Stuff

by Gail Steketee

  Debra believed that her hoarding began at around age eleven or twelve; at least that was her earliest recollection of significant collecting. Her mother insisted that it began much earlier, closer to age seven or eight, around the time of her grandmother's death. Debra was close to her grandmother and felt safe and comfortable with her. Her grandmother had a calming influence on her, gently encouraging her to keep her room clean. When Debra first learned of her grandmother's death, she locked herself in her room and spent hours in frenzied cleaning, hoping that following her grandmother's advice would somehow bring her back.

  The death of her grandmother meant that Debra and her mother had to sell the house and move, although they did keep a small piece of land connected to the property. Debra felt lost and clung to everything that had belonged to her grandmother. These things were now, as she explained, "extensions of me." (Her uncle's plan to sell the remaining property from her grandmother's estate had her crazed with grief. "If it happens, I'll cry forever!" she exclaimed. "I'll never be happy again.")

  Just a few years later, Debra's mother remarried and changed her name. Debra felt that she had lost her mother to a man she did not like, and she blamed him for the beginning of her hoarding. He was, by her description, an angry man who disliked children and wanted to send her away to boarding school. She claimed that he stole things from her and tormented her by getting rid of the newspaper before she had a chance to read it. She began trying to rescue the papers from the trash by bringing them back into the house. Her stepfather thwarted her by taking them to work. She resorted to stealing newspapers from the neighbor's trash. (When I met her, she still had many of these stolen newspapers.) Over time, the ongoing battle with her stepfather made her more guarded and secretive about her possessions, and she was careful to keep her room locked.

  Just out of school, Debra took a job at a bookstore, which seemed ideal because it allowed her to be around the things she loved. She worked hard as a shipping clerk, staying late every night. Quitting for the day when there were still things to do bothered her. At the end of her shift, she would think, Let me do this one more thing before I go home. But one thing led to another. Toward the end of her time at the bookstore, she fell asleep and spent the night at the store on several occasions.

  Part of her job involved maintaining lists of all the books in the store and all those on order. Soon these lists became sacred: possessing them gave her a sense of mastery, as though she had read the books themselves. She began duplicating the lists for herself when the thought struck her that she should try to make a list of every book that existed. (When I met her, she still had boxes and boxes of paperwork from this project.) Finally, exhaustion overtook her, and she quit her job.

  Debra's own personal history also fell under her preservation net. Ever since she could remember, she had feared change. "I don't like forwards; I like backwards," she complained. The biggest changes in her early life were losses—her father, her grandmother, and, in her mind, her mother. The losses left her uncertain about herself and her identity. It seemed as though she could never quite get a grasp on who she was or where she wanted to go. Instead, she turned to activities that would freeze time. For instance, she photographed nearly everything: "Every second of my life I can document. If I want to remember it, I'll take a picture." She even photographed the trash. In the month before our first talk, she took nearly thirty rolls of film. Her photography began as a coping strategy, a way to get rid of things she couldn't keep—perishable things. By taking a picture, she could keep something of the essence of each item.

  Debra's efforts to preserve "the time in which we live" seemed to me to fit the terror management theory (see chapter 2) as some sort of attempt to achieve immortality—to produce something that would outlive her. But when I asked Debra about what she wanted done with her collections when she was gone, she surprised me by saying she didn't really care. In fact, she said, if her husband wanted to throw everything away, that didn't bother her. Her purpose in documenting the time in which she lived was driven by a desire to experience everything, not to leave a legacy. Even though she had read few of her magazines and seen few of her taped TV shows, having them gave her the feeling that she had experienced them. As long as she saved them, they were part of her experience. If she got rid of them, she would lose the experiences. For Debra, the driving force for her collecting seemed to be the fear of missing out on life or failing to remember it.

  Pristine and Perfect

  When Debra started buying magazines, she began to notice details of appearance, minor unintended flaws—a clerk's fingerprint or a wrinkle in a cover. The more she noticed, the more it bothered her. The thought that her magazines were not perfect left her uneasy. She coped by taking her copies from the bottom of the pile, where they were less likely to have been handled and inadvertently altered from their original state. They were as pristine as when they were created. This became increasingly important to her. She explained that when people pick up magazines, "they leave fingerprints and oils from their skin, and they wrinkle the pages."

  Soon she searched for magazines without printing flaws as well. Sometimes the "O" on the cover of the Oprah Magazine was out of place and touched the fold at the edge. But even when she found a perfect copy, handing it to the clerk to ring up violated its purity. She made friends with the women at Barnes & Noble and convinced them to allow her to ring up her own magazines so that only she touched them. This worked for a while until she began to notice that her own handling of the magazines was violating them. Looking through them changed the creases, the magazines lost their crispness, and she left fingerprints. She started buying two copies, one to read and one to keep pristine. As her things took more of her time, she quit reading the magazines altogether but still continued to buy two copies.

