Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Kwyjibo]

There were a lot of responses about this in another thread so I thought I'd set up an ongoing thread.

The episode this week was particularly hard to stomach.  The kid with the alcoholic dad living in all that filth and pet hair was nauseating enough but the other story, the older woman with all the cats, oh my.  What did they say she had?  Over 30 living kitties anyway.  The sheer volume of excrement in that garage was stomach turning.  I was amazed that the woman was surprised at all of the dead kitties they found... did she really think all of those cats weren't breeding?

Julie actually left the room this week, this show gets to her that bad. 

[Cockney Rebel]

We haven't watched this episode yet.

Not sure that we will now you've supplied a description

[Kwyjibo]

Bob Barker hasn't been preaching about fixing your pets for nothing, that's for sure.  Poor woman really thought she was helping the little beasties.

This was the first episode that didn't really center on cleaning up, or the the person fighting the cleanup.  Both of these people were pretty much okay with their stuff being removed.  This episode was more about the psychosis of the whole thing.  Both people were fairly off their rocker in their own ways.

[Juliana]

it was seriously physically sickening this week.

[va-vacious]

Didn't see the show, but that is precisely why I have the "no more pets than there are human hands" rule in my house. (I have to remind myself of that every time I want to adopt another animal!)

[Kwyjibo]

Lots of things going on this week that got to me because they were things I've seen my family do.  Like spending inordinate amounts of time going methodically through things before throwing anything way.  I totally do that, and J does too. 

The idea of the hoarder expecting someone else to take their junk was another.  My dad gives me things he's obtained all the time that I'm sure he would like to keep himself and I get it and I'm like wtf do I want with this?  He gave me a Jetson's Christmas ornament the other day that he got at the flea market... why would he look at that and think of me?  He just bought it to be buying it.

The younger girl, oy, she's the perfect example of why you have to constantly cleanup after yourself.  Everywhere she went a mess sprang up as if from nowhere.  Most people, I guess, are wired to do this automatically.  I know I'm not.  I have to make myself police all horizontal surfaces for stuff that we got out and didn't put away, or junk mail, coupons, newspapers, whatever.  The difference is that we keep a handle on it, this girl wasn't even capable.

[MissKitty]

I felt really bad for both of the hoarders this week because the older woman is seriously mentally ill and the younger woman has such low self-esteem that she doesn't really care.

Neither of the men in the relationships have the hoarder disorder. Honestly they'd be better off cutting their losses and leaving, although that isn't going to help the women and might actually make them worse (especially the 28 year old). The young guy, Mark (?) even admitted that he knows he is enabling her, but seemed powerless to leave because he cares for her and wants her to get better.

Kwij, if you don't like the Jetsons ornament, put it on eBay or donate it to Goodwill or something. Don't keep it simply because it was a "gift!" It is one thing to save a keepsake because it genuinely means something to you, but keeping it just because you don't want to hurt someone's feelings could result in you feeling resentful toward your Dad for having to keep something you really don't want.

And really, do you think he will even notice that you don't have it anymore?

[Kwyjibo]

Oh, I know.  I threw it on the "yard sale" pile down in the basement to be disposed of next year.  He was at the house this year when we had our yard sale and I had stuff he'd given me out, he even looked at some of it, he didn't remember giving it to me.  I'd be up to my neck in crap if I kept the stuff he gives me.

If he gets the slightest inkling that I like something he's on board and starts giving me stuff.  Like old pop bottles, I have a few, mostly it's older stuff with interesting cut designs or colorful/arty labels, no rhyme or reason if I like something and it's cheap I'll buy it.  I probably have 20 or fewer and should probably do away with some of those.  He jumped in a couple of summers ago and gave me a bunch of plain, blah stuff that he picked up somewhere.  How do you tell him?  I just take it and stick it somewhere until I know he's forgotten and then get rid of it.

[Cockney Rebel]

How do you tell him?

Suggestion:- Maybe you can tell him you're not collecting anything anymore? Use the excuse that you wanna concentrate on the new rugrat or whatever. If he continues to give you stuff, you can just repeat that mantra until he perhaps gets the hint? I've had to do that with my Australian cousin several times. Because we had a Simpsons-themed wedding she's convinced we still like the show 12 years later and always sends us some Simpsons 'crap' each Christmas. I know her heart is in the right place, likewise her generosity is wonderful (she's often spent FAR more on the postage than the tat inside) but I've had to tell her to just stop and simply raise a toast to us - as we do her - each holiday season.

I dunno. I have a hard time feeling sorry for these people on the show. I feel far sorrier for the people around them - the parents of the young girl last night and the kids of the older woman a few weeks ago. It sounds callous but if I was any of them I would just bail and walk away from it all. I can't handle that dysfunction.

There have been times in my life when I could have been accused of 'collecting' things, but never excessively. Now I am the exact opposite of that. I prefer to live with the barest minimum of detrius and we have been progessively and proactively ridding ourselves of more and more 'useless tat' with every month that passes. We've given 80% of our books to the library, the CD collections have been decimated and/or reduced in weight, we donated almost $1000-worth of nick-nack rubbish (toys, figurines, bobbleheads, sundry tsotchkes, old hi-fi equipment etc) to a cat neutering charity in the Spring and are constantly getting rid of larger furniture items on Craigslist or eBay

For me, I just reached that point where I realised that I didn't need to buy all those DVD's that never get watched, get those CD's that never get properly listened to or buy books I could read for nothing from the local library. By cutting back on the excesses, I find myself actually listening to, watching and reading a lot MORE than I used to. The less you have the less you have to worry about losing/damaging/cleaning/dusting/storing everything.

