Hoarding - what causes it?

Wasn't sure where to put this thread ... so here it is.

Does anyone have any personal experience? Any theories?

 

No one?

 

I am the opposite actually, I hate to keep anything that may resemble clutter.

In fact, everything I own could easily fit in my car.

 

Same reason people hoard money...insecurity, black holes and voids on one's the sense of self. Google it....I am certain there are thousands of articles on the subject

 

Lol ... Seriously?

This sounds like the opposite of the hoarder dysfunction.

I am picturing you living in an apartment with no furniture. All you have is your phone, one suitcase worth of clothes, a couple blankets and a pillow, and you sleep on the floor. You have enough food for a couple of days, a glass, a plate, one frying pan, one pot, and a handful of utensils.

 

I live in a furnished room, just not my furniture.

All I really need is my computer and a place to sleep.

 

No, I don't have any personal experiance. The theory is that it's some symptom of mental disorder, beyond that I don't really have a theory. I imagine it's different on a case by case basis.

 

It's a mental illness ....

 

Next time you have a topic like this, Member's Casual Chat is probably the correct section.

Not really sure what causes hoarding, but it is definitely some sort of mental disorder.

 

As a police officer I have been inside the homes of hoarder's a few times. I've seen where every single room is completely taken up with junk, and the hoarder left little open pathways you could follow to get from one room to the other. Back yard had tons of useless junk as well. One I'm thinking of wasn't grossly unsanitary. Sorta dusty all over, but it didn't reek. The owner washed dishes and clothes and threw out food garbage, but he had simply saved everything else from newspapers, magazines, and mail to old broken down and dated TV's, record players, washers, dryers, etc, etc, etc, and this had been going on for decades.

I don't know what causes this mental illness.

 

Yeah, I know a couple of hoarders. It comes from a substitution of stuff for love. "No one loves me but I have all my stuff." I was never a hoarder myself, but when I felt unlovable in my younger years, I had a desperate attachment to my stuff. Once I found that people could love me, my stuff no longer seemed so important. I recognize the symptoms in the two hoarders that I know.

This should probably have gone in "Other Off-Topic Chat".

 

You're lucky. I keep my objects (and in near-pristine condition) for reasons similar to what you described. Though it's not that I'm not loved, I just don't have a group of people I can feel I truly belong with. Plus I like being in control of at least one aspect of my life. The best part is inanimate objects don't think for themselves like humans do.

 

I recommend pasting this on your wall, or something similar you made up that says, "you belong", somewhere you can see it regularly. It won't work right away, but over time, it should help.

 

As a matter of fact I will. That should always give me something to look forward to. Thank you, xwsmithx.

 

No problem. And you can call me William.

Don't be surprised if you find yourself just outright arguing with it at first. Over time, you'll find little exceptions here and there, and then eventually you'll find full blown examples of the truth of the statements. What happened? Two things: 1) You started to notice when people actually demonstrated these things, whereas before you ignored them or discounted them. 2) You started to actually change your behavior to become more attractive to people. I used to be so negative and so morose and so critical, it's no wonder no one wanted to be around me. Then I found people (almost all on-line) who thought I was funny, and that started to make me less negative, less morose, less critical. And the less negative I got, the more people who liked me. I still suffer from a severe handicap that turns a lot of people off (a high IQ), but I'm not nearly as friendless and morose as I used to be.

 

My grandma was a hoarder. Real bad. Ever watch that TLC special Hoarding: Buried Alive ? It was worse than that.
I talked to some of her family members and apparently she used to keep the house meticulously well cleaned, trying to be the perfect wife to please her husband, who was known to go off seeing other women. One day something changed. Much later we found out that she had secretly had an abortion, and then secretly had been pregnant and put another child up for adoption. One of my family members remembers the hoarding started about that time, and speculates that the loss, possibly from the abortion and/or possibly from putting a child up for adoption, caused her to snap. From that moment on, she didn't want to let go of anything ever again, like she had let go of two of her children (one to abortion and the other to adoption). She might also have associated keeping the house clean with doing everything to try to keep her husband. Eventually she gave up, gave up on her husband and let the home fall into chaos.