  As her quest to obtain perfect specimens continued, Debra began to think that the clerks might be leaving fingerprints when they stocked the bookstore shelves. She convinced her friends at the bookstore to allow her to open the shipping boxes herself. Then no one but her ever touched the magazines; they went straight from the printing press into her possession, untainted.

  Before long, she needed a strategy to prevent her own soiling of the magazines when she removed them from the boxes. For this she devised what she called her "theory of threes." She pulled out three copies from the shipping box, being careful to touch only the top and bottom copies. The middle copy remained untouched. She now had one copy to read (though by this time she had given up on reading any of them), one copy to cut up if she wanted special access to an article (although she never did this either), and one copy to save, protect, and preserve.

  Her arrangement was not without its drawbacks. One day as she was scanning her own magazines at the checkout counter, a new clerk spotted her and shouted from across the room, "What are you doing?" The whole store stopped to stare at her. It was, she said, like a scene from a movie. Debra tried to explain but was reduced simply to saying, "I'm a hoarder and have OCD."

  Finally, her system broke down completely. The cost put a major strain on her family's finances, and the time and effort involved exhausted her. She had to settle for something less perfect, so she ordered magazines by subscription instead, and only one copy of each. She told me that when this started, she was overwhelmed by the sense that these magazines weren't good enough, so much so that she became physically ill when they arrived. For a while, she went to the bookstore to get new magazines as well, until her discomfort gradually lessened. Then her subscriptions, about a hundred each month, went directly into storage. She said that it would have been too much of an ordeal for her to touch them. Although they were not as pristine as those purchased using her "theory of threes," they were still in a state as close as possible to when they were created. She also trained the postman not to make any marks on the magazines and to be as careful as possible with them.

  Debra's perfectionism extended well beyond magazines. Although initially her mother and husb
and kept the clutter out of most of the house, Debra controlled the positioning of the furniture, the alignment of the cans in the kitchen cupboard, and the arrangement of food in the refrigerator. If anyone moved a piece of furniture, she was not comfortable until it was back in its correct place. Cans had to be properly aligned with the labels facing out. Only her husband could move anything in the house without upsetting her.

  Her perfectionism presented problems for large purchases as well. When she and her husband bought a computer, it never made it out of the box. After trying for a year, they gave up and bought a floor model so that Debra didn't feel guilty for ruining something that was new. Handling cash was similarly problematic. She had thousands of dollars in cash that she couldn't spend because the bills were too new and too crisp. She couldn't stand the idea of allowing them to get crinkled, so she carefully packed them away in her bedroom. Most of the time, she used credit or debit cards to purchase things, but she needed to use cash occasionally. To allow herself to do so, she insisted on getting old bills when she went to the bank. Similarly, when the TV Guide arrived in the mail, her husband "messed it up" so that it was wrinkled and dirty. Without it, her TV recording schedule would have been impossible.

  Although conditions in the homes of people who hoard would hardly lead one to think of them as perfectionists, the intense fear of mistakes is a common characteristic among hoarders. For instance, one of our clients would not recycle her newspapers unless they were perfectly tied up in carefully measured bundles. She did not want the men picking up the recycling to be critical of her. Another was unable to get rid of an old suitcase until she found the key. "It's not all there," she said. "It just isn't right." Like these women, many hoarders interpret minor mistakes as equivalent to failure. Although most of us can accept minor mistakes as part of being human and not cause for self-denigration, many people who hoard can't do that.

  Debra's insistence that the furniture be arranged in just the right way and her attempts to keep things in a perfect state are examples of an ordering and arranging compulsion. Such compulsions result from an idea that things need to be arranged in a particular, symmetrical pattern. "Symmetry obsessions," as they are called, are a common but little understood form of OCD. Sometimes the need to arrange things in a particular way is driven by magical thinking that keeping things "just so" will ward off harm. More common, however, is what Debra experienced. When the furniture was moved, she didn't fear a negative event; she just felt uncomfortable, as though things were "not just right." Not-just-right experiences, or NJREs as some OCD researchers and patients call them, are relatively common, and not just among people with OCD. Like an itch, the sensation that one's clothes don't fit right, or the experience of seeing a crooked picture on the wall, NJREs violate our expectations for order.

  Most of us learn to tolerate these violations and either don't notice or feel nothing more than simple recognition that something is out of place or off-kilter. But for people with OCD, NJREs can be quite dramatic. I once consulted on a case of a young man who was completely incapacitated by various NJREs and had been hospitalized. For instance, he did not feel right when passing through a doorway unless his shoulders were equidistant from the doorjambs. The discomfort kept him trapped in his room. The only way he could go through a doorway was to leap through so that the experience was as short-lived as possible. Several staff members were needed to clear the hallway whenever he was about to rocket out of his room.

