What's the worst case of pathological hoarding you've seen? In one case of pathological hoarding, a man became such a compulsive hoarder that his behavior forced his wife to live somewhere else. Ron Alford,...
Ron Alford, Managing Director of Disaster Masters, a company that specializes in cleaning out apartments that have become "utter disasters", says, "I did a project out in California for a guy who was a computer programmer, a really good one. His affinity for keeping things, especially mail, was so great that the floor in the kitchen disappeared and the table on top of the dining room disappeared. It was like four feet of junk mail. He just couldn't toss any mail away. His wife couldn't get in the bed with him anymore, so she actually moved out. After two years of living somewhere else, she finally found out about us, and we went to California and restored him. At the end of the process there was a thirty-foot container that we had filled to the top."
"Their little three-bedroom house was not very large at all. Magazines were neatly stacked up in the garage up to the ceiling. Some of them were twenty years old and he just couldn't get rid of them because he wanted to go back and look at them. He honestly thought he would read them one day. So I asked him, 'When you are going to read these magazines? You can keep them, if you tell me two things -- one, where are you going to do the reading and two, when you are going to do it?' Compulsive hoarders can't answer those questions because their time management sucks. Here is the other truth. Everybody on earth has only got twenty-four hours a day to do things," says Alford.
Another example come from a show Dr. Phil, the television psychologist, did about compulsive hoarding. The husband in one of the families who appeared on the show had hoarded so much junk in his house that his wife moved out of the house and into a trailer that was parked in their yard. A few years later, the husband joined her in the trailer. They had a couple of cats that still lived in the house - so there were cats and junk in the house, but no people. Meanwhile, the husband's hoarding ways continued, and the trailer they had moved into as a refuge from the junk-filled house started filling up with junk also.
Alford says, "With women especially, it can be a shopping problem. Some women will go shopping and they will buy shoes that do not fit them just because the shoes are on sale. These are high-priced designer shoes. The prices are artificially inflated to begin with, and they still cost a fortune when they are on sale. But these women are proud of themselves because of the bargains they've found. I did a project for a woman who was $35,000 in debt because she wanted to wear Manolo Blahnik shoes. She thought she got such a great deal because she was buying $650 shoes for $400. She got an adrenaline rush from being able to buy something on sale. But, how many pairs of shoes do you really need? How many feet do you have?"
