What do I mean by “seriously cluttered”?  If you have areas of your home that cannot be used for their intended purpose, then your life — and your family’s –  is being seriously impacted by the clutter.  For example, sometimes a family cannot eat at the dining room table because it is covered with stuff.  Or a sofa or chair is out of commission because it has a heap of clutter on top.  Sometimes people stop using beds, bedrooms or even bathrooms because the clutter has taken over.  Is this you?  Commit to turning the problem around for just 15 minutes a day — I promise you will be amazed at the results of a little consistent daily focus.

Here are the links:

• HoardHouse.com is an evolving media project by three Columbia University journalism grad students.  The project explores the issue of hoarding in New York City, drawing from interviews with psychologists, social workers and hoarders themselves.  Sometimes when you are in the middle of this problem it is comforting to know that you are not alone, and that others have similar or even more serious issues with clutter.
• Does Decluttering Make Sense in Hard Economic Times? This is the question posed by the writers at OnSimplicity.net.  When we feel poor or when we’re even worried about the financial future, the scarcity mindset kicks in and it’s harder to release clutter.  This article makes excellent points about why it’s just as important to declutter now as ever.
• “The Rules” About Paper. Does paper pile up as fast as you can eliminate it?  ClutterDietBlog.com breaks down paper clutter maintenance and prevention into 10 straightforward rules.  Great stuff!
• Decluttering a Loved One’s Possessions. Sometimes the sad tipping point from a little bit of clutter into complete chaos is when a loved one passes on or has to go into long-term care.  We are faced with their many possessions and no idea how to decide what to keep and what to part with.  This thoughtful article suggests ways to bring clarity and effectiveness to the decision-making process.

Here’s hope for an abundant, joyful and productive week! )

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“I am enough and I have enough,” immediately resonated with me.  Many times in my life I had found myself trying to make up for a sense of inadequacy by putting other people’s needs before my own.  In the workplace,  I worked long hours and took on unreasonable responsibilities.  I got into relationships with people whose addiction issues ensured that I’d be called upon to rescue them.  Instead of taking the time to truly nurture myself and put my needs first, I ate as a shortcut way to comfort myself.  I ate when I was tired, I ate when I was angry and I ate when I was sad or lonely.  I tried to make up for my perceived inadequacy by spending money and buying stuff.

And I always worried that I didn’t have enough or, worse, that I could not trust that I would have enough to survive in the future.  If I could afford the food I craved now, I should buy a lot of it and eat as much as I could.  Who knows when I would be able to buy it again!  I bought my son piles of toys at Christmas because what if next year we were too poor to enjoy Christmas?  And of course, when you don’t trust that you’ll have what you need in the future it’s natural to hang on to possessions as much as possible and as long as possible.

I have come to believe that emotional eating and clutter/hoarding both stem from a scarcity mindset.  We fear that there isn’t enough love, approval, money, or comfort in the world, and we try to protect ourselves against this scarcity by eating and hoarding.

Where did this scarcity mindset come from?  Many of us who struggle with emotional eating and clutter/hoarding didn’t get what we needed as kids or teens.  This deprivation takes many forms:  abuse or neglect or abandonment from a parent or parent figure, poverty or periods of financial insecurity, trauma or grief to name a few.  We gather our piles of possessions around us and eat when we’re not hungry to try to eliminate the fear of not being enough or not having enough.

It’s natural and good to want to keep oneself safe and protect yourself from deprivation, but in the case of emotional eating and clutter, this normal and positive instinct to protect ourselves backfires.  The result is a cluttered home and a body weighed down with fat.

What I’m asking you to do when you begin the Tweaks system is to start to trust.  Trust yourself and trust the universe to give you what you need when you need it.  I know this is scary, but I promise you that offering this trust is a critical part of transforming your life so that you can experience true abundance.  When you trust, you can learn to nurture yourself in positive ways and gradually release the stuff that crowds your life and the extra weight that pulls you down.

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A hard fact about any problematic behavior — hoarding, smoking, overeating, gambling, shopping addiction, drug addiction, and the list could go on and on — is that people can change their behaviors and their lives, but only if they truly want to.  There is always hope that a person who hoards will come to the desire to change in his or her own time, but in the meantime the family and friends of the hoarder have to figure out how to make peace with the problem.  They have to decide how and whether to offer practical help on a day-to-day basis while the hoarding goes on.

These resources and organizations are particularly helpful for family and friends:

• ChildrenOfHoarders.com
• OCF Foundation Hoarding Site
• Hoarders.org (San Francisco Bay Area Internet Guide for Extreme Hoarding Behavior)
• Children of Hoarders Email Discussion Group

Here are some links for hoarding cleanup help. I have not used and cannot recommend any of these companies — this list is for information only:

• HoardingCleanup.com
• ThePlan.com

If you know of a good link I missed, please leave it in a comment.

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• Anti-Hoarding Strategies from a Hoarding Therapist

This is a short documentary (a little more than 20 minutes) that you can watch in its entirety. Four people in the UK with hoarding issues talk about their lives and their problems with stuff.

