Stuff (26 page)

Even filling out questionnaires poses a problem for hoarders. More than once, we have waited for more than an hour for a research participant to complete a ten-minute questionnaire, only to throw out the data because the person wrote a paragraph about each question rather than circling one of the answers provided. Our diagnostic interviews can take six to eight hours instead of the usual two or three, as hoarders provide endless details or sit silently, unable to make up their minds about how much a symptom bothers them. The process of sorting out important from unimportant details is clearly impaired in hoarders, who can't see the forest for the trees. Jerry described it as "like a kaleidoscope—broken pieces that don't fall just right."

Alvin first noticed his difficulty with organizing things when he was nine years old and away at camp. As the other children packed to go home, Alvin remembered sitting alone among his things, trying to figure out how to arrange them in his case and watching the other children leave one by one. Their efficiency startled him, and his own comparative inefficiency distressed him. Alvin's father prided himself on his ability to organize his collections of books, pictures, and magazines. His motto, "Everything in its place," rang in Alvin's head on the trip home from camp. Alvin resolved to do something about his organizing problem and asked his father if he could watch him sort and organize the mail. Perhaps not quite understanding his precocious son's odd request, he refused. The incident stands out in Alvin's mind as a lost opportunity.

Jerry thought little about organizing problems until taking a ten-day trip to visit friends in Vancouver. A week into his stay, his friends hosted a dinner party. Jerry remembered sitting in the kitchen as his friends gave the guests a tour of their home. When they got to Jerry's room, there were gales of laughter. When Jerry asked about the laughter, they told him that they were debating whether he would ever be able to organize the chaos and get all his stuff home. Their reactions to the mess in his room embarrassed and confused him. Alvin had a similar experience when he visited a friend in Chicago. After just four days, his host tried to get Alvin to allow him to hire someone to organize Alvin's room for him.

Other experiences of our clients have led us to suspect that deficits in attention and the ability to stay focused constitute a large part of hoarding. While Jerry and I were in his room once, he said he wanted to show me an article he had clipped out of the newspaper. He knew vaguely where to find it. Before he could find the article, though, he got distracted by a story about a picture of him and Alvin with a member of the British royal family. Next was a story about the jewelry in the sink, another about the inscription on a jewelry box, and another and another. Everything he spotted in his search had a tale he had to tell. In the end, he never found, or even remembered that he was looking for, the original article.

In one of our research projects, we compared people with hoarding problems to people with other mood or anxiety disorders and to people without any kind of emotional problem. We found that most of the hoarders reported frequent childhood experiences of distractibility, attention deficits, difficulty organizing tasks, failing to finish projects, losing things, being forgetful, and talking excessively. All of these are symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). As adults, the hoarders displayed even more pronounced symptoms. Also as adults, they described a tendency to avoid any work that required sustained mental effort. Jerry is a good example of someone with this problem. He spent almost no time trying to organize his things because the intense effort required and frustration from getting confused caused him to give up. "Everything I do is so hard. I have to think about it so much," he complained.

The brothers coped with their inability to keep things organized by turning their living space into storage and simply moving into new living areas. Luckily, they had the financial means to do so. Even so, their new homes filled up so quickly that they lived in perpetually dysfunctional spaces. A week before one of my visits, Jerry got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. He tripped over one of the many piles by his bed and knocked over an exquisite Venetian vase. It shattered when it hit a metal case sitting on a pile of clothes. As he tried to step over the pile, he stepped on a piece of glass that lodged in his foot. He could barely walk after digging it out. He admitted that it was buried so deep, he should have gone to the emergency room. Despite the pain and trouble caused by his accident, he had not yet cleaned up the glass. I asked him why.

"I don't know, it just feels so stupid," he replied.

"Have you tried to clean it?"

"Well, I went up there yesterday and looked at it. But I got depressed."

"Can you tell me exactly what you were thinking when you went up there?"

