Part of the problem with the phenomena of hoarding, now deemed to affect one in five people, (the other four are collectors) is that we want to fix it before knowing what it is. Being righteousness about someone’s plastic Santa collection might seem like trying-to-help but it’s still like sinking in chocolate truffle, tasty and feeling good… but you’re not going anywhere.
“How often do we leap ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.” Thomas Moore.
Psychology Today recently ran an article on hoarding that identified some of the symptoms and causes. It was scary enough to send me scuttling off to check on my sweet wrapper collection because nowhere in the entire article was there any reference to meaning.
It’s certainly true that hoarding is an attempt to insulate oneself from stress, which leads to isolation and thence to even more stress. But such a vicious circle is not dissolved by willful efforts to de-clutter.
It is also true that…
‘trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body,’ George Carlin
Yet this ‘neurotic solution’ still manages to keep the sandwiches within arms reach until such a time when the anxiety of being fed might be addressed. You’ll get some funny looks, more of the same judgement which makes progress impossible, but its important to leave the sandwiches where they are and take the time to ponder them, as would a naturalist observing some curious trait in the animal kingdom.
All this sandwich taping is way more common than you think. It is even promoted as a social value. We are taught from an early age to acquire and display. Success itself is measured by how much more you have than you need.
In the old days only the poor were mad. The wealthy were simply eccentric. Its still true. The little old lady with forty cats gets sneered at whilst the little old man with forty Bentleys is someone to emulate. You could say that the lower income hoarder is faithfully living out an ideal despite their lack of resources. They too are projecting their inner world onto matter which must then be painstakingly collected up and preserved.
When I was a kid I got sent to a boarding school in a war zone. There were grenade screens on the windows, terrorist drills and rifle practice after class, but the worst threat was from within, endemic sexual abuse, total loss of any privacy nor any scrap of protection from institutionalized bullying.
One day I found a lost cricket ball in some bushes. I grabbed it and ran around to the back of the house where I buried it in a sand bucket. I didn’t play cricket. I had no use for the cricket ball and never went back to dig it up. Yet somehow what I had done soothed me. When times were particularly tough I would comfort myself with the thought of the buried ball. Thinking about it could smooth a path to untroubled sleep.
It was only decades later that I understood the significance of these events. In ancient times warriors might ‘bury’ their hearts before battle as a way of both summoning courage and preserving themselves from impending onslaught. This ritual gesture meant some essential center was kept hidden and protected from the clang of conflict. Some crucial aspect of self got to transcend trauma and violence.
My own instincts for preservation had resorted to symbolic gesture and a form of magical thinking in order to manage an unmanageable situation. And it had worked, though making sense of it all afterwards involved fresh appreciation of just what I was going through at the time that made such dreamlike action necessary.
While we are shaking our heads at the bag lady piling up newspapers she does not need and will never read, most of aspire to the kind of wealth we likewise do not need and will never use, an ideal promoted by our government that has more bombs that it will ever need…. but may still use.
You may not have twenty five dinner sets, just in case, but still fantasize about having the wherewithal to do so, just in case.
The hoarder may not have the material resources to amass more wealth or power or property but still remains true to the ideals of consumerism pumped into them since childhood. You can pursue your used magazine collection with all the gusto of your fellow hungry ghosts on Wall st, back issues of Hello! working just as well to fill the bottomless pit as Stocks and Bonds i.e. not very well.
So, in order to avoid hypocrisy, it would be better to say that the spiritual emptiness and emotional hungering that prompt the hoarding reflex are the defining support struts of our consumer society. We find different ways to fill up emptiness depending on available resources and personal idiosyncrasy and these need exploring as you would a dream, so that the conflation of spirit and matter can be gently unpicked.
When the master says,’ Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s’ he’s drawing our attention to how easy it is to confuse things you’d think were easy to tell apart. In fact the sacred and the profane are easily conflated, a process recognizable by the fascinations it produces. We get fixated upon stuff because it’s glowing with some value/worth in addition to what it is in-itself.
Sometimes what has to be projected is worthlessness. The strategy, however, remains the same; even if the focus has shifted to all the symbolic odds and ends no-one wants, or the yesterday’s news a person might secretly believe themselves to be.
The popular conception is that hoarders are just greedy and controlling. The common or garden expression of this is that they are tight arsed and obstinate. It’s expressed in Freud’s psychoanalytic literature as ‘anal fixation’. Either way the emphasis is on blaming the person concerned rather than the interactions in the family which might give rise to anxious loss of control.
Many post-Freudians follow this pattern of holding the child responsible for their difficulties. Some talk about primal fault or primal defects. Erikson shifts the emphasis a bit and talks about autonomy vs shame and doubt. He describes the controlling consequences of not-enough-interaction, but also winds up blaming the victim with the indirect yet additional shaming of their ‘failure to achieve play satiation.’
What gets forgotten is that the hoarding reflex originates at a time when discrepancies between disgust and praise are accompanied by the use of transitional objects to manage the growing gap between me and not-me. If there is excessive anxiety about being allowed to exist in one’s own right rather than as an extension of Mother then the need for transitional objects will assume some unusual contours.
This is bound to be further compounded by the collective consideration that we have no divine mother. If individuals respond to maternal uncertainty with frantic efforts to fill their emptiness with stuff, how shall an entire Culture respond to the utter loss of the Great Mother?
The Swedes have a saying, ‘he who buys what he does not need, steals from himself,’ which begs the question of how anyone might learn something so artful. The answer is, by example. They have already been robbed; of their connection to Nature, the sacred Temenos of the Great Mother’s lap, the shame free prospect of Unconditional Being.
I once saw a wounded baboon trying to pack his gaping belly with sticks and grass. Anything he could find was stuffed into the open laceration. When the goddess is cast out we all behave like wounded animals, stuffing our evisceration with dirt and leaves. You might shake your head at the futility of it all, but the instinctive efforts to stem terminal bleeding-out dies harder than logic and rational argument.