physically and emotionally abusive and made her feel guilty for being unable to bare children and be a mother. he died suddenly at age 40 and left her with all the money he kept from her through their marriage of almost 20 years. i suspect he worked with the mob honestly, her stories sound like it even though she doesn't even realize it. so she was left with this freedom and all this money and she went through it all in a matter of months.
ever since then she had been hoarding, and as she got older it became difficult to contain and manage and she was left sleeping on her sofa unable to get into her rooms.

at first it was horrible trying to reason with her. she would throw a fit over the smallest things and become emotional when i was explaining why a certain thing needed to be tossed out. but over time i learned how to talk to her and what to share with her and when to do so.
after working with her for 2 years we made remarkable progress, she told me that i am the only one who makes her WANT to get rid of the stuff. others before me who were sent by her social worker or by her family members all treated her like she was crazy, some stole from her, and most took her things in piles and threw it all away without even looking through the stuff. She would go and bring the things back home after they had left.
so working with her I was able to clear pathways through the house and reach rooms that were blocked for over a decade. we cleared the kitchen floor, the living room floor and many shelves and cupboards. mind you she needed to go through every item with me to decide if its trash/recycle/donate. so it took us a long time to reach each milestone.

after 2 years i was met with some personal responsibilities that prevented me from working with her anymore. I kept in contact and knew she was still trying to find another good match to help her keep working. but i knew it wasn't going well
it's been a year and a half now. last week she had contacted me and told me she was in hospital, and asked that i go feed her outdoor cats (no animal can live inside her house. really.) since i still have a key to her house i went, and had to go into the house to fetch the food and water.
and it was shocking. all the work we did was gone. the pathways are gone. the house smelt bad, i counted at least 30 cockroaches that i could see, i hate to think how many i couldn't see
i contacted her social worker and we had a talk.
i talked to the lady and told her that if she is willing to go stay with relatives or rent a room for a month i will go to her house with a friend and gut it out. she surprisingly agreed, i think the trust we built over time made her know that i am the only one she can allow to do that while she isn't there. i think she just wants it all gone now.
sure she might and probably will hoard again. but once she starts with a basic, clean, empty home, and is visited twice a week to regulate her, plus she is nearing 90 years old, it will not be as bad now.

she is a lovely woman, very friendly, very family oriented though never had kids of her own. she is smart, very compassionate, she treats me like i am "the daughter and granddaughter i never had" (quote)
yet she is able to cook soup in a vile kitchen covered in a coat of grease and gunk with creatures crawling everywhere and a fridge full of moldy food that expired six months ago.
and she is able to shower in a tub that is half full of pots pans and dishes because there is no room left in the kitchen sink.
and she sleeps on a sofa that is nearly sunk to the floor and ruins her back every day while her bed is covered in garbage in a room for more than 10 years.
I am not sure how to explain it but my best guess would be that over days, weeks, months, the hoard became bigger and she gradually got used to it and this is just her life. she wishes it was different, she has dreams. but when she thinks about where to start it's so daunting that she just gives up. and suddenly she is in her 80's and even if she wanted to start clearing out her own house, she just can't. on top of that she is alone in the country as her brother and his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren are all in a different country.

i suppose it's different between each hoarder. hopefully i will be able to clear out her house and give her a few years left of normal living conditions. i will update here if that happens, with before and after pics if she allows me to.

 

[Lady Pigroach]

Obsessive compulsive disorder. It's a bitch.

 

[Trump's Chosen]

Lmao, don't keep the stuff you paid for, just throw it out so you can pay for it again when you need it again.

 

[Samson Pumpkin Jr.]

One of the theories I've heard for it is that it's a coping mechanism for failed social connections. A hoarder begins to develop emotional attachments to inanimate objects as a substitute for emotional attachments to other people.

If this is true why would hoarders keep so many things that they can't possibly have an emotional connection with each one. Kids have emotional connections with rocks but a kid doesn't pick up every rock on the street, give each of them names and treats them like pets. There is a limit on how many connections we can have and hoarders can have like a thousand things in their home. There must be some other cause but I do think that loneliness plays a role. Or perhaps the loneliness is involuntary, maybe the personality of someone who hoards is just so inherently unlikable that no one will want to be around them

 

[melty]

 

[Dom Cruise]

The way I see it there's two types of hoarders, those that have a lot of actual stuff and those that let their homes get filled with garbage.

Wanting a bunch of stuff is a little more understandable, but allowing your home to get filled with garbage is beyond insane to me.

I can only guess that it stems from extreme laziness, people who are so lazy they'd rather just toss shit aside than take out the garbage, very quickly it snowballs into a huge mess and the bigger the mess the less they want to clean it up and that's how you get that situation with piles of trash everywhere.

 

[Juan But Not Forgotten]

I don't know, maybe throwing stuff causes them mental discomfort, so they choose to keep it around, until it becomes automatic.

 

[soft breathing]

A friend of mine is a hoarder. I try to not go into too much detail but the basics from what she told me:

- her parents never had a lot of time for her, she never really saw them growing up
- she never had a lot of friends at school aka a support net for herself
- she got bullied a lot
- two of her family members, one parent and one grandparent, died shortly one after the other
- she was never really able to cope with the deaths
- she went back to school, still sad/depressed about the deaths and the bullying just went on and on
- her family gave her the choice if she wanted to keep some thing from her deceased relatives
- since she was so overwhelmed with life itself, she kept it all
- around that time she also started seeing a therapist because her depression from the bullying, loosing a relative etc got worse
- she never had the energy to sort through it and was scared if she even opened the boxes of stuff in them she'd get triggered and fall back into a hole etc
- for some reason knowing that memories of her deceased relatives are in the boxes gave her comfort
- so she started keeping other things in boxes for the same reason, never re-opening them again, piling them up all over her room and other prats of the house
- she basically started different hobbies (crafting, drawing etc), never did a lot with them, packed them into boxes with the 'later, i'll deal with it later' mentality - even if she didn't enjoy the hobbies

She is now at the point where those piles and piles of stuff don't give her comfort anymore but huge anxiety. On the one hand because she's overwhelmed with them and their presence, on the other because she's scared of having to throw them away.
If I understood her correctly, having to throw things away that are tied to someone or something that's emotional/important to her feels like 'cutting out a part of herself' or 'throwing the memories of the people away'.