"I thought,
How terrible is this? What would my grandparents think? What's wrong with me? How stupid was this? I must be stupid to allow this.
"

Then Jerry told me about many of the other things that had been broken over the years, including an antique lamp of his mother's, an expensive chandelier, and the wooden sculpture that he broke after my first visit.

"Lots of things have been broken in the past and will get broken in the future," he said. "Then I also think of other things, equally precarious, in my rooms that I should clean up. At that point, I pretty much give up trying."

He concluded, "I have come to this. It's like my life—in shards!"

Cleaning up the glass would have taken less than an hour, but during that time he would have had to endure those depressing thoughts. By not cleaning it up, he could avoid the thoughts, atleast as long as he wasn't in the room. Unfortunately, he had to endure them every night when he returned to the room and every morning when he awoke. With some effort, however, he could distract himself with other thoughts during these times.

I convinced Jerry to let me go with him while he tried to clean up the glass. He was reluctant to face such an unpleasant task but agreed for my sake. He spent about forty minutes on his hands and knees picking up glass shards and sweeping up the dust and other trash with his hands. "My father would pass out at my technique. He was big on systems. Maybe I should get a vacuum sweeper to do this." Yet he continued with his hands. Jerry seemed to experience very little distress during the cleaning, although he did say that if I wasn't there, he wouldn't be doing it. When we are doing therapy with people in these kinds of situations, we seldom do more than talk them through the task of cleaning and sorting. Much of what they need is someone simply to keep them focused. My presence seemed to distract Jerry a bit from the discomfort and kept him working.

Although Jerry threw away most of the broken glass, he set aside two large pieces. He said, "I just want to save these." When I asked why, he responded, "I'm remembering how it looked before it fell. If I throw them away, it's like I'm giving up on it, and I hate to do that. It's like I think maybe somehow it will get back together. I know that's crazy, 'cause it can't, but that's what it feels like. I don't want to give up on it. I guess I just like to know it is there." This sentiment reminded me of how he felt about maintaining his boyhood home: selling it would feel like giving up on his mother.

When I asked how he would feel if he were to throw away those two pieces, he said, "It would be just as bad as when it broke, and it would feel that way for a long time." This was another refrain we'd heard before. When I pressed him some more, he said, "Maybe a glass blower can use them for another piece." Finally, he said that he would get rid of them in a month or so, when he got over the loss of the vase. When I visited four years later, the pieces were still there.

Although many hoarders avoid spending time in their homes and feel depressed when they notice the clutter, paradoxically they retain an intense attraction to individual items in the hoard. Alvin told me that he visited his penthouse apartment for a short time nearly every day to get away from his business and to enjoy his things. He didn't organize or try to cull when he was there; he just enjoyed being amid his treasures. I accompanied him on one of his walks through the apartment. He scanned the room with his eyes and said, "Most people would look at this and see a mess. Really, it's layered and complex." When his gaze fixed on something, he inspected it, and the effect was intoxicating. He spotted an Orrefors crystal goblet and launched into a description of the Ariel versus the Grail technique used by the designers, but it was really the shape and contour of each piece that excited him. His eyes found another treasure. "Here, let me show you this, Dr. Frost." He picked up a bronze elephant with a man sitting inside a basket atop it. He recounted how he had found this piece in an antique store more than a decade before, but the detail with which he described the store and the purchase made it sound like yesterday.

"But wait, Doctor, look at this." He pointed to a stained-glass panel with a wall lamp in it. "This came from my parents' house. There are still eight of them there on the wall and working. I saw one like this go at Sotheby's for over four thousand dollars."

"Wait, here, look at this, Doctor!" His voice rose with excitement as he found a ring. The ring, he thought, was from western India. It was huge, almost the size of a walnut, with a large sapphire in the center, a Buddha on each side of the stone, and elephants around the edges—silver with gold inlay.

