I'm watching A&E's Hoarders show on Netflix right now. I've seen many tweets and Facebook posts by friends that watch these shows saying they feel like cleaning after watching. I totally feel that way at the moment. It also disturbs me on another level.
I could easily become on of these people. One of the psychotherapists mentioned that hoarding is hereditary. Both my grandmother and my mother were hoarders. It seems that a lot of these people had a big trigger that started the hoarding. I did start hoarding to some extent after my mother passed. I was always trying to fill the void by buying stuff I know I didn't need. I couldn't let some things go that were obviously crap because they had either belonged to my mother or had some memory attached. I would bring home broken stuff from people's trash that I found while out delivering pizzas. I thought I was being thrifty and saving something from a landfill, but I see now that it was not the case at all. Most recently, I started doing it with yarn. I think I finally snapped out of it and I'm better now and am actually purging stuff, but a major life crisis could easily trigger something again.
I could easily become on of these people. One of the psychotherapists mentioned that hoarding is hereditary. Both my grandmother and my mother were hoarders. It seems that a lot of these people had a big trigger that started the hoarding. I did start hoarding to some extent after my mother passed. I was always trying to fill the void by buying stuff I know I didn't need. I couldn't let some things go that were obviously crap because they had either belonged to my mother or had some memory attached. I would bring home broken stuff from people's trash that I found while out delivering pizzas. I thought I was being thrifty and saving something from a landfill, but I see now that it was not the case at all. Most recently, I started doing it with yarn. I think I finally snapped out of it and I'm better now and am actually purging stuff, but a major life crisis could easily trigger something again.