On to the solutions!

A lot can be done if both parties can work together. But we have to be reasonable and figure that there is a likelihood that the hoarder will not let anyone else go through and triage their hoard. The pride alone will hinder any progress; but the shame will make it nearly impossible for them to accept your help and to be seen going through the hoard.

It's not that it's impossible but it's very taxing and leads to a lot of friction. And if you expect them to take initiative you might as well wait forever.

Negotiation and compromise are always worthy strategies not just to deal with hoarders but as a general rule for interpersonal dynamics. A good practice may be to give them room and time to move things along, but when setting agreed scheduled goals.

In my experience they'll will set the goalpost everytime they can and feed lie upon lie, letting weeks turn into years, if they even bother selling you they will change.

As I've said, the hoard is secondary. It's their inert spirit, lack of motivation, learned helplessness, and overall cynicism of life, and of their life, that will keep on pulling you down with them. In their heart of hearts, they know what they are doing and why, they just won't ever admit, and will stand at any corner with a lie, and excuses, to defend their motives and lack of progress.

One idea worth addressing for both CoHs and hoarders is that many emotional and philosophical primitives governing behavior will lead a person down the same alleyways. If a person is incapable of adapting one's environment to one's necessities, instead of adapting themselves to the environment, it will prove very difficult to change one's reality.

As I've explored extensively, many key pattern-behaviors lead to the same defeatist solutions. Learned helplessness being one of them.

Looking at ideas and emotions as vectors of contagion can help us be mindful and navigate the social world better. People that grew up in a hoard environment are used to a lower standard of treatment. This usually means that the person was trained to tolerate more negative emotion. If wielded correctly, this can be a 'super power', but if not managed it can lead down to the same old patterns.

The point of discussing all these topics and keywords is they'll help us focus on the root cause of the problem.

Underneith the 'hoard' is emptiness, unresolved feelings, hopelessness, and serious psychological disfunctions. It can be argued that the hoarder himself is stuck in a psychological stage he can't move forward from. And it's not only a problem to them but they'll begin to contaminate others, thus creating a 'basin of attraction', as if to pressure the world to solve their problem because they can't.

One of the reasons I took it upon me to try to solve 'hoarding' as far as I could and give primarily Children of Hoarders a helping hand is because it noticed these patterns and I studied on my own many different fields that had useful language to describe what's going on. One I understood the nature of hoarding, and because of how much it affected my life, I had no choice but to double down and find an answer.

It's hard to imagine how many CoH managed to break free and move on with their lives; it's even harder for me to imagine how no one saw it as a pressing matter to turn back and find a way to solve this so other people don't have to suffer through this. I don't blame anybody. Life is too hard and there isn't much time to waste when surviving is so pressing in our lives.

I guess I was too damaged from this that I might as well take a jab at it.

I wish I had an easy flawless solution, but I figure each hoarder is special in their own way, and has a different backstory that led them to neglect their living conditions.

In the end, we can't live life for anyone else. People have to work out their own problems (usually with a helping hand). But the hoarder mentality (narcissistic at their core) is full of pride, and shame, which is basically a dead end for thought to reach and stay in perpetual rummination.

It's not talked enough how costly it becomes to build a new 'self' with the pieces that need to be picked up after the building of lies and chaos is demolished. The strength it took to lift such a building means there is no strength left to start another... And from what? Rubble?

This is why it's near impossible to rehabilitate hoarders.

We are not just spatial beings; our curriculum never leaves us. Even the most therapeutic minds that wish to forgive and forget can't simply forgo the nature of the past. From paraphilics, to criminals, to abusers, it's very hard and dangerous to forget their past just to give another chance. And this isn't to say they don't deserve one, or that they will reoffend, but the past brought them to us even having to question whether they deserve a new opportunity.

Children of Hoaders know how many times they had anxiety, shame, fear, how many arguments, how much depression, how the hoard change their choices, their life trajectory, how it made them neglect themselves and their relationships, and how much it changed them. It's not easy to pretend and start over after a thousand cuts. The human mind is malleable, and the brain is plastic, but it's not that much. And in the end, the ball is also on the hoarder's court to keep their end of the deal. Their brains are likely worthy of being studied. Their inner chaos likely can't be organized or structured. I speculate that their 'cosmovision' is oriented towards the most unstable and shifting realities of our lives. These have to be brains that had no opportunity, and perhaps capability, to orient life to inner designs.

A structured mind creates habits, attempts to 'control' their environment, the people they deal with, their dreams, their goals, etc. It makes us ponder if lack of structure leads to hoarding or if hoarding leads to lack of structure. Not everyone that doesn't have structure becomes a hoarder, nor everyone that is a hoarder lacks structure, but it seems pretty much convergent. My suspicion is that both lack of structure and hoarding increase with one another.

