Can't Just Stop

by Sharon Begley

  Someone who buys compulsively does so because it quiets distress and anxiety but brings no pleasure, or at least no more than the it feels good when I stop being in fear for my life variety. A true compulsion as I’m using the term—following the lead of the emerging neuroscience—brings relief, not joy. Take the sixty-year-old woman who was being treated for hoarding disorder as part of a study at Boston University. When the clinical team first met her, they couldn’t even get through the door of her apartment, and so met in the driveway. Sophie agreed that as a first step she would sort her stuff into categories—keep, donate, discard—marked with colored stickers. That was going well when, out of the blue, her abusive father called her for the first time in fifteen years. Sophie did the only thing that, she knew, could reliably hold back the suffocating anxiety that seized her when she heard his voice: she ran out and bought eight vacuum cleaners. Just as Jenny saw her acquisitions as “building a wall” to hold back the demands and cruelties of the outside world, so Sophie saw purchases as a bulwark against the return of a past she thought she had escaped.

  Roots

  Among people being treated for compulsive buying, the problem usually arose in the late teens or early twenties, an age that, not coincidentally, coincides with greater autonomy to go out on one’s own, a bit of financial independence (all those babysitting gigs and lawn-mowing jobs add up), and—this being America—a driver’s license. No particular pattern of early life experiences appears with any frequency in the personal histories of compulsive shoppers.

  By the age of thirteen, Debbie Roes had already convinced herself that other girls in her school—in San Carlos, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, though Debbie’s family was middle class—were prettier, cooler, smarter, and more popular than she would ever be. They were also the kind of girls who would show up in an amazing outfit every day and, Debbie swore, never wear it again. “I remember thinking I just didn’t measure up,” she told me one morning. “I so wanted to look like these girls, but I felt I never did.”

  That’s when the shopping started. At first, it was something fun to do with friends, but soon it became more desperate. Whenever she had money—from babysitting, from her allowance, from the cash her father gave her after he and her mother divorced when Debbie was fourteen—she would hit the mall, often by herself; the social element had fallen by the wayside as the compulsion took over. “The money always felt like it was burning a hole in my pocket,” she told me. A chubby tween, Debbie had also developed an eating disorder, and as she lost weight she felt the clothes looked fantastic on her. “As I got thinner I’d shop more and more,” she recalled. “I’d think, ‘Ooh, good, I can wear clothes I was too chubby to wear before’ ”—tight jeans and clingy sweaters and short skirts. “I never felt like I measured up,” she said. “It was like, yeah, she’s prettier, she’s more popular, she’s richer, and she’s smarter—but I’m better dressed. I was always looking for validation, and the shopping helped with that. It was sort of a consolation prize that made me feel less bad and less unworthy. It was a way to deal with stress and disappointment. I’d white-knuckle it sometimes by not buying anything for a week or even a month. But I can only go for so long without shopping. When I give in, there’s this incredible feeling of relief.”

  Debbie’s compulsion to shop derives in large part from an anxious feeling that if she is not shopping she is missing something. “It feels like everyone is doing this and I’m not,” she said. “I get anxious that there are these amazing sales, that if I don’t go I’ll miss a great bargain and will feel I messed up, or that I’ll miss my one and only chance to get something that will make me look and feel really great, because it won’t be there if I wait a day. I have to go right now. If I don’t, the anxiety becomes unbearable.” Needless to say, the relief lasts barely until she drives home. It comes flooding back as if she were a drunk whose euphoria-producing binge has turned into the ashes of regret by the morning after. Her resulting tension sets the stage for the next bout of compulsive shopping.

  Several years ago, Debbie became a wardrobe consultant, something she recognizes was as risky as an alcoholic taking a job tending bar. “But I’m really good at shopping and thought I could help people,” she said. Unfortunately, her shopping became even more compulsive with a new source of anxiety: if she did not look as fashion forward as next month’s Vogue, her clients would lose faith in her. Not even getting bailed out of credit card debt by her father (twice) and by an ex-boyfriend stopped her compulsive shopping.

