“How Do I Help a Hoarder?” Some Useful Links
How can I help my friend or my family member? People write to me asking this question every day. They are spouses, children, parents, siblings or friends of people whose hoarding problems are out of control. They desperately want to help their loved one gain control over the clutter and mess that has overwhelmed them. NurturingHope.com is primarily a community for those of us who actually struggle with clutter and emotional eating, but I’ve written this post to offer some resources that can be helpful to friends and family.
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:
If you know of a good link I missed, please leave it in a comment.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/andreanna/
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