Confessions of a Hoarder: Truth Be Told

As I’m trying to make time to meditate, and make more room in my life for people and things I want to do; I’ve developed a couple of bad habits. One is watching TV on Netflix. We don’t have cable, and haven’t for years, so for a very long time I never watched TV. Yep, never. No water cooler talk for me that revolved around fictional TV characters. Back when everyone wondered who killed JR, I couldn’t have cared less. Now, I’ve made my way through Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, am in the middle of season 3 of The Office, and have started watching Hoarders, one of the saddest shows ever.

This show has been strange and cathartic for me. It has made me see that my mom is a hoarder, as is one of my sisters. For real, not just collectors, not just hard to let things go, not just messy, but hoarders. I think I may be one, too. I’ve had my girls to help me fight it off, and I don’t get so defensive, but on a gut level, I feel it. One of the things that these hoarders all seem to have in common is a deep loneliness. They have people in their lives, but they are not connected to them. They live alone in their piles and boxes and a place in their head where all this stuff means something and takes the place of interacting with others on a level that comforts and satisfies. It is a sad, sad trade off. There’s also a huge amount of anger, just brewing under the surface of these sad people, an emotion that they seem unable to express unless someone is messing with their stuff.

So of course, as I’m studying neuroscience and therapy, my wheels are spinning, and this is what I’m thinking. Dr. Dan Siegel, who’s written The Mindful Therapist, says that as babies develop the right sides of their brains are developing faster than the left. He says that the right side of the brain processes are: earlier to develop, holistic, non-verbal, visual/spatial imagery, metaphors, stress reduction, autobiographical memory, and (an) integrated map of the body. This is complex, but stay with me here....The left side is: later to develop, linear, linguistic, logical, literal, lists, factual/semantic memory, and digital:Yes/No-Up/Down. (Siegel, 2010, p. 61). Siegel states, “Often the feeling of isolation comes along with a drive to be certain of the outcome of interactions, to guarantee the results of communication” (p. 61).

So now I’m getting it. My life, my loneliness and my compulsion to buy clothes and (cheap) jewelry. I wasn’t always so much of a hoarder, when I was young and had close emotional connections. It’s become a struggle in the past 10 years, when my life became very hard. I was raising three daughters alone as my sister succumbed to mental and physical illness and I accompanied her to way too many emergency room runs and doctor appointments. My dad was struggling with cancer and experimental chemo before he died. My youngest daughter’s thyroid disease was undiagnosed; and so we struggled with childhood depression, chronic colds, migraine headaches, and an assortment of issues associated with thyroid disease, that finally after years of therapy and specialists, my family doctor finally figured out. My middle daughter became depressed also in the midst of this, and my oldest daughter was a young mom.

And my mom. She is a hoarder. She never gets outwardly mad, but you can’t take things away from her. You can’t throw away old paper from 30 years ago. I have helped her move twice since my dad died, and it’s monumental. She has a three bedroom apartment now, all the closets are filled with clothes. She has become a tidy hoarder, so it’s harder to know. She has an amazing way of filling things up, with stuff. I nearly cried when we moved her to her apartment only a year ago. She had piles of garbage (old refrigerator drawers that she’d saved, with old towels) that she insisted of having the movers bring and I nearly lost my temper over her bringing them on to the already nearly full moving truck. It was a sad moment in her new apartment, when you couldn’t walk through it due to the boxes, and she knew she should have thrown stuff out. My childhood memories of bringing friends home after school were to hear, “Doesn’t your mom ever clean?” I felt ashamed and isolated, and ashamed of being ashamed of my mom.

I also remember my dad’s frustration with the clutter, and his idea of helping was to enlist us kids to clean on Saturday mornings. I invariably got the kitchen, and I would throw away anywhere from 10-20 plastic bags from bread and twisties. Dishes were washed and put away, bread crumbs cleaned out from the counters. The floor cleaned. My dad would take the unsavory job of cleaning out the fridge, saying things like, “Geez- us” and “Oh my God” as he threw things away. My dad and I would bond over the clean kitchen, my mom would smile and say thanks, and within a few minutes, fly off the handle and nearly cry because her plastic bags were thrown away. Throughout the week, she’d blame me for not having her plastic bags. I would secretly wish that our house would burn down. Then we could start over, and be like the Brady Bunch, with a clean house.

As a teenager, I cleaned my bedroom every week. I threw things away and my mom would retrieve things, like my old make-up out of my bedroom trash. People would walk into my bedroom, and it was clean, and orderly and they’d ask how come my room was so clean. I guess I was beginning to live in the left part of my brain, I was not finding what Siegel calls “resonance” with anyone on the right side of my brain, so I shifted to finding safety in the left side processes. I handled the loneliness and the craziness in this way. I grew to love school and the orderliness there. It increased my sense of isolation, but gave me a new reason for it, I was just smart and introverted. There, some sense made of the chaotic universe.

to be continued...