The Secret Lives of Hoarders: True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter

by Matt Paxton;Phaedra Hise

  Despite all those strikes against her, Katrina managed to keep her house clean. In her favor, she still had a fulfilling job and a very supportive boss who gave her time off to do her cleanup. Six months after we worked with her, she still had full use of her kitchen, living room, bathroom, and bedroom. Katrina wasn’t bringing new stuff into the house, not even into the two full “storage” rooms.

  Katrina had made tremendous progress and she was finally living in a clean, safe environment. I’m confident that Katrina can maintain the status quo. She will probably need help emptying those two bedrooms, and she may call us within a year or so and say that she’s ready to get that done. First, she will have to deal with her depression and develop some outside friendships.

  In the meantime, when I talk to Katrina I give her lots of praise for keeping the rest of her house clean, and remind her of what huge improvements she has already made in her life. She’s moving forward in the journey to stay clean.

  MARCIE

  Cleaning Marcie’s house started off pretty well. The living room was filled up to the ceiling with piles of stuff Marcie had bought—much of which had never been taken out of its original packaging. The room was so full that it took my crew about two days just to get through that one room. Once Marcie let us into her house and accepted that we were there to help her, she was right with us on that first day, making decisions on what stayed, what was to be donated, and what was trash. She was making good progress.

  On the second day Marcie and I had the talk about her abusive husband. She admitted that she shopped to comfort herself, and I’m guessing that he gave her money because he felt guilty.

  When the realization about why she hoarded hit her, Marcie ran through her pathways to the kitchen where her husband was. I could hear her shouting, “I do this because you hit me!” He was built like a linebacker, over six and a half feet tall with solid shoulders. Although he was eighty, he wasn’t frail or stooped. When he came out of the back of the house and took a swing at me, I knew I didn’t want to get into a fistfight with him. We left, planning to come back the next day after the drama had calmed down.

  This was clearly a case where a psychologist could have helped, but unfortunately Marcie didn’t have that support, which as a late-stage hoarder she could really have used. As the crew and I were having breakfast in the hotel restaurant, I was served with a restraining order, and we were never allowed back. It’s one of the few hoarder houses that I started but didn’t finish. We have stayed in touch with Marcie’s children, but she still lives with her husband in that home of clutter and abuse, and she will probably stay there for the rest of her life unless she makes the decision to leave.

  Abuse, like hoarding, is something that will continue until the person at risk decides to make a change. Unfortunately, even if a hoarder is in a dangerous situation, like Marcie, not much can be done if she chooses to stay there. In her case, the hoarding is really the least of her worries. At the moment, Marcie just has too many other critical issues going on to deal with her hoarding.

  LUCY

  Lucy’s relationship with her family was strained and complicated. Ever since her daughter spearheaded a secret cleanup a few years before I was called in, Lucy had been hanging on to anger and resentment over the disrespectful way she felt treated. But when her house filled up again and got to the point where Lucy couldn’t stay there, her daughter reached out and invited Lucy to stay with her.

  We classified Lucy as a mid-stage hoarder who still had many issues to work through. Even during and after her cleanup, Lucy continued to live with her daughter, and as her collection of craft supplies dwindled at her own house, Lucy tried to carry some yarn and fabric to her daughter’s house to keep. The daughter drew a line and told Lucy that wasn’t acceptable.

  Lucy’s daughter also encouraged her to move back into her own house once it was in livable condition. While Lucy might have seen this suggestion as a rejection, her children softened the blow by spending time with Lucy doing fun things outside the house.

  Lucy moved back into her own house and began to see a therapist. It seemed like she had a lot going for her, with supportive children and professional counseling, but only a month after hear cleanup, Lucy went back to hoarding.

  In the first few weeks after her cleanup, my crew or I checked on Lucy weekly. When I’d called to tell her I was coming by the next day, I discovered, she would stay up all night cleaning out her living room and moving things to the attic. She became a sort of bulimic hoarder, falling into a cycle of hoarding and then purging.

  One problem for Lucy was that her therapist didn’t seem to get any insight into the extent of her issues. The therapist had never seen her house or spoken with her children. Like many hoarders, Lucy was saying the right things to hide her problem. She said that the therapist told her that she was doing just fine.

  Aside from the lack of help she got from therapy, Lucy had also lost her main connection with the world when she retired, which contributed to a somewhat bleak picture of her situation. She was hoarding again, and she didn’t appear to have much incentive to stop. But for now, I still have to give Lucy a thumbs-up. The fact is that her relationship with her kids got much better after the cleanup. They used to yell at one another about the hoarding, but afterward they started to focus less on the hoarding and more on enjoying one another’s company outside the house.

  Lucy is still trying, and her life got better, just not quite to where her family hoped it could be. Sometimes the family wants a cleanup much more than the hoarder does. That’s when the family just has to accept the relationship for what it is.

  NIKA

  Nika started off well, meeting with her organizer once a week. But after she started buying clothes again a few months after her cleanup, she canceled her organizer appointment. The organizer called Nika a few more times, but she never heard back. Eventually she gave up.