Two moments that really struck me:

• A book hoarder expresses his guilt about the idea of parting with some of his books, “It’s almost as though you’re betraying them.”
• A woman who feels unable to throw her garbage away says, “It might be a lot of rubbish but nobody is allowed to touch it.”

What were your reactions to the documentary?

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Haven’t we all said things like this before?

• If I get rid of this wedding vase, I’ll feel guilty.
• But I might need seven sleeping bags one day.
• I think this brooch/chair/ugly knickknack might be valuable again.
• If I put the bills away, I’ll never pay them on time.
• I want this chartreuse muumuu to go to a good home.
• I want to declutter, but I can’t get motivated.

Go read the article now to get some great solutions for these dilemmas — and bookmark the article

What are your favorite non-reasons for holding on to clutter?

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• Dealing with Clothing Clutter
• Anti-Hoarding Strategies from a Hoarding Therapist

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!

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Well, I didn’t really want the kitties either, to be honest, but still my heart kind of ached at the idea of getting rid of things that once held meaning for my used-to-be-little boy. The kitties spent the last two weeks on my otherwise uncluttered desk.

Today I had a flash of brilliance. We live on a busy street with lots of pedestrian traffic, and lots of kids. I passed the kitties over to my husband and asked him to walk them a block or two away and find a wall to put them on next to the sidewalk. In my imaginings, a child would find the kitties and treasure them (for a while at least). Thinking this, I could part with the figurines. “But take a picture!” I begged my hubby. I knew I would want to tell this story on my blog.

Hilarity ensued. When Martin found a nice wall for the kitties and put them up there, the smaller one crashed to the ground and broke! A tragic loss But here is a picture of the lone surviving kitty, waiting for its new owner.

Sometimes it really is hard for us to part with our clutter. People like us who have clutter and hoarding issues tend to imbue objects with intense emotional significance, and we sometimes even feel guilt toward the objects themselves when we are ready to release them from our lives. When you run into a quandary like this, consider whether there is a creative way you can part with the item without anxiety You might be surprised at what you dream up!

This is a Friday Fun post. 

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It’s not that I hadn’t been doing laundry, mind you.  A couple of times a week I would wash three or four loads in a panicked laundry marathon.  (Sunday nights were popular because it would dawn on me, “What the heck are we all going to wear tomorrow??!”)  But since I was doing laundry under pressure, I would go through the huge heap trying to piece together enough outfits to get us all through a couple of days.  I couldn’t just wash everything because there was so much dirty laundry.

What happens when you can’t find missing socks in the chaos (hint: check under the kids’ beds and even between their sheets!)?   You guessed it — it seemed like I was always asking Martin to pop into Walmart and pick up yet another six-pack of socks or underwear because there were never enough.  When you’ve forgotten several favorite pairs of jeans or dresses at the bottom of a heap of clothes, it’s easy to think that you need to shop for more clothes because you have nothing to wear.

When I decided something had to be done,  I started a new routine:  washing, drying and putting away two loads of laundry per day, every day. In my large capacity washer, this was about twice as much laundry as our family of five generated on an ongoing basis, so I figured I’d be catching up on the backlog of laundry at the rate of one load a day.

Well, I did two loads of laundry a day almost every single day, and Mount Washmore gradually — very gradually — became smaller and smaller.  Believe it or not, it took more than a month to get to “bare floor” status.  This means that our family of five had more than 30 loads worth of backlogged dirty laundry!

Decluttering the Clothing

As I sorted and folded the clean laundry every day, I separated each item into one of three piles:

• Keep: the item was in good condition, still fit, and looked nice;
• Throw Away: the item was torn, stained, worn out, etc.;
• Donate: the item was in good condition but no longer fit or, if it did fit, it didn’t suit its owner.

Why didn’t I just trash the junky clothes without washing them?  This is where the crazy comes in     To this day, I find it nearly impossible to throw out an item of clothing that is dirty.  What would the garbagemen think??

I have to tell you that it was very challenging also to give some of the clothing away, my clothing in particular.  What if I gained weight and needed those bigger clothes?  What if I lost weight and could wear the smaller clothes again?  Well, the truth of the matter is that most of the clothes that didn’t fit me were also very dated, and if you look at your clothing critically you may find the same thing.  This anxiety that I had was compounded by the fact that I had suffered poverty in my teen and young adult years and I worried that I would find myself too broke to buy more clothing in the future when I needed it.  Well, that worry proved to be unfounded and I now truly believe that clearing out the clutter opens the door to abundance in our lives.

So I pushed forward through the anxiety and continued to trash and donate all the clothing that was in bad shape, didn’t fit, or that we just didn’t like.  Every time a donation bag was filled I put it in my minivan and made a point of dropping it off the next time I went by the clothing donation box.  I did not keep count but I know that I must have donated at least 12 huge bags of clothing.  It was unbelievable.  Even after tossing and donating every item we didn’t love, the whole family had more good, clean clothing than we knew — and so many socks that I did not buy socks again for at least a couple of years!

A nice side effect of dealing with the clothing clutter?  My daily habit of doing laundry stuck with me and became my Laundry Routine.

* Thanks to the wonderful FlyLady for this unforgettable expression.

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