Her next husband dearly loved her but eventually left for no other reason than that he couldn't live with her chaos any longer. He gave her several chances to try to change. But even though she acknowledged he was good to her, I don't think she truly loved her second husband as much as she had desperately tried to keep the first.

Her family tried to help her, but every house she lived in she eventually turned into chaos. At one point we also found out she was renting out four storage units from three different storage facilities (this in addition to two homes). I didn't know she had that much money, it must have been costing her $1800 a month. Everything inside each of those compartments was junk, a lot of it had become moth, termite and rodent-infested.

 

It's just part of human nature--to build up supplies for those times you don't have them. Like most parts of human nature, it can get distorted by people with mental illness.

 

The knowledge that sometimes, the good times end, and you might actually need your stash.....

 

There are plenty of survivalists and junk dealers who keep tons of stuff on hand they might need someday (one guy had a wing of a plane, why? who knows), but hoarders are different, they keep trash, stuff that either was never worth anything in the first place, like junk mail, or stuff that has deteriorated so badly that it has become worthless, like rusted metal or moth-eaten clothes. Survivalists and junk dealers have no problem throwing crap like that away. So good theory, but no, that's not it.

 

I believe it is rooted in OCD, often times accompanied with anxiety.

 

Have you noticed that people who hoard are almost always fat? I’m not talking just morbidly obese, I’m talking like anything ranging from slightly overweight to deathly obese. They choose to hoard and store excessive calories. Including a lot of garbage calories that they don’t need. so that mentality translates into physical possessions that they must hoard and store excessive amounts of, and a lot of it is just plain trash.

I think that is the root cause of it. If fat people learned to control their eating habits then I don’t think hoarding would really happen.

 

Every time 'Ive seen the show "Hoarding", the person always has underlying unresolved issues. When I did home health care , many older people just didnt have the physical ability or help to get rid of stuff.

My mom moved back up here recently and I kept telling her... just come up here dont worry about your stuff, store it at my house. Shes had a hard time since my dad passed and needs to hang onto memories. Its normal to hang on for a time, but not normal when it overtakes their life.
I guess there are different reasons but the most severe are mental illness.

 

Many possible psychological reasons.Loss of Family or a specific
loved one.Therefore a need to never lose anything else in life.
Therefore a condition where one is almost scared to throw stuff
away.Maybe an Insecurity Complex.
One develops an attachment to things over and above
rational thinking.An Irrational attachment to things.

 

Yes! I have personal experience! I hoard all of my worthless crap, because I don't want you to get your mitts on it. IT'S MINE!!!

 

Do they think that maybe one day, those things, will come in handy? Put aside for a rainy day or when needed? You never know when you might need that old 8 track player. And if that article about the ups and downs of people's moods in the magazine is ever needed again, it's in one of these magazines...

Organize..

1 for interesting tid bits.
1 for factual interests.
1 for possible repair.
1 for works but outdated.
1 for I'm not sure about these, yets.

etc etc....

And if really adventurous, date them and put them in chronological order ...

and if really more adventurous, file them into a filing cabinet... Another 'item' of interest, per se.

Hoarding.... the idea behind the IBM information Main Frames.


Replica of Zuse's Z3, the first fully automatic, digital (electromechanical) computer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware


Hoarding Tech 101.. Introduction to Computers



https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/87/233285467_4724b56c19_z.jpg?zz=1


So what causes it?

$$$ $$$ $$$ (???)




Main Frame Hero???

But then what about these???

https://www.google.com/search?q=lan...ved=0ahUKEwjkxJSzn4vbAhUrwlQKHbBwDtgQ_AUICigB


And these are only Electronics.. and only a part..




https://www.google.com/search?biw=1....0....0...1c.1.64.img..0.0.0....0.nxdEuDUbinc

Airplanes go out of commission many times also...




And at other times, cities..

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=i...VIjlQKHY-iDGUQ3VYIJCgA&biw=1366&bih=605&dpr=1