  In early 2011 Debbie began to log every purchase, noting how often she wore it and if she returned it. The results were, she said, “abysmal.” The next year was no better; her closet was even more full of things she had worn once or not at all. On the rare occasions when she pared her closet, she didn’t break a sweat finding thirty-four items to give away: unlike hoarders, for whom parting with possessions is intolerable, acquirers generally have no such difficulty.I But then she took a cue from a program that April Benson developed, targeting the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components of overshopping. Benson counsels her clients to train themselves to ask six questions when they find themselves on the threshold of a purchase:

  Why am I here? (where “here” is a retail website or a bricks-and-mortar store)

  How do I feel? If the answer is, “nervous about the fact that my only good suit is threadbare and I need to look presentable for tomorrow’s job interview,” or “stressed that I have literally nothing appropriate to wear to my friend’s wedding this weekend,” then a purchase is perfectly justified. If the answer is, “as if I’m about to explode like a shaken seltzer bottle if I don’t buy this pair of shoes that I know I don’t need,” then you’re likely being driven by a compulsion that’s leading you into trouble. Continue to the next question:

  Do I need this? See above. If the answer is anything short of job interview or wedding, continue to the next question.

  What if I wait? If the answer is, “I’ll look shabby for the job interview” (or wedding), then waiting doesn’t make sense. If the answer is, “I’ll explode with anxiety,” then try extending yourself into the future: imagine a future you who is besieged with even greater anxiety than the current you, a strategy that can defuse the present anxiety without making the purchase. To wit:

  How will I pay for it? In many cases the prospect of adding to your debt load provokes greater anxiety than foregoing the purchase. If so, focus on the emotions that come with that—how your heart will sink when you see your next credit card balance, how stressed you’ll feel as you figure out which bills to postpone paying, how mortified you’ll feel if you have to ask your spouse or family for financial help. Focusing on the negative emotions that will flood over you as a result of buying can swamp those you feel as a result of not buying. Analogously, people who have felt compelled to shoplift have been able to stop themselves by focusing on the terror they feel when they’re arrested or jailed, and the humiliation they suffer when they have to tell their friends and family.

  Where will I put it and what will I do with it? This can also help defuse present anxiety. Again, project yourself into the future; you’re home with your purchase, looking for a place to put it. If your hoard of shoes or shirts or tchotchkes is already so immense—perhaps with many previous acquisitions still in their original wrapping or not used in some time—that the one you’re contemplating will be as noticeable as a teaspoon of water added to the Mediterranean Sea, focusing on that can also bleed away the anxiety compelling you to acquire it. That helped Jenny reject many prospective prizes that she initially felt compelled to scoop up from the store or the street. Visualizing its future in her already-crowded apartment drained away the compulsion.

  In addition to this practical checklist, however, Benson encourages her clients to think about and understand what drives them to overshop—“how it all began,” she says—as well as to identify in-the-moment triggers that fill them with an anxiety that only shopping can dispe
l. “I had to learn what triggered it and what happened when I overshopped,” Roes said. In January 2013 she started a blog, “Recovering Shopaholic,” in the hope that going public about every purchase, every trigger, and every consequence would shame her into controlling her compulsive shopping. By mid-2013 she had hundreds of regular readers from around the world. She felt that, through the blog, she was giving voice to millions of people in the grip of the same compulsion that had made her do its bidding for thirty years. “I don’t want my life to have been about being in malls. I want my legacy to be something helpful,” she said. “Until this, I felt, well, there were a lot of things I didn’t achieve—I never had children, and I never felt very accomplished in my career. But I was a heck of a good shopper.”

