Hoarders are defeatists. They take refuge in their pathology and surrender to it. Exactly like any addict. What they don't understand is how much their physical state influences their state of mind and decisions. Hoarders are the first victims of the hoard.
Transcending the hoard requires mental clarity, resilience and love for change. But most hoarders don't want to change. They created their situation after all. Like addicts (which they are), hoarders see their addiction as pathological (at least the ones that admit it) but they won't take any steps to change it. Since they identify with the label they can't get out of the box they created for themselves. They live in a perpetual state of hedonism and immediate pleasures.
Like all addictions it lowers their dopamine baseline which leads them to buy or collect more items to get the same pleasure. Which, in turn, leads them to more sadness, depression, and they can't escape the loop. See, this has nothing to do with hoarding, and everything to do with addictive loops. Once the person starts understanding how their body works they can start disciplining it on a regular basis. To get around and avoid falling into this behavioral and psychological spirals, the person must employ abstinence at the right times to wean themselves off of the compulsive behavior.
There is no need to stop the behavior altogether. There are logical sensible reasons why people do what they do. They are not crazy. But, in hindsight, we can analyze how costly/profitable a behavior is. Hoarding will take over other natural healthy affairs, thus interfering with them. This is the proof it's pathological. That said, the goal is not to stop hoarding but to learn not to overdo it, and to play with the nervous system to one's advantage. By knowing its limits we can learn to push only so far, and then wean off your behavior for a 'refractory' period, so you can start hoarding again. Because the negative spiral is what leads to excessive overindulgence. Because if you contain it before your dopamine payoffs go down we can then prevent exaggerated escalation of behaviors.
As grotesque as the hoard is, I don't think any person would want that when they're in a healthy state. It's the lack of skill in understanding one's mental state, as it's connected to physical state, that leads a person to lose control over one's behavior, mental state, and self-image.
As I've mentioned in other sections of the website, there are a lot of comorbidities with other psychopathologies, which we recognize in symptoms like anxiety, depression and shame - all PTSD and CPTSD related. This gives us a hint, that despite the different taxonomies and presentations they all share similar causes and responsive adaptations. This leads us to see that the problem doesn't lie in a unique disease - which hoarders with learned helplessness and grandiosity (feeling special) mistake for - but they lie in the usual suspects like trauma, stress, and negative spirals.
I can't stress enough the connection between body and mind - between consciousness and environment. Whichever you give precedence it's necessary to work on both in tandem and see how each improvement on one domain leads to the improvement on the other.
The Body
So let's start with the body. Your mind needs a healthy body to clear itself, and let you maintain a stable standard to improve in a progressive manner.
If properly managed, these elements can be stabilizing and lead you to healthy patterns even when you fall astray. Instead of relying on accidental improvement you let your tried and proven habits circle you back even in times of crisis. Your own body will become accustomed and develop 'muscle memory' to push to healthy modes of being.
The Mind
The mind is a complicated place. We tend to think of it as the origin of all things but I quite often think it's the body that sets the mind up. Nevertheless listening to your thoughts can give you insight both about the mind and the body, so you can circle back and cover both ends.
As I've been preparing, dealing with the hoard requires energy, a motive to push you to the end in one go, and the availability to maintain things after they're clean. This requires you to know yourself and your life situation and be absolutely honest. Don't just keep telling yourself 'I'll do it!' or 'This time is the time!', only to you see yourself fall short. Tell yourself 'I will not do it. It's a lie I have been telling myself. I always give up half way because it's too hard for me to do it.' Be this reasonable and realistic with yourself. The lies you tell yourself, you know are lies, will make you lose faith in yourself when it turns out you 'failed' once again. Not only have you lied to yourself for the thousandth time, you have failed yourself once again. You are disrespecting yourself at every turn.
