Anti-Hoarding Strategies from a Hoarding Therapist

January 17, 2009 · Posted in Declutter Daily, Hoarding

Welcome to NurturingHope.com!

I've lost more than 100 pounds and transformed my cluttered home into a haven of peace -- click here for my story and pictures.

Ready to take action? Start turning your life around today with the free Tweaks system.

Looking for personal support and mentoring? Click here to find out about our safe and private Member Forum.

Karron Maidment runs UCLA’s intensive treatment program for hoarders. She has written a really interesting article that contains many insights gained from treating hoarders in the program. I’m going to outline some of the article highlights in this post; it’s well worth the time to read the whole article if you are interested in more.

The UCLA treatment program concentrates on helping hoarders with discarding clutter, organizing kept items, preventing incoming clutter and introducing alternative behaviors. Therefore, I’ve boiled down the article’s strategies into these four categories.

Discarding

The program’s patients choose a single room to start decluttering and stick with that room until it is cleared. (I too advise this approach in my post “7 Steps to Declutter Your Home in 15 Minutes a Day.” ) It helps to choose an arbitrary clutter-clearing path around the room and stick with it. They handle items once, and handle every item — no sifting.

When discarding items during the intensive treatment program, hoarders learn to rate their anxiety on a scale and then monitor the anxiety over time — the anxiety always decreases. The anxiety decreases faster if the discarded item is out of sight (the old out of sight, out of mind). When discarding, notice that nothing terrible happens after getting rid of a valuable-seeming item; this will help make it easier to make future clutter discarding decisions.

When discarding items, ask yourself:

What’s the worst thing that would happen if I didn’t have this item?
What do I think other people do with similar items?
If I need this information later, how could I access it if I throw this away now? (Helpful with paper clutter.)

Organizing

People who hoard tend to like to keep things out in plain sight because they are afraid that they will forget about the item or what it represents if it is put away. (I am very much this way, especially with paper clutter. Now that the house is virtually clutter-free, I can use this “in plain sight” trick effectively to help me remember things — for example, I’ll put my shopping basket in front of the door in the morning so I don’t forget it.)

Hoarders also tend to categorize items differently from non-hoarders, which means that we may sort and store items in inefficient, complicated ways. Over-categorizing is a common problem.

Once clutter has been cleared from a room or an area, it’s best to start using that area for its intended purpose right away. For example, relax on your couch, sleep on your bed, or use your kitchen counters and table for preparing and eating food. Empty the trash every day.

Preventing Incoming Clutter

Discontinue as many subscriptions to magazines, newsletters and catalogs as possible.

If shopping is a problem, it can be helpful to practice going into stores and resisting the urge to buy. Hoarders with serious shopping problems could place credit cards with trusted family or friends. (I found the information on minimizing incoming clutter to be rather sparse in the article. This is a big issue for a lot of people.)

Introducing Alternative Behaviors

People who hoard tend to be resistant to the idea of schedules and routines, but structure really helps. A pattern of late nights and sleeping in is a common problem, and so it’s good to get back to a regular sleep/wake routine (see the Get Enough Sleep Tweak posts). The therapists believe that normalizing your sleep routine can also help with depression.

As hoarders, we tend to be all or nothing people. When our homes are overwhelmed with clutter, we tend to spend all our time either trying to cope with the mess or hiding from it in bed (this sounds familiar and I would add “or on the computer”). The program works on helping the hoarder create a balance of work, recreation and rest.

Hoarding patients develop a simple daily routine that includes emptying trash, doing dishes and sorting mail. They set a specific day of the week to do laundry and pay bills.

Conclusion

The effectiveness of UCLA’s treatment program comes down to the motivation of the participants, and I would bet that this is always true of any attempt to overcome or manage hoarding tendencies.

But if you are a hoarder, you are here reading this right now, which means that you are probably already highly motivated to change your life. Many hoarders, tragically, do not seem to believe that there is a problem at all and completely resist the idea of changing. The bottom line, in my opinion, is that there is hope even for those who are unable to get into intensive treatment — gradual, small improvements in routines and ways of doing things can be transformative!

Read all the decluttering posts here.

Click here to get updates and information about the NurturingHope.com Tweaks System by email, FREE.

Click here to find out more about our private, supportive Member Forum.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spryngtree/