  Ordering and arranging compulsions often accompany hoarding. More than three-quarters of children with hoarding problems also have problems with ordering and arranging. Like Debra, a number of our clients have reported to us that as children, they carefully arranged objects in their rooms and felt uncomfortable whenever the items were moved. Some investigators believe that these NJREs originate in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain thought to be responsible for error detection. They hypothesize that the brain may be sending out messages that things are not as they should be or that a mistake has been made. This results in a sensation like Debra's that the furniture is out of place or a magazine is not the way it should be. In searching for the cause of this error signal, Debra may have concluded that the magazines she purchased were wrinkled or defaced with fingerprints even when they weren't.

  Another kind of perfectionism, related to symmetry obsessions, is a deep concern about "completeness." Completeness pervaded many of Debra's saving behaviors. For example, she found it very difficult to separate the content of mail she received from the envelope in which it came. It was hard for her to capture the experience in words. "They belong together," she said, "and if they are separated, it's like they are broken, or like separating a mother and child." She never discarded any mail, even junk mail, without the original envelope. For a while, Debra refused even to open her mail. It seemed to her that mail was meant to be unopened. This stopped abruptly when she lost her driver's license because she failed to respond to a minor traffic ticket that came in the mail.

  Violations of this sense of completeness can influence people's sense of themselves. Debra recounted an episode of panic when her recorder failed to work for an Ellen DeGeneres anniversary show. The show was rebroadcast a few days later, but she missed that as well. To get an idea of why this show was so important to her, I asked her a series of questions that form what cognitive behavior therapists call the "downward arrow technique." This technique is designed to uncover important beliefs or reasons for behaviors that the individual has trouble articulating. It also is an attempt to transform these beliefs from statements of fact to hypothetical. My conversation with Debra went something like this:

  ME: Why does missing that show matter to you?

  DEBRA: Because it's the only show I don't have. It's like a missing piece of a puzzle.

  ME: And if you don't have that one show, why is that important?

  DEBRA: That show was special.

  ME: How will not having it affect your life?

  DEBRA: Because I'll remember forever that I missed it.

  ME: Why would that be so bad?

  DEBRA: Since I could have taped it but didn't, I blew it. There is something wrong with me that I can't even tape a show correctly.

  ME: So if you don't tape the show you want, it means there is something wrong with you, and that will stay with you forever?

  The beliefs revealed here had nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the show or its contents; having a copy of the show was all that mattered to her. It mattered for two reasons. First, she worried that her angst at not taping the show would stay with her forever. Second, she thought that failing to tape the show meant that she was inadequate, a failure as a person. Although this is far from the whole story of her hoarding, attempts to avoid that sense of failure may have contributed to the problem.

  Debra feared mistakes more than anything. As a young girl, she excelled in school. Even though she was smarter than most of her classmates, any mistake left her feeling worthless and empty. She vividly recalled a weekend at the beach with her mother during the fourth grade. She felt tormented throughout, and when they got home, she told her mother that she had something terrible to confess and hoped her mother wouldn't hate her for it. "I got an eighty-nine on my English paper," she said. Debra had never gotten below a 90 before, and the experience left her feeling "like a loser." By middle school, little had changed. Debra was incensed that although she was getting 100s on her math tests, the teacher's computer grading program could record only two digits, so her test scores were recorded as 99s. Losing a point on every test was intolerable.

  Back-to-school shopping trips with her mother were agonizing as well. She recalled her mother looking defeated after she spent hours in the dressing room attempting to find the perfect fit and color. The aftermath tried her mother's patience even more. Debra refused to wear many of her new clothes because doing so would ruin them. She discovered, however, that if she took pictures of the clothes from multiple angles, she coul
d remember what they were like in their pristine state, and then she might be able to wear some of them. Even so, many unworn clothes from her childhood still hung in one of her storage units.

  Perfectionism ultimately paralyzed Debra. She realized that there was no way she could come close to making her bedroom conform to her standards, so she gave up trying. It was easier to live with the mess than to experience the frustration of failing to create a perfect room. This is a common obstacle for many of our hoarding clients.

  Out of Containment

  As a child, Debra closely guarded her stuff. Although she saved a lot when she was young, her room was neat and very carefully organized—so carefully, in fact, that she could instantly tell if anyone had been in the room and moved or touched anything. Everything was at an angle, and she memorized the angles. Anything askew drew her attention as soon as she entered the room. Once when she was twelve, a neighbor girl came over to play. During the course of the afternoon, the girl locked herself in Debra's room. Despite Debra's protests, the girl didn't open the door for thirty minutes. The experience traumatized Debra. As an only child, she wasn't used to sharing and felt violated by this behavior.

  Debra described herself as feeling like a mother bear with cubs: "I'll do whatever it takes to protect my things." No one dared to touch her stuff. She allowed her husband to move her things, because she trusted him. Her mother could move them, too, but only a little. She tried to describe this to me one day: "Picture a cartoon with thought bubbles. I have a hundred million bubbles. Junk mail is one of them. If I throw it away, it's out there without me, out of containment. I want a bubble around me and all my stuff to keep it safe. I don't want any of my things out of containment."