  Even though she was a mid-stage hoarder, I was concerned about Nika because during her cleaning I noticed that her husband, Andre, understandably, wasn’t very encouraging. He had lived with this for years and had doubts. He was eager for the house to be clean, but he had adopted an attitude of “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Living with someone who was skeptical instead of supportive made it easy for Nika to let herself off the hook. If Andre didn’t think it was possible, why would Nika even bother to try? The lack of support was Nika’s main challenge.

  I suspect that Nika decided that the organizer was pushing her too hard, and she just gave up on trying. Mid-stage hoarders like Nika have a good chance for a full recovery, but only if they have a few key factors in their favor. Support from loved ones can help these hoarders gather the energy to fight years of bad habits. Or therapy and organizational tips can give highly motivated hoarders the tools they need to build new habits and ways of thinking. Nika had a great organizer, but not the motivation or support to stick with it.

  Once she quit meeting with her organizer, Nika didn’t have any elements of success working in her favor. I haven’t heard from her since her cleanup, and although her house is no doubt cleaner and she is in a better situation than before, I suspect she is still buying clothes.

  ROXANNE

  Roxanne had been hoarding in her trailer home ever since her children were young. She was forced to clean up at age sixty at her social worker’s insistence, so that home health care could safely visit the house.

  At her age and given the amount of time she had been hoarding, it would have been a struggle for anyone to change those entrenched habits. Even though we might think of her as only a mid-stage hoarder, Roxanne had the additional challenge of being poor. A lifelong smoker and heavy drinker, she had developed throat cancer. Her liver was failing and she had to wear a colostomy bag. Doctors had told Roxanne that even with treatment, her time was short. Her goal was to get the trailer de-cluttered enough for hospice to be able to care for her during the cancer’s end stages, and we did that.

  Roxanne had no
family support. Her daughter hadn’t visited in ten years, and although the social worker had contacted her and explained Roxanne’s situation, the daughter wasn’t interested. Roxanne also didn’t have any friends, and her neighbors in the trailer park had been avoiding her for years.

  Roxanne had no loved ones supporting her, no motivation to change, and limited time and physical energy. She had decades of hoarding under her belt and she was stuck in a fantasy past. She had resisted therapy and she had no outside interests. Roxanne had too many strikes against her for an effective recovery.

  A few months later, we got news from the social worker that Roxanne’s cancer had gone into remission and she no longer needed hospice care.

  That was a remarkable gift for Roxanne, but unfortunately, without other positive support in her life, I can only imagine that if she is still with us, Roxanne’s sitting in that smoke-filled trailer, full of stuff, waiting for her daughter to visit.

  BEN

  I stop by to visit Ben, the “pizza man” and late-stage hoarder, every few months to encourage him to let me help clean out his house, but he’s still not interested. Now he has three identical Volvo station wagons, each filled to the brim with empty pizza boxes, half-used bottles of pizza sauce, old pepperoni, and other food trash. At this point, the three cars have cost him more than it would have cost to clean up the house. Ben will probably have to buy a fourth car pretty soon and start filling that up. The house is definitely a Stage 5 situation, and his neighbors are starting to complain because the airplane and car parts are spilling out into the yard.

  Ben is still in denial about his hoarding. When I mention it, he will talk about it for a few minutes but then change the subject. He can talk your ear off about almost any topic, but Ben won’t talk about his hoarding, or the fact that his wife and kids have left him because of it. I keep reminding him that I care enough to help him get his life back, but I expect that Ben won’t do anything until he is forced to. Eventually a building inspector will visit, and the process of condemning Ben’s property will begin.

  The only way a cleanup can help Ben is if he admits that he has a problem that is ruining his life, and decides he wants to change it. Unless he can do that, Ben will end up just like Margaret, waffling between clean and cluttered for the rest of his life, and resenting “those people” who keep making him get rid of his valuable stuff. It’s really a shame. The man is brilliant and could add so much to so many lives. Instead he chooses to live a lie in complete solitude with his stuff when he could be acknowledging the truth and working toward recovery.

  CANDACE

  With her OCD, alcoholism, grief over her mother’s death, and advanced Stage 4 house, Candace seemed like a hoarder who had an overwhelming number of barriers to staying clean. Any one of those issues could keep her stuck in hoarding, but Candace is a strong woman who brought real enthusiasm to her recovery. However, she got bogged down in several challenges.

  Before we would even take her cleanup job, I told Candace that she had to stop drinking. She poured out her liquor and started attending AA meetings again. She threw herself into the cleaning. Afterward, she started getting estimates for repairs and for adapting one of her spare rooms for temporarily fostering rescue dogs.

  Candace was on a high after her cleanup; she was thrilled to have her life back. She was full of energy and plans for a promising new future. But a few weeks later, Candace slipped into the hoarder hangover. Because Candace didn’t have much of a life outside her hoarding, she got stuck feeling unsure of who her new “self” was. Candace felt overwhelmed by the repairs she had planned. It felt to her like she had taken on too much too soon, and she slipped back into some of her former comfort behavior. She stopped seeing her therapist and quit taking her OCD medication. Then she started drinking again.