To change you must be absolutely honest with yourself. You must finally tell yourself who you are. Not who you want to be, but who you are at this very moment. This is not an acceptance of your overall limits. Accepting who you are right now won't condemn you, it will just align your mental map with who you are being. If you achieve that you will finally set from the place you are - to make moves from that point - instead of perpetually dreaming who you want to be without ever coming down to earth with practical moves adapted to your specific situation.
Change requires bravery. To change is to admit you might not be who you think you are, who you want to be, and accept you are not and might not even become who you want. This state of mind is pure humility towards life. And humility is the first step towards change.
Are you ready to change? If so, be ready to bow yourself to the unknown. Because only in the unknown, only in self-exploration, and honesty with oneself, can arise a person capable of reliably maintaining a plan and active measures to change their situation.
Once you got past this you can finally address your situation. Use your vacations, if you are unemployed use that time first (a month out of a job is nothing compared to years living in a hoard); if you are not proud ask people that you know won't judge you. The right people love a person humble enough to see their own faults and ready to change. The fault lies in insecurity. People sense insecurity and feel like you are not committed to the change - that you will just drag them into a back and forth that might turn into a negative spiral.
The gist is to do it one go with purpose.
The first thing I want you to do is observe your hoard. Walk around in it. See what bugs you. Tell yourself what you wish you could change even if you don't know how. Write it down if you need. And, as you observe, I want you to imagine your house empty - as if it were new, ready for someone to move in. Now, imagine how you would set it up if you could start anew. How would you use each room. For what purposes? How would you organize areas? Do these choices make sense in regards to what these rooms are usually used for? Why not? Are these objects out of context?
The road to transformation is first a road where the person adapts to the environment and not the environment to the person. It's not that you must be a slave to the environment, it's that your elasticity allows you to find better and creative solutions for problems. You can't solve problems with 'solutions' that will lead to other problems in the future. You have to look at your environment and measure how it will interfere with each thing. Do these objects block a door I will use later? Will this door when it opens make all the objects inside fall out? Does me avoiding ordering objects after I buy them lead to procrastination and chaos? Do I spend time setting up areas to receive future purchased objects? Are objects that will rarely be used worth buying? Are objects that if not consumed right away (and you likely won't) worth buying? Should I accept this discardable gift?
There are a hundred more questions like this you must do to manage your environment that start with your decisions. Decisions stack. They stack across time. And every decision you make along the way matters. Every single one of them.
If you are to go from your imagined empty house to your imagined ideal healthy environment you must realize that the person that will live your ideal house will have to be ideal as well. The hoard is a process of inner transformation as much as it is a process of outer transformation.
When you start cleaning you need to focus on points of contamination first. Objects that can spill, objects that can combust, objects that are rotten, objects that are toxic or that can transmit bacteria, objects that can corrode, objects that can ruin other objects need to be removed and isolated (preferentially disposed of) first.
Next you need to start dividing the chaos into two areas: order and chaos. On one side you have the hoard and on the other you will focus on opening up the space and organizing objects by category and sub-categories. Be simple. This requires many iterations. As much as necessary. And you won't clean it all and organize it in one move. Separate objects by category as I said and set up areas with bags only to receive garbage. You can set recycling bags as well if you have the time for it, but if not then just mix all the garbage.
Wearing gloves depending on how toxic or harmful (broken glass, corroded metals, chipped woods, etc) the objects you are dealing with is very important. If you can sort through areas with only non-harmful objects then you might be able to not use them to up your pace, but, as a general rule, gloves are very important and will protect you from accidents that are bound to happen.
Wearing a mask is another good practice worth considering. Hoarder houses have a lot of mixed objects in forgotten conditions, spilled chemicals, batteries foaming, animal rotten food, you name it. Breathing these toxins, or small dust particles or old plastic bag fragments, is very dangerous for the health. A mask can avoid a lot of exposure.
At first you shouldn't focus on disinfection and cleaning, unless there is a major spill or bacteria. Initially you should only focus on organizing objects by category and giving them a clean. The rest of the environment is gonna have to wait to be cleaned when all objects are isolated and ordered into groups. You want to bring the objects that belong in their respective rooms near those rooms.