We tend to see hoarding has the clutter aspect, and we forget about the compulsive nature of bringing novel objects home. There's a sense of conquest that reminds me of primal times of bringing a fresh hunt; or even a beaver gathering branches to stop rivers from flowing. It makes one think how much these behaviors don't have an ulterior motive other than deeply engraned instincts that travlled across the ages to this day. I tend to think they keep repeating like any other to keep them 'fresh' and workable, even if only for next generations.

I tend to think that we can't look at humans as individuals alone; we're not just individuals or social animals part of a social hive or network; we're also geneoligical branches - we're rivers and afluents of the past towards the future. Perhaps hoarding, at its core, is unstoppable. Perhaps it's the wrong approach to try to stop it. My perspective has been for a while that these impulses and 'energies' should be steered instead of erased. This leads us to the interest of noticing the very constituents of the situations that lead to hoarding (collecting).

This is no longer just geared towards hoarders. In this section I'll be looking to present the ways both the children and the hoarder could join forces towards similar problem solving, or at the very least realize how their problems might be more similar than many CoHs might imagine, given the likely disdain they have towards their parent's behavior. See, it's not part of my quest here to present all the known facts about hoarding up to date; my only compromise is to give my road and the data I collected individually. So, I don't know whether hoarding is inherited genetically, environmentally, or if it's originated in hoarder first hand. I figure each hoarder may have a combination of these factors or a unique combination. We all know that many CoHs become hoarders themselves - so environmental contagion is a given; but we also know that not every CoH becomes a hoarder themselves, so there is a clue there that not everyone is 'infected' by said environmental or genetical contagion.

It would be spectacular to see studies that linked the big5 personality models crossing information with hoarding disorder. It would definetely gives a clearer picture of the type of temperamental profile we can expect to develop hoarding tendencies. It's very hard to imagine a consciencious person having hoarding problems, as an example. By contrast, it's much easier to imagine low consciencious, and high in openness having this problem. The other dimensions seem more like a coin toss on the matter.

• Solutions for both

I have a simple way. It's not fullproof but it might be the least cost expensive for the most possible return. You need to find him meaning/purpose that requires his cleaned house to be leveraged for that purpose. And it has to be a purpose he recognizes and sees the need for a clean house to advance that purpose. (Logotherapy) For example, I cleaned a hallway table, and set up there an aquarium that I began to invest in and aquascape. Not only did I conquered a space, I also signaled investment in the hoarder, and I gave the hoarder something to make content about by filming for her facebook. I also cleaned every division, but I cleaned an office room and I began painting. I then cleaned the corridor and then I ended up setting up paintings on the wall. She is also a painter. I ended up pushing her and participating in exhibits which made her invest in it herself as well. As you can see it's very time consuming and required me to invest in the hoarder, leverage her interests as well to create a common goal and meaning in her life. Look, to be fair, we can't just take. We gotta give back, and learn to love others and not just be transactional and self-involved. I was very much like this as well for obvious reasons of moving my life forward, but sometimes we must help others. It's not easy because it usually seems like a setback and set backwards, but the reality is that your situation will only become worse if you don't have the option of leaving. And your uncle is always bound by blood, as much as nowadays it seems to be less important or useful. But the point is that, if you can't leave this strategy I told you probably the most effective and cuts to the chase. Energy for tasks is usually not a physical problem but a psychological investment one. The hoarder has no reason to move ahead. And so he doesn't see a reason to do even basic task because they contribute to any improvement. Besides he keeps you in his orbit stuck with him (don't personalize it - it's human nature). Ironically, as disgusting as it might seem and as hard as it might seem, if you can't leave, your best shot is to invest in him a bit like I told you. There is a counter-intuitive dynamic in people and animals as well, where the more you try to escape the more they suffocate you, and the more you approach the more suffocated they feel. Dogs, for example, become aggressive if you show fear; and they become very playful if you play with them. It's a mirroring thing like they begin to act like the role they perceive you to think they are from your body language - the dogs become villains because they see you afraid (therefore he must be the villain or simply 'bad'). In case of hoarders they feel you just want to leave because they are inadequate and repulsive, so they become what you see them as even more, trapping you further in the hoard. They can do it actively or by being defeated - it's called 'learned helplessness' and 'cofirmation bias').

But I still think it can be guided and steered. One way to do it is be compulsive about not being compulsive. It can be done. It just needs reframing. Another way is to find purpose for things and give them away or sell them. Another is to be a minimalist. Another is yo give away money or invest it so you don't have it to buy. You need to block out your exposure to the situations where you feel the compulsion. Like going less times to the store and sticking to a list of purchases. Another is to fix your self-sabotage by analyzing why you are doing it. What are you trying to stop? Your kids leaving? Why? Are you afraid of change? Why? Are you afraid of intimacy? Why? Are you afraid of trusting another person because you have been hurt? Etc. All these questions have answers and solutions.

Forcing you to invest in a false identity and in occult endeavors you can't bring to light. Animals disorganized thought. It leads to disorganized emotions. And therefore disorganized behavior. Noise, safety reframing failure and tools learned along the way as necessary for your ultimate destiny.

Post hoard: CoH - feeling good; H - taking advantage of the changes you created - oportunists