This is a totally non-kinky post today. Lately I’ve checked out a few of the episodes of Hoarders on A&E, about people who compulsively fill their houses with junk and never throw anything away. I have a good friend who’s had this problem for years and it only seems to get worse as the years pass. If you’ve ever dealt with a family member or friend with this condition you know how frustrating and bewildering it can be. You want to just talk reason with them. It seems like such an obvious problem and so easy to fix if they’d just throw things out. But they won’t and no amount of reasoning will budge them. You can help them clean out the house and in two months it’s back to where it was. The house is just a symptom of a deeper underlying mental disorder, a form of obsessive compulsive disorder that plugs into issues such as loss and abandonment, and which can be incredibly hard to treat. Anyway, it’s a very good series and they have some preview clips and episodes online at the link above.
Hey Sandra,
My father is like this. He filled our house up with all kinds of ‘projects’ he planned to accomplish. This went on for years. When ever we questioned this he got very irate. He did this for years always claiming that we were going to have this big garage sale. We never really did. Eventually the home got very ‘unhealthy’. Five years ago we got four (!) enormous dumpster loads of his stuff out of there. It almost made him die to see it. He was so mad. He immediately filled the house up again. How he did it? His favorite ploy was to wait till the end of the day at a nearby garage sale and offer them a package price on the remaining stuff!
Fast forward to July 08. He got real weak and we realized the home needed to be ADA friendly..so we had to do it again. Again he was furious…but being 87 hasn’t the energy to do it again.
The family suffered for about thirty years before we said enough! You’re exactly right, though. It’s a compulsive disorder that cannot be reasoned with. Great post. Thanks for sharing that.
Rachel Lane
Thanks so much, Rachel! I certainly sympathize with your situation with your father. It can be so incredibly frustrating trying to reason with someone who has this condition. I’ve been trying to help my friend for years and have basically given up, I hate to say. I love her and would help her in a minute but there have been so many false starts that I don’t have much hope left. Every now and then she’ll get excited about dealing with it, but usually there’s no real action to back it up, or she makes minor improvements and then backslides.
The A&E show is really good and I’ve seen several episodes. Some of them are just so shocking and disgusting, though a few of the people they’ve profiled actually look to have a decent chance of maybe getting it under control. It’s a complex and difficult condition. I wish they just had a pill to take for it, but alas, there’s no easy solution.