How do hoarders rationalize their behavior? Hoarders find lots of ways to rationalize their obsessive compulsive hoarding behavior. Compulsive hoarding is a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and compulsive...
Compulsive hoarding is a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and compulsive hoarders often rationalize their behavior with obsessive thoughts.
Ron Alford, Managing Director of Disaster Masters, a company that specializes in cleaning out apartments that have become "utter disasters", points out how tenacious hoarding behavior and the obsessive thinking that goes along with it can be. "'I might need this' is a big rationalization, but they are loaded with every good excuse. Their whole life is rationalization. They just hang on for dear life and it's tough for somebody like that to let go of things unless the pain of losing the spouse or the partner is greater than the pain of losing the stuff."
The Obsessive Compulsive Foundation (the OCF), a patient advocacy organization, says on its website, "Hoarders generally tend to save things that are of little or no value, or if the things they save do have real value, they tend to save them in ridiculously larger quantities than would ever be necessary." The OCF website, Ocfoundation.org, describes several types of obsessive thoughts that drive compulsive hoarding behavior.
One type of obsessive thought, according to the OCF, is the "worry that if they throw a particular item away, it will be lost forever, and they may one day be in need of it in order to be able to use it, to be able to remember it, or do something connected with it". This is a type of perfectionist thinking. Hoarders are afraid of making mistakes by throwing things out things that they think they may want or need later.
What often happens though, is that hoarders keep so much stuff, and it is so disorganized, that they aren't able to find the items that they've saved. Everything disappears into massive piles. So even if the items were truly useful, which they usually aren't, hoarders wouldn't be able to get to them later.
Hoarders often save magazines, newspapers, and junk mail because they intend to go back and read or reread them "some day". But "some day" never seems to come, and the piles of reading material keep on growing.
Another type of obsessive thought resembles the type of thinking seen in hyper-responsible obsessions, says the OCF: "It is the idea that each thing they save and/or repair might be useful to others (rather than themselves), and that the hoarder would be responsible (and therefore blameful and guilty) for another person not having this vital item should the need arise." But the items are usually not, in fact, useful to anyone else, and the hoarder never does end up giving them away. They remain, and pile up, in the hoarder's house.
Another rationalization described on the OCF website is the belief that "what they are doing is actually recycling". The hoarders may believe that they are performing a community service by conserving resources. "Throwing away something that could possibly be reused is seen as being highly irresponsible. In actuality, there really is no need for what they have saved, there is no one to give the items to, and the only result is that the hoarder is burdened with a house full of junk," says the website.
