Do hoarders have special awareness which differs from the norm?

[TheLightSideOfTheMoon]

DP has hoarding tendencies. Mostly it’s contained in his room - a room chosen for this purpose.

However, every now and then he’ll get upset because the room is ‘messy’. But he won’t remove anything. He can’t understand that it’s not just a tidiness issue, the stuff WILL NOT FIT onto shelves/into cupboards.

It’s almost as though he expects the space to grow to accommodate the stuff. Obviously it won’t.

Is this normal? Because it’s frustrating.

Do hoarders not look at other rooms or other people’s homes and just observe that there are fewer things?

What’s the deal?

Should be ‘spacial’ awareness in the title.

I have some tendencies, I try my best but I find it really hard to let go of stuff.

its anxiety related, I know I need to do it, I get so overwhelmed and then I don’t do anything.

i have the same amount of spatial as awareness as the next person, AFAIK, and yes I’m aware that other peoples houses tend not to have bags of stuff everywhere.

I had some success with the one thing a day challenge and managed to do it for nearly a year. But stuff happens and I fell off the wagon.

I get it’s frustrating for you, I annoy myself sometimes. At least it’s all in one room though.

He doesn't sound like a hoarder if it's just one room? No it's nothing about spatial awareness. It's a form of ocd. You can be blind to your own clutter but it's not IQ related so of course you go into other people's houses and see that they have less shit than you and your life / house is abnormal.

I can't stand my sisters living room as an aside. She has two sofas, tv and TV unit and it reminds me a doctors waiting room. . I don't like houses that have nothing in them that suggests people live there. But I have never been in any house like mine. I don't have any issues at all with appreciation of what's going on. It's not about being so dense you don't realise that 20 cubic metres of crap doesn't fit in 10 cubic metres

In my (not vast, admittedly) experience, hoarding is an anxiety response to some kind of loss. Not necessarily a death, though it often can be, but some form of emotional hole that needs filling. The collection, accumulation and holding onto things offers some sort of psychological comfort, sometimes guarding against intrusive thoughts.

Yes, and my understanding is it's related to regaining/maintaining control/security.

I had a friend with a hoarding problem. She was convinced their house wasn't big enough. it was perfectly big enough they just had far far too much stuff that other people would have got rid of. It was definitely a MH issue.

You are describing my husband. It is Warhammer. I have no advice. It stays in that room, I try not to care about what it looks like.

It sounds like your husband might have undiagnosed adult adhd

I have slight hoarding inclinations. Parents really deprived me of a sense of self growing up so perhaps that's why I feel a kind of panic at the thought of realising I threw out something I now need..
I do a big clear out every year but I need to psychologically prepare for it.

This is very interesting and rings a bell for me too. Can I ask what you think the connection is between being deprived of a sense of self and the panic at throwing things away?

If it’s stuff he never uses just collects and piles it up onto stuff he’s already got, chances are he’s forgotten what he has. I would throw out bits from the bottom of the pile when he’s not around, the things I’m sure he’s forgotten about (when he’s not around). Sounds harsh but I would do this to stop it getting out of hand. Hoarding is a mental illness and the hoard is eventually going to come out of this room and take over the whole house.

Maybe give him a rule that he’s not allowed to buy anything new without getting rid of something old first.

And he might need therapy. This would drive me crazy, I hate clutter, you have more patience than me OP

I see there are fewer things, and I just think that if it was my house, it would be full of my crap in no time. I do feel envious to a point. But I just can't get rid of stuff.

For years, I could not get rid of anything that had a face on it as I was convinced someone somewhere (human or animal) was being harmed. So I kept magazines, leaflets etc. If I screwed up a leaflet with a cartoon dog on, my mind told me that I was harming a real dog. It is weird, and I have not explained it well.

The person I know with hoarding tendencies seems to see space as something that needs to be filled, I have noticed that. As a child they would want to rearrange furniture to make space to fit more items into a room. Like Tetris. That was their hobby - they would draw out and redesign friend and family members' room layouts so they were fuller.