AFAIAC these people on the show are seriously screwed up. As viewers we laugh and grimace in equal measures at them. I'm painfully accustomed to mental disease, but theirs seems so entirely illogical. You watched last night (or DVR cut the show short) and just KNEW the older woman was going to lose one or both homes and the younger girl was going to get progressively worse and either grow into a bitter old hag or top herself at some point. Its a train-wreck of a TV show that makes me feel uncomfortable to watch to be honest.

That roll-top desk WAS a piece of shit though.

[Kwyjibo]

I know I asked but I guess when you get right down to it there's no point in saying anything.  I dunno, he's my dad and he's not a very open kind of guy and giving me junk is one of his ways of letting me know he loves me.  Maybe that's crazy, but when I can graciously take whatever it is and ditch it later on the sly and leave his outlet intact I'm going to give him his outlet.  He's nearly 70, it's far too late to cure him of this.  If he was spending a fortune sending me gold plated non-sense from New Zealand that'd be another story.

I can't see dismissing a mental illness because it's illogical.  Aren't most mental illnesses?  I get very uncomfortable watching the show, but on the other hand it's enlightening and it's motivated me to correct some of the behaviors I see that I share.  It's precisely because of this show that we're liquidating a lot of the DVDs that we don't watch and I'm going through my garage and work bench and getting rid of a lot of "just in case" crap that I've kept.  Hopefully I won't be collecting McDonald's coffee cups when I'm his age because of it.

[MissKitty]

I don't think CR is dismissing the mental disorder, he's saying that it is different to what we normally class as "mental illness." And their thinking IS illogical - but like you said, most mental illness IS illogical.

Hoarding/pack-ratting has been around forever, but only recently has it been classed as an actual mental disorder, and although the people on the show are for the most part quite adamant that they don't have a problem, I think anyone watching the show can see that they have some serious issues to overcome.

I was telling my Mom about the show and we both agree that one of my aunts (her sister in law) has the hoarding problem. She cannot go to a store, garage sale, flea market etc without buying something. She has an entire room of nothing but clothing, most of it still with the tags on. She has hundreds of pairs of shoes and only ever wears the same pair of slip-ons. She has three chest freezers (the largest you can get) completely jam-packed with meat and frozen stuff that she's bought on special.  She picked and canned over 200 jars of tomatoes this summer, and 160 quarts of green beans, and froze god only knows how much corn. She cannot let a single item in the garden go to waste, even after admitting that she still has several dozen jars of stuff leftover from last year.

But you'd never know she had a "problem" until you went to her house, and even then she has managed to keep the hoarding confined to a couple of low-traffic rooms. I suspect that your Dad is probably the same. Completely normal in all other aspects and would be offended if someone said either of them were mentally ill or have a problem.

[Kwyjibo]

Yep, describes him almost to a tee.  Most of his stuff is confined to low traffic areas, or areas that only he goes into.  I was all set to type that he doesn't generally buy new stuff to hoard, but quickly realized that he does and has for as long as I can remember.  It's become second nature to me at this point.

Dad also cans and freezes inordinate amounts of stuff from the garden, and he also makes jellies which he gives away at a pretty good clip yet still has a pretty healthy stockpile of.

[Cockney Rebel]

I was telling my Mom about the show and we both agree that one of my aunts (her sister in law) has the hoarding problem. She cannot go to a store, garage sale, flea market etc without buying something.

This same aunt SOLD HER CAR last year because gas was "just too damned expensive". Then bought almost exactly the same gas-guzzling monster to replace it with.

And yet, everything she is buying is not sapping her finances.

Huh?

That's maybe the 'illogical' nature of this disease. But on reflection, maybe 'illogical' is a poor choice of word. I have way too much personal experience of severe mental illness to dismiss any example of it really.

Kwyj, I hope you can overcome your own predilection to this problem as well as making sure it doesn't completely bog down your Dad at this time of his life.

Personally I have found chucking/giving stuff away to be extremely cathartic.

[frizgolf]

getting rid of a lot of "just in case" crap that I've kept

This.
I inherited this tendency from my dad. He always had two or three coffee cans with the exact same unmatched collection of screws, nuts, and bolts. I'm starting to see this tendency in myself.

[Kwyjibo]

That's funny, because the "jar of screws" was something I'd decided was okay to keep!  When we first moved into our house I put a new knob and lockset on the door.  I kept the old one.  I've grown up believing that if something still worked and might have a use, even if not to me, that you couldn't throw it away.  The problem with that logic is that the object never finds it's use, so what was the difference?  Whether it's in a landfill or in my basement it's just an unused object, but in my basement when added to countless amounts of other things that have been kept in the same vein it becomes a mess of massive proportions and a serious cause of anxiety and depression.

Likewise I had a pile of 3"-10" pieces of 2x4s, old faucets, scraps, hardware you name it.  But, I threw almost all of that crap away precisely because of the perspective I got from this show.  I guess what I lack in this case is the ability to see middle ground.  Some stuff does have a use, scraps of wood (the bigger pieces anyway and maybe one or two small pieces) come in very handy for all sorts of things, but keeping every last scrap of everything leads to a very big cumulative problem.  It's seeing that middle ground that most people are able to do that these folks aren't.  At least as far as keeping things goes.  What drives people to acquire things is another story.

Oh, and yeah CR, that rolltop desk was absolutely shit.