  With compulsive shopping, therapists often have success having patients first identify the emotional triggers that send them to the mall—sadness, feelings of inadequacy, anger, fear, frustration, shame, guilt, whatever. Then, the therapist asks the patient to think about what Benson, author of To Buy or Not to Buy: Why We Overshop and How to Stop, calls the “authentic and important underlying needs” related to the triggering emotions. For instance, guilt needs atonement or acceptance; inadequacy needs a kinder, more realistic assessment of one’s relative worth. It doesn’t work for everyone, but at least the approach takes into account the emotions that drive different people’s overshopping, including the anxiety underlying the compulsive variety.

  Shoplifting

  While other compulsions can turn the mind into a prison, compulsive acquiring can make the metaphor real: alone among the true compulsions,II it can land you in jail. It’s impossible to know how many people who steal compulsively get away with it, but by one estimate 87 percent of them are arrested at least once, though only about one in five go to prison.

  Kleptomania is an impulse-control disorder and is quite rare, striking less than about 1 percent of the population. But there is also a compulsive form, resulting from a buildup of anxiety that can be dissipated only by the theft. That sounds like a convenient excuse, but the more people who described to me what drove them to shoplift, the more it seemed to carry a kernel of truth. They described feeling a chronic tension, one that rises to intolerable levels until they give in and pinch something, at which point the tension dissipates like a balloon with a slow leak. There is no sense of anger or vengeance in the kleptomaniac’s theft; in the compulsive shoplifter, however . . . well, meet Kaitlyn.

  When I spoke to her in 2014, it had been fifteen months since she had shoplifted, and when she had finished telling me her story I almost thought, Wow, that’s like Michael Jordan retiring at his peak. For Kaitlyn, who was then fifty years old, was very, very good at shoplifting. She swiped her first trophy, a candy bar, when she was nine, but apart from a couple of times in her twenties she wasn’t tempted to shoplift for years. A period of financial stress in her thirties gave her another case of sticky fingers, however: short of cash, she began lifting clothing, vitamin bottles, cosmetics, and food. Typically, she would be sitting at home fixating on her finances—the money she was making doing part-time marketing wasn’t covering her bills, and she was running up credit card debt and borrowing from friends—when a palpable anxiety seemed to flood out from her core to her extremities. It felt as if her blood had somehow become hotter, thicker. When she argued with her boyfriend or had a lousy day, the anxiety made her ears throb, and she became as restless, itchy, and jumpy as a junkie. She would then remember something she saw at the mall and knew in her bones that that was the key to quelling the angst.

  One of the first times she acted on that belief, she went into the local pharmacy to pick up a prescription and found that swiping things she needed—toothpaste, shampoo, soap, vitamins, cosmetics—was as easy as bending down to reach a bottom shelf, her purse conveniently yawning open. “I would go into a store, feeling this pent-up anxiety, and it would just happen,” she said. “It was an amazing feeling of relief.”

  Kaitlyn had grown up with an alcoholic father who beat her brothers and terrified everybody else with his drunken, violent rages. Her mother took her stress out on Kaitlyn and frequently hit her. The family suffered from bouts of poverty and at times didn’t have enough to eat. It was a difficult way to grow up, and when Kaitlyn hit those financial headwinds something just clicked in her mind: “Those things that were done to me, those years and years when I was violated . . .” Her voice trailed off. “I was trying to make it even,” she finally said. She couldn’t erase the abuse but, by shoplifting, she seemed to make “it”—the world; life; fate; the tally of good and bad, fair and unfair, joy and misery— “a little more even.”

  Terry Shulman, who treats many cases of compulsive shopping and shoplifting, says it’s common among compulsive shoplifters to “feel compelled to make things right,” often after being victimized or deprived. “It’s as if they have this itch to even the score. They feel entitled to do what they’re doing, as if they’re avenging a past injustice.”

