As I’ve alluded to earlier, a substantial aspect of becoming a hoarder is emotional regulation, but another less spoken of is the character the hoarder cultivates.
By creating a rift between the environment of the household and the “outside world” the hoarder forces people to choose a “side”. It acts as a way to check allegiances.
But what kind of personality can withstand this crevice? It has to be someone that has to entertain a good amount of solitude. This isn’t to say that hoarders are by default canonically loners, but it does mean that one of their ‘self-states’ is that of being a loner. But, by contrast, they can also shift between this occult life and a rich social life. Sometimes, the best way to hide is in plain sight. In order for hoarders to pick so many items, they must oscillate between hyper-activity and hypo-activity – between high energy spirits and low energy lethargy – so as to visit many places where items can be collected and also earn so they can spend. Hoarding is time consuming and money-worshipping. Hoarding is an expensive endeavor which makes them devout materialists and money worshipers; certainly object worshipers.
They do this for two major reasons: one is in their control, ironically, which is their desires, making them susceptible and easily entailed to pursue, collect, be sociable, curious and juvenile; and the other reason, less in their control, is the backlash they suffer for not being able to sustain the first state of high spirits forever. Hoarders are inconsequential. They are dreamy creatures that are too bubbly for this world, but it’s hard raw reality that forces them back. And with their hopes, dreams and aspirations all that’s left are the illusions, the windows, and the wishes. They are unable to take the necessary steps to become who they envision themselves as. Their desires are unrealistic, which in turn leaves them just like their things: a half-done and abandoned project.
If you gave wealth to a hoarder the problem would only magnify. The problem is that hoarders are impractical and unable to supply any psychological investment in logistics and mechanics. They have the dream; they collect first steps; but they are incapable of bridging the former and the latter, into fruition.
Another relevant characteristic of this behavior is the pride in conjunction with the shame. Hoarders are people often with two faces. They love and hate themselves; they are hopeful and dreamy, yet self-sabotaging and depressive; they are proud of their struggle and resistance yet they are deeply ashamed and humiliated. And this is what they contaminate others with: shame and low self-esteem.
By reducing others they aim to control them like a kid that sticks to a mother’s leg to force her to bend to his will. Hoarders pull everyone down to slow them and demoralize them. It’s psychological warfare. Accompanied by shame tactics they cripple people psychologically.
It doesn't matter if it's done consciously, unconsciously, or a mix of the two; the result is that these behaviors have these characteristics regardless.
In truth, some are just as scared of being exposed as their “imprisoned” family members, but they rationalize it as character strength since they can’t escape their own inadequacies. But to be fair some are just shameless slackers. One theme you will notice in hoarders (and narcissists) is the sheer amount of cognitive dissonances, contradictions and “bipolarity” in their personality, behaviors and emotions. They go from being ashamed to being shameless, from being victims of the world to imprison everyone in their whirlwind, to have a public face to having a private tragedy, from being high energy to low energy, and from being insecure and with no self-esteem to being arrogant, condescending and proud.
They are often very bitter people, once the facade is lifted.
But we culminate in their most relevant mark of their persona which is the fact that they are trying to stop life.
Just like professor Sam Vaknin explains about narcissists, hoarders also are deeply invested in inert dead objects; they don’t invest in the future per se, but in being able to keep on stacking and purchasing meaningless vacuous tokens; in addition, they are trying to stop the flow of time, and you can see this because most hoarders save a sense of nostalgia from many of their trinkets, which is a need to keep on identifying with not only their past selves and experiences, connections and emotions, but also with the worldview they had, the hopes they still had and their juvenile naive spirit. Just like narcissists, they mourn their past and they resent the future because it’s the ultimate clash with fantasy as reality gets in the way by imposing itself. And reality is often ugly and brutal.
A key point that is worth mentioning is that hoarders 'personify' objects around them. Just as narcissists have internal 'objects' they introject and interact with, hoarders also do the same - which is why their space is 'them'. Like 'solipsists' there is nothing that isn't 'them', and so hoarders identify with their belongings. So, they imbue those objects with 'magical properties', by extension of considering them part of them (unconsciously).
There are many studies in the anthropological field regarding 'totems', 'trophies', sacred objects, and also the opposite: objects that consecrate, taint and contaminate - 'anathemas', 'pariahs', 'miasma'. Given the psychological properties people attribute to objects by association, it creates a 'physics' of psychic - thus 'magical' - phenomena. And this may all sound convoluted, but it's in this 'plane' that metaphor and identity have their own geography and are commerced and disputed. It's because of this 'hard to pin down' world that expressions like 'this is garbage!' or 'you must get rid of this!' gain a much more acute emotional charge for the hoarder. The hoarder doesn't simply hear those expressions as neutral or synthetic statements about objects; instead they hear them and interiorize them as identity assaults, because the objects are part of their identity - they are 'mementos' of past acquaintances, memorabilia of past life stages, remembrances of events, feelings and experiences, or even memoranda of dreams, wishes, offerings, etc.
These objects are 'hyperlinks' to different parts of the hoarder's brain - hippocampus, limbic region, PFC, etc. And I mean this as literally as this metaphor allows me. The hoarder 'freezes' time by exporting inner triggers to outside objects.
Note: Some hoarders may have memory problems (dissociation) which they compensate by using objects as 'mementos'.