One of the many clothes racks in the apartment had fallen over and caused a shift in the landscape, burying his box of prized rings. Alvin's ring collection numbered more than five hundred. Each had a story, and each was personal, from his father's moonstone ring to the signature ring he had bought one night at an upscale restaurant. He'd seen it on the finger of the man standing at the urinal next to his in the restroom and offered him three times what it was worth. Alvin appreciated the artistry of each of his rings, but more than that, his rings recorded his life. They were his way of organizing and remembering events. They provided a vividness not available from simple recall. I asked why he had a Hula-Hoop in his room. He'd bought it on a recent trip. "In my mind, it's like a reel that can put that movie back on."

But it wasn't as simple as needing things to aid his memory. It was more like the things allowed him to reexperience a past event. He described a recent experience of losing a folder containing his notes from an event he'd organized. For the life of him, he couldn't remember anything about the event—who had been there or what had happened. When he found the folder, his memory returned. He said, "I didn't even have to look through the folder. I remembered it all. Memories associated with things are vivid. The things are like holograms."

"But wait, Doctor, look at this!" Again his voice rose as he spotted a nineteenth-century Russian icon hanging haphazardly on a nail next to the doorjamb. It was a masterful piece, and I could see his appreciation as he carefully caressed the wooden backing and the inlay. "There must be a dozen more of these around here somewhere," he said.

"But wait, Doctor." Now he rushed from thing to thing. I expected another valuable artifact as he reached across the cluttered top of a nineteenth-century French dresser. Instead, he picked up a pair of green plastic dime-store glasses. He handled and admired them with the same reverence as he had the icon. They were, he recounted, from an "Emerald City" party he had once organized.

"When I walk in here," he said, "it's like walking into the past. Here, let me show you." He opened a drawer and pulled out a stack of business cards. "I collect these. I must have over twenty-five thousand of them. I can tell you something about each of these people—mostly where I met them and what we were doing. Being handed a card forms a physical connection to them and to that past. There is a physicality to my memory. I have to have the physical connection."

The way Alvin's memories were tied to objects is reminiscent of sympathetic magic, in which someone sees a physical object as forming a connection with the original owner or event, much like Jerry Seinfeld's shirt did for my student (see chapter 2). Once Alvin was at a dinner with the former governor of Puerto Rico. The governor gave a speech that Alvin admired, and Alvin asked if he could have the governor's notes for the speech. At some point during the meal, the waiter picked up the notes and threw them away. The governor promised to e-mail a copy to Alvin, but Alvin insisted on the original. He spent more than an hour going through the kitchen garbage looking for the notes. He said that the original notes carried the "physical memory" of the dinner, and he had to have them.

Many of the things Alvin collected connected him to people he did not even know. He showed me a ring he had bought years before at a flea market. It was engraved with the words "To my daughter." The affection from parent to daughter struck Alvin as beautiful, and he had to have the ring. He described such things as "footprints to the soul of the former owner."

We spent nearly an hour looking through Alvin's stuff. By the time we left, his hands were blackened with dust from the treasures he'd caressed. Possessions connected him to his past and the pasts of others. They had a meaning far beyond their physical existence. "It's like a language," Alvin said. "The things speak out."

Alvin's experiences with his possessions were far richer in detail and complexity than they are for most people. Each of his treasures contained a vast amount of information, and seeing an item conjured up all of it. It was easy for him to get lost in the memories stored in each thing or in the stories they contained about others. But these objects also had a physical presence—they had shape, color, and contour—and these characteristics were as captivating to Alvin as the memories. Alvin's excitement at showing me his treasures reminded me of Irene's bag of bottle caps. His appreciation of the physical attributes of each thing was remarkable. His attention to every physical feature of an object expanded its value and meaning. As Alvin once said to me, "Visual art bounces my electrons." We have noticed an inordinate number of hoarders who describe themselves as artists. This might be because hoarders are more intelligent or creative than the rest of us, their worlds filled with an appreciation of the physical world that most of us lack. This part of hoarding is a kind of giftedness, a special talent for seeing beauty, utility, and meaning in things.