The plan is to only to do a deep clean on the areas when they are fully sorted through and emptied. Of course you may have to work around furniture that is too heavy or too full to move. You want to avoid dealing with the inner contents until your area is clean. It's important not to soil clean objects with other objects.
As you clear the first phase where you split your room's hoard into an area for ordered objects, an area of your chaotic hoard, an are of your garbage bags, and an empty area you will want to increase, you now want to keep doing this and then throwing out the garbage and opening up new bags to restart the process again. When you reach an open area with only ordered objects grouped together (even if they're laying on the ground), you will want to do your first ground swipe, followed by disinfection. After it dries, you can tackle the furniture and its insides. You will want to remove everything inside first - not step by step, remove it all. And then you will observe the objects and do the same thing you were doing again: split objects into groups; but never put unclean next to clean. Unclean is it's own group. You don't want to create more work by having to clean what's decent as well. Once you clear each piece of furniture you want to decide what objects will go in. Not to fill the piece of furniture, but to be usable daily.
A good tip to bear in mind is that if you won't use an object in more than a year it shouldn't be in your house. Put it in your garage, or your basement, or storage room, or do garage sale, or just give it away to someone that will use it (you can even go ask for it back if you end up needing it again). The things you keep in your house are for daily use. Not for nostalgia, not for 'to-do later'. You have to enforce strict laws in some areas and never falter. NEVER.
As I've said earlier, this isn't to say you can't have chaotic rooms where things are a bit messier or for to do later, it just means your rooms need to have strict rules that only welcome certain objects, certain practices, certain people. This is canonical to sustain a healthy environment.
Your space can be set to your advantage. As I've mentioned, you don't have to be a slave to your environment which is what you become under a hoard. Being free in one's environment is being able to easily change how it is set up. Though you don't have to be changing its configuration, being able to (because it's logistically easy) makes all the difference when the need arises.
See, mental health is about setting your reality around promoting events, activities, people and influences that invite healthy and enjoyable situations.
Clearing a hoard is a tedious job. Hoarders have a hard time clearing in part because they don't want to decide what's important and what's not; at least that's what they say, but they buy it nonetheless. They also buy a lot of things but they don't just buy everything. So they value; they just value many things. The obvious problem with this is that there isn't a hierarchy worth noting. They bring out everything to the same level. But a good exercise for a hoarder is to notice, as they clear the hoard, how many of each object is unused. This exercise will get you to see that that justification is just an excuse. Hoarders just do what they do because they're stuck in that loop - a little bit brought by their circumstance pressuring them into those behaviors and a little bit by their own choices and emotional-behavioral loops.
As it has been stated one of the problems behind hoarding behavior is absence of delayed gratification. Hoarders, like overweight people with sugar, or drug addicts with their drug of choice, compensate their negative streaks and efforts with quick dopamine bumps.
There are three main ways to counter this dopamine hunger problem:
- The first is by diminishing the amount of negatives in your life;
- The second is by increasing the positives
- And the third is by having more presence of mind to visualize the pleasure of medium to long term pleasures
It's usually hard for hoarders to diminish the negatives. After all, hoarding was compensatory to begin with, so we can't hold that against them. Although they should actively search for solutions to diminish their negative influences.
Regarding the positives, it requires exploration and understanding that excess dopamine creates habituation which will progressively remove the pleasure of each purchase or saved item. This means, logically, that once you understand how much each item actually gives you back, and that after that point there's a diminishing psychological return, all that's left is to not pass that threshold; and if you do, you should wean of it the purchases and bringing items you collected home.
I take hoarders, like any human being, for rational agents (not only, we're all emotional agents as well), which means they can see when something doesn't behoove them, especially when we give them a choice they can acquiesce.
The third strategy is the most complicated and likely hardest to rely on because it's a constant and long term practice. Visualizing, not just what your behaviors lead to, but also what you are missing by letting the hoard go.