  Candace had a lot of challenges and not very many support tools. She didn’t have family or close friends, only her AA meeting contacts. She tried attending a hoarder support group, but she felt that was depressing instead of encouraging.

  In addition, Candace discovered that she was $10,000 more in debt than she’d originally calculated, as a result of credit card abuse. As her hoarding got worse, she had started losing or throwing away her credit card bills. Now she couldn’t afford to make the repairs to her house, and without those repairs, her plans to volunteer with the ASPCA were on hold.

  Even with those challenges, the good news is that Candace’s house hasn’t gotten any worse. Her life is better than it was two years ago, and she is trying to reach out and connect with people again. For Candace, like most late-stage hoarders, it’s very tempting to give up instead of doing the hard work to get her life back together. Candace may be taking a little break, but I’m proud of her for making it this far and I’m hopeful that she has the energy to keep moving toward her goals. Candace’s story is not finished, and only she can decide if she’ll continue to live in depression and mess or if she’ll take all the necessary steps and get the help she needs.

  THALIA

  After locking herself in her car and threatening to swallow a bottle of pills, Thalia was taken to the hospital immediately. The cleanup was put on hold because obviously we couldn’t make any decisions about what to keep or throw away without guidance from her. Cleaning while she was gone would have made the situation worse.

  Fortunately, Thalia’s attempted suicide was more a cry for help than an actual attempt, and one to which members of her support network were able to respond. Her therapist made sure that Thalia got treatment, and when she returned to the house, we finished her cleanup.

  At the end of Thalia’s cleanup things were looking good.

  Two years after Thalia’s cleanup she’d reverted to her old habits—and then some. It’s our policy not to do a second cleanup except under really exceptional circumstances. We weren’t able to help Thalia until she was ready to help herself.

  But Thalia was a classic late-stage hoarder and still in denial. She cleaned up in order to keep her house, not because she wanted to give up hoarding. Two years later Thalia called and confessed that her house was full again. But as we talked, it became clear that she was still in denial and only wanted to clean up enough so that her house wouldn’t be condemned a second time. I knew that if we came and cleaned, the same cycle would repeat itself, and so I turned her down. I told her that if she gets to the point where she really wants to change, I’ll be her biggest supporter.

  ROGER

  We are all still rooting hard for Roger. During his cleanup, he started out by not trusting the crew at all. He didn’t have faith in anyone apart from his sister Kathy. But partway through the job, he opened up and bonded with the group. Once he realized that we weren’t going to lie to him or throw away his stuff without his permission, he became much more communicative and friendly. He would talk sports all day long; he had a brilliant mind for details and statistics. The happiest I saw him was when he earned a Clutter Cleaner shirt on day two of his cleanup. This kind of thing, in itself, is a great victory for an advanced hoarder.

  As Roger shared stories with us, and his sister did also, we learned that Roger had several serious challenges. He had been abused as a child by someone he trusted outside of the family, and that had scarred him emotionally. His parents had let Roger live with them so that they could, in a way, protect him from his fears and the outside world. When they died, Roger felt almost completely alone. Therapy wasn’t an option—not only was the closest therapist two hours away, but Roger didn’t trust anyone enough to even try counseling.

  The cleaning led to Roger suffering another big loss—the sale of the family house. He moved to a smaller house nearby. With so many of his things having been thrown away in the cleanup, he struggled emotionally. His sister Kathy was patient and supportive, and would have done almost anything for him. She helped him land a job, and for a while it looked like Roger was on a good path toward recovery.

  The job doing inventory in a warehouse had been located through a
n organization that trained and found placement for workers with special needs. But Roger had been living alone and on his own terms for so long that he wasn’t able to meet some basic societal expectations. He couldn’t get to work on time. And when he did show up, he had not bathed, had food stains on his clothes, and crunchy things in his beard. He had trouble staying focused and carrying on simple conversations.

  Roger was let go. After that, he went back to hoarding.

  Roger’s family had done everything right, and Roger worked hard. But without therapy and some connection to the outside world, he couldn’t maintain a clutter-free house. Kathy isn’t sure that Roger can ever live alone, and he may need home health care support to make sure he eats and bathes.

  Roger’s family is dedicated to supporting him and making sure he has a place to live, but at this point, Kathy feels like she has tried everything to help him be clean. She is working on accepting and loving Roger for who he is.

  Advanced hoarders are all on the same journey that Roger is, moving back and forth along a continuum from clutter to tidy. Their goal may be merely to stay closer to the clean end of the scale, and their loved ones need to be content with that. Luckily, Roger’s living conditions are safe, and his family is accepting the reality of his situation.

  WENDY AND SAM

  After their cleanup and meetings with social workers and doctors to talk about the prescription pill hoarding, newlywed seniors Wendy and Sam were able to keep their house clean by following some rules and checklists. Sam, who had never been a hoarder, wasn’t really contributing to the problem, and he was able to support Wendy, an early-stage hoarder herself, in her efforts to stay clean. Because she wanted this new relationship to work, Wendy had the motivation to stick with it.