  In a typical episode, Kaitlyn was on her way back from vacation in Europe when a flight delay left her with time to kill at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, a mecca of high-end stores. She decided to fill her carry-on bag with as many “gifts” for her family and friends as she could fit. She took designer scarves, ties, Godiva chocolates, expensive perfumes and cosmetics. Instead of feeling alarmed at her behavior, she felt strangely soothed. Somehow the fact that she was stealing gifts for her family that she couldn’t otherwise afford made it acceptable. After that, airport shops became favorite targets, and she regularly filled her bags with magazines, duty-free cosmetics, clothing, gifts—“and a lot of it,” she said: she had gotten so cocky, she didn’t break a sweat as she slipped things into her large carry-on bag, purse, or pockets. “As I got older I didn’t need to do it anymore”—she had become a powerhouse Realtor who handles homes in an upscale area. “But I kept doing it. I knew where the store security guards were, I knew where the cameras were, and I felt like I was seeing and hearing more clearly than normal.” She got away with it hundreds of times. She gave stuff to Goodwill and to family, she stuffed it in her closets and cabinets and drawers.

  Through her thirties and into her forties, Kaitlyn’s shoplifting intensified, and she “took anything and everything I could get my hands on,” she said. Things eventually went south, however, and Kaitlyn was arrested for shoplifting three times in three and a half years. Her first arrest was for lifting $11.30 worth of vitamins and cold medicine for a sick friend. When she tried to stop after the first two arrests, she recalled, “It was like I was in hell. I was absolutely miserable. I said to my husband I have to take something!, and he would scream at me, Why can’t you just stop?!

  “I couldn’t.”

  Her lawyer negotiated the charges down to misdemeanors, and after her guilty pleas she was fined and sentenced to two hundred hours of community service (with a Red Cross blood donation center). She was essentially scared straight—a success story that underlines why distinguishing between impulsivity, behavioral addiction, and behavioral compulsion isn’t a theoretical exercise in psychological taxonomy but a crucial first step in crafting an effective treatment. “Fortunately” doesn’t describe much about Kaitlyn’s odyssey, but it does apply to the fact that her form of shoplifting was not an impulse-control disorder, as kleptomania is; for that, there are essentially no proven, effective therapies. But Kaitlyn’s overshopping was a true compulsion, driven by anxiety. Shulman therefore started by asking her, as he does all compulsive shoplifters, why she thinks she did it. “I try to help enlighten my clients about what drives their compulsion,” he told me. “Are they trying to make up for loss or abandonment? Are they trying to right a perceived wrong or injustice? I try to give them a sense of why the behavior is happening. Often they say they have no idea, but once they gain some insight they have a better chance of changing.” He had Kaitlyn introspect about the anxiety that drove her to shoplift and ask if there was another way to dissipat
e it. “I always ask, why, why, why do you feel compelled to do this?” Shulman said. “I don’t agree with Alcoholics Anonymous that the reason doesn’t matter and all you have to do is ‘just stop.’ More often than not, the insight is helpful and necessary.”

  This is the cognitive part of the cognitive-behavior therapy he practices: getting a person to remember that her father never let her have new clothes. “That helps you know your triggers, your warning signals,” Shulman said—in Kaitlyn’s case, when someone told her she couldn’t have or do something it triggered angry memories of the deprivation she experienced as a child and is still trying to make up for.

  Although Kaitlyn had been clean for more than a year when we spoke, she still dreams of shoplifting and its unfailing power to drain her anxiety. “I fantasize about it like an ex-lover who got away,” she told me. “It’s kind of a wistful feeling. I felt my shoplifting was the best thing I ever had.”

  Bibliomania

  A remarkable form of acquiring took hold in Europe beginning some 250 years ago, when a certain slice of society found itself in the grip of a mad compulsion to buy, own, keep, display, and boast about (but not necessarily read) books, a passion so widespread it acquired a name: bibliomania. Those in its grasp as well as those observing the afflicted saw in bibliomania undertones of madness, a foreshadowing of psychiatry’s classification of many compulsive behaviors as mental disorders. In one of his thousands of letters to his son Philip, the English statesman and epistolist Lord Chesterfield (1694–1773), having heard that Philip was acquiring a taste for rare volumes, warned the young man to “beware the Bibliomanie.”