I think the poster who said hoarding is a response to a loss and represents the need to fill an emotional hole, is onto something, at least in that case I don't think the spatial awareness is different but I think there is a difference in perception of whether space is a good and valuable thing - freedom to move about or a bad and scary thing - a gap that needs filling .

But it's a complex condition and I imagine the exact reasons for each person are different.

@MorganSeventh my husband is a hoarder. I have long said that hoarders are like space - they abhor a vacuum. I keep it under control by enforcing strict boundaries - he is allowed two areas of the house where his “collections” are and these are out of sight of any visitors. I live in the house too and my health and sanity and need to be able to invite people into the house without fear of embarrassment are as important as his. He likes a clean, tidy house and has said so, but he has no idea how to achieve this on his own.

It's a mental illness. My DP are hoarders. FiL is also to a certain extent and DH has similar tendencies. He likes to hoard his own stuff but complains about my smaller amount of stuff taking up space that he could fill with his precious tat.

Hoarding is a serious and complex mental health problem. It is irrational by definition. Sorry you're going through this.

I believe it's a mental health issue, probably rooted in childhood for a lot of people

I do believe though that if you have a family , you have a responsibility to either keep it to one room only or seek proper help for it. It is not fair to expect your kids or partner to live with it - and it is usually junk that people hoard

I have known two hoarders. One is my MIL she is very sentimental and has stuff like her dead Mother's clothes who died about 35 years ago and the bike she rode as a child in WWII. She has newspaper articles she has clipped form newspapers. Though stuff is everywhere it has some order and her house does not seem grubby.

The other was actually a friend her house was just an awful messy dump and very dirty, she wanted me to come to dinner , nothing would induce me to eat there. We actually fell out over a completely separate issue and deep down I was a bit relieved. She was not a bad person just a completely messed up in the head one. She had some very odd ideas about the class system and had grown up poor as had I. But she had grown up on an awful estate. Whereas I had been raised in a family with just far too many children but in a lovely area.

That is not hoarding.. that is collecting.

Even though every room in my house is full of stuff.. most of it is craft stuff. I was told by several psychiatrists (including one that came to my home) that it is not hoarding as it is not "rubbish". They said hoarders keep rubbish, not actual useful things or collectable things like Warhammer.

@Catabogus maybe that what I HAVE is replacement for a core self.
Although, I do now have a sense of my self. But perhaps when I was younger, my possessions were a definition, of sorts.

Define rubbish!
I know when I cleared out last year I had kept lots of nice pretty shop bags. Card bags with little rope handles. I would never use them though. They were hard to throw out because they were in perfect condition. But useless. But pretty.
🤔🤪

Ha, I have a load of those too. I think I could regift them as they are in good condition too.

My former husband was a hoarder (well… IS but you can’t hoard in prison).
Since his arrest and abrupt departure from the home over a year ago, I’ve had the fun task of removing the beast that is his ‘collection’.

It very much was the elephant in the room- in every room! Hard as I fought to keep his tidal wave of shit at bay, it oozed it’s way into the entire home and permeated our family dynamic with so much resentment, toxicity, and damage. He had a sad, voiceless childhood and going through his stuff, much as I hate him, is a rather tragically eye opening experience. It’s very revealing.

I’ve spent years being angry about his hoarding. Now that I’m the one tackling it by myself, I really see the child who was never allowed to be and the man who was never really there. It’s an absolutely painful disorder. It’s been a terribly sad year for us and undoing his hoarding has certainly added more sadness than I can handle. I’m throwing away inanimate objects that had more value than his family.

Sorry to summon the dark clouds to the thread! 😬

I wonder if, for older people in particular, hoarding is a response to changes in memory and one’s sense of time. Their possessions can be a prompt to memories that are essential to their sense of who they are. Often for those hoarders with dementia, the worst thing you can do is strip away all their hoard at once - they end up seriously disorientated - so you need to clear the hoard very sensitively.

I can understand the appeal of keeping, say, the paper boarding pass for the first time you flew to New York, or the birthday card signed by all your friends on that surprise party in 1991 - but it’s where you draw the line, between keepsakes and junk.