I hope this kind of made sense - I have a hard time understanding her reasons because I'm really the exact opposite with no emotional ties to things I own. That's also why I always feel pretty helpless and desperate when she asks me for help. Saying "just throw that shit away" doesn't help her at all obviously.

 

[Angel Dust]

There is no one singular reason. It's a multitude of things swirling together. Some reasons:

>Getting a new object can be a powerful rush of endorphins. It can temporarily fill an empty void in someone's heart. But then new object just becomes object, and that happiness goes away. So they keep getting new object to replace old object again and again and again in an effort to find peace. The problem compounds into shame and regret, which turns into trying to justify the hoard.

> Deep, deep self loathing. There are some people who think this is how they deserve to live. They get a nice apartment or house or trailer and they feel like they don't belong there, it's an unearned happiness. So they hoard trash and let the bugs come and turn into a wasteland, which brings the comforting feelings of this is how it's supposed be, this is where they belong. Almost like a pennant.

> Sheer, sheer laziness. They're simply too lazy to clean. They're happy when/if the hoard is cleaned and have no emotional attachment to any of it, but it'll fill right back up for the same reasons.

> Growing up in poverty or moving around constantly, creating a sense of manic attachment to objects. They want to replace what they never had, right the wrongs of their childhood.

 

[RapeMan]

Having a million dirty dishes and food packets is not hoarding, it's just living in filth. The hoarder in my family has decent stuff, just too many of each item. It can come in handy sometimes.
>Hey Hoarder do you have a spare dishwasher?
>Yes, in fact I have 12

Lmao, don't keep the stuff you paid for, just throw it out so you can pay for it again when you need it again.

This guy hoards

 

[Barbarella]

A friend’s mom is a hoarder, and she doesn’t even know why her mom is like this. The mom buys off QVC, goes to thrift stores, there are paths in the house. She probably wouldn’t be on hoarders because bathrooms and appliances are all functional but it’s sky high in bins (although she does sleep in a tiny chair by the TV) since every space is filled. My friend’s mom wanted it cleaned out once and asked her to help, but she said Mom couldn’t let anything go. She had about 50 mugs (for her and her husband) and just dozens of plastic bowls of all sizes, that when my friend tried to throw away the mom said she would use someday. She saves those packets of sporks and stuff you get from fast food and my friend says she has about a thousand! Mom wants to donate them but doesn’t do it. Everything was a fight so my friend gave up Mom’s bought stuff on QCC that’s never been opened. Some is for her friends but she never does give it to them. We figure she’s just a hoarder because she can’t let anything go. Nobody is allowed in her house but family so I’ve never seen it.

My friend is a neat freak, which is understandable.

I'm quite a bit of a hoarder and my house certainly is thrashed because of it.
What it comes down to for me is that I set up plans for a thing, life gets in the way, can't make time for said plans, new plans are made, place being thrashed makes getting task done more of a chore, chore gets pushed off more, and I develop of a sort of avoidance to it all.
Not to powerlevel too hard: but it's gotten to the point where I prefer to be at work than at home. I keep my occupational workplace tidy and can get everything I need to get done accomplished quite efficiently. When I'm home, there's all of this shit I WANT to do but because of the absolute state of things, I just get drunk and wallow in filth. This only compounds the issue because one of the things I've taken to hoarding is recyclables. I don't need the CRV money but in the past I've made it a point to give my recyclables to those that do. Now I sit here, surrounded by cans of malt liquor and empty water bottles, because jesus christ it would be a chore to to sort that shit out for the benefit of some bum and I'd rather just drink more and add to the pile of shit that makes all of the other stuff I want to do harder.

Have you considered that you are less of a hoarder and more likely to have ADHD and possibly a drinking problem, and it’s all overwhelmed you? You haven’t said anything about attachment to items. Now it just seems too much to do and you may not know how to start

I don’t know your financial situation, but if you can, call a place like 1-800-gotjunk or look for a clean out specialist. They’ll haul your old crap away, (and save albums and stuff you want) some will clean it or you can hire some after, and you can start fresh and learn better habits. Maybe you’ll drink less if your place is more livable. Also, stuff may be damaging the place, so you need to overcome your inertia and depression and move on it.

If you can’t imagine people taking stuff away, then maybe you are a hoarder and there is therapy you need. But if you just want it gone, that can happen.

If losing your junk doesn’t bother you, and if you can’t afford a clean-out specialist, admit to your friends what’s going on and let them help you. They’ll probably be more understanding than you think.

If you are alone, just decide you are doing it. Period. Break it up into smaller pieces, one at a time. Get rid of the bottles and recyclables. Don’t worry about sorting, but them in a bin and somebody will dig it out! Get the dishes done. Start throwing stuff out room by room, corner by corner if it’s that bad. It may seem like an insurmountable task, but if you make yourself spend an hour a day doing it, if you are determined, as you start to see progress you might be more encouraged and do more. Give yourself a reward when you meet a goal, a movie or something healthy that you enjoy. Booze is helping you avoid what you are doing but it’s not a good crutch to have. So try to think of fun and healthy ideas.

You can do it. We all can do what we put our minds to, including you.

Good luck