Why Are Some of Us Hoarders?

We should start with a large caveat; one person’s ‘hoarding’ is another person’s ‘collecting’ or ‘not throwing things randomly away’ or ‘being grateful for one’s possessions.’ But when every polite explanation has been given as to why someone has developed an advanced interest in archiving everything, we have to accept that there are cases where proportion has definitively vanished, where there are towers of newspapers blocking the hallways, the cupboards no longer open and the kitchen is clogged with containers from a decade’s worth of takeaway dinners.

The phenomenon of hoarding throws into relief the sheer psychological achievement behind ordinary disposal. What health to conclude that we probably won’t need the box that the hairdryer came in; and that though they were once beautiful, we won’t realistically have any further use for the old jumpers with the moth holes in them – and that though there may have been one or two articles in them we missed, we can do without last year’s fast yellowing magazines. Health brings with it a sense of probability, of what is more or less likely to be important going forward. And behind this, we can detect a confidence about our capacity to discern value; a working sense of what the world is liable to be like and who we’ll want to be in it.

By contrast, the unfortunate hoarder is afflicted by a radical uncertainty as to their own wants and ultimately, as to their own identities. There tends here to be a past (as with most mental troubles): often impatient, easily-angered parents who gave a child a feeling that they didn’t understand much and mattered even less; that certain things were extremely important and others not – but without there being any additional explanations for what the operative logic might be. 

The child would from this have developed an association between making a decision and running grave risks. To choose will have become associated with a terror of setting off fury, vindictiveness or abandonment. The hoarder may, in other areas, now have difficulty deciding what job to do, what partner to choose, what clothes to wear or restaurant to book. Anticipating others’ needs has become the alternative to the impossible business of fathoming one’s own; keeping all options open the alternative to the torment of making a decision.

Hoarding can be motivated too by a fear of loss, precipitated by an actual grave experience of loss. By holding on to everything, the hoarder hopes that no further important things will be thrown away. It may have been material things that vanished long ago, probably in childhood. But it’s far more likely to have been metaphorical, emotional ones that are driving the behaviour. Perhaps the hoarder once enjoyed parental warmth and then a sibling was born. Or a parent died. Or abuse began. By clinging to old batteries or socks, files and stamps, the hoarder is confusedly striving to prevent yet more emotional privations.

Rather than pushing the hoarder to ‘tidy up,’ we might ask them, with greater compassion and far greater utility: what might you once have lost that mattered to you deeply? As often with mental unwellness, the sufferer may have no conscious idea. And yet if one can – thanks to psychotherapeutic introspection – remember the sibling who shifted a parent’s attention, or the baby who died in pregnancy, it may become less important to preserve every last shoe box or spent printer cartridge. 

The solution to compulsive hoarding isn’t to learn to throw things away; it’s to understand what has already been taken from us emotionally. What hoarders are covertly trying to preserve, against the backdrop of difficult unremembered pasts, are not belongings at all – rather a sense of worth, a mood of safety and a feeling of love.