Jessie Sholl’s New York apartment is a rent-stabilized fifth-floor walk-up, three small rooms and a sleeping loft where she and her husband, both writers, have lived for seven years. Perfect-storm conditions for clutter. But Sholl, a petite, pale-skinned woman of 42, keeps things tidy with routine “purges.” Even of objects she likes.
“I should get rid of this,” she said on a recent afternoon, pointing to a chicken sitting on top of a bookshelf, handmade by an artist out of recycled shower curtains. “It serves no purpose.”
Two minutes earlier she had been admiring its colourful plumes.
She laughed. “It’s a little pathological, I admit.”
If Sholl is overly zealous in her approach to housekeeping, one can understand why after reading her recently published memoir, “Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother’s Compulsive Hoarding.” The parent Sholl describes is a woman whose cluttered living room inexplicably contains five sewing machines and at least eight pairs of mouldy cowboy boots. She is someone who buys too much and doesn’t throw anything away, even as the stuff piles up and impedes normal life – the textbook definition of a hoarder.
In dealing with her mother’s home in Minneapolis, Sholl has spent much of her life alternating between feeling shame about its squalid condition and attempting to rid it of the books, scraps of paper, empty food cartons and thrift-store tchotchkes littering every available surface.
When she learned her mother had cancer, in 2006, Sholl flew out for one last-ditch cleanup attempt, an effort that inspired “Dirty Secret.”
“The stove was piled feet-high with dirty pans,” Sholl said. “It gnawed at me that she was living that way.”
Many children of hoarders know the feeling. Even as scientists study the cognitive activity that accompanies the disorder and television shows like TLC’s “Hoarding: Buried Alive” and A&E’s “Hoarders” have made it a mainstream issue, scant attention has been paid to how hoarding affects families of the afflicted, especially their children. Most are left to their own devices to make sense of growing up in homes where friends and relatives were unable to visit, with parents who seemed to value inanimate objects more than the animate ones navigating the goat paths through the clutter.
Randy O. Frost, a psychology professor at Smith College, has been studying hoarders for two decades and is an author of “Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things.” Children of hoarders, he noted, often display a tortured ambivalence toward their parents, perhaps because, unlike spouses or friends of hoarders, they had little choice but to live amid the junk.
Sholl’s mother, Sheila Sholl, said for years she was in denial about her hoarding.
“I told myself I was collecting kitschy things, and I was sure the value would go up,” she said. “I was dealing with anxiety disorders that I had as a child through this stuff. I’d walk into a room and see my stuff and feel comforted.”
As the house filled up, though, she shut down.
Her daughter’s book, she said, helped her understand how hoarding affected their relationship, especially after she and her husband were divorced, and why her daughter decided to live with her father.
Preliminary evidence from research being done at Johns Hopkins University suggests that hoarding may run in families, said Jack Samuels, an associate professor in the psychiatry department.
“We think there may be a genetic component,” Samuels said.
Dorothy Breininger, a professional organizer and a producer of the A&E show “Hoarders,” said she has noticed that when someone is raised by a hoarder from a very early age, “there’s a likeliness they’ll want to collect.”
That may be why Jason Brunet was “reassured greatly” when he was able to down-size from a large two-bedroom apartment to a one-bedroom in Seattle not long ago. Brunet, 30, appeared in an especially harrowing episode of the show. His mother’s hoarding was so far gone that authorities deemed her home near New Orleans unfit for her pet dogs, after Child Protective Services removed him when he was 13. He spent the remainder of his childhood living nearby with his older sister.
Most therapists agree that the disorder is complex and difficult to treat. Frost noted that there has been some success with cognitive behaviour therapy that “includes a combination of things: focusing on controlling the urge to acquire and learning how to break the attachment people have to things.”
Just trying to de-clutter the home doesn’t work, because “you’re dealing with the product of the behaviour, not the behaviour itself,” he said. “That’s what’s so frustrating to family members – they’re trying to de-clutter and it ends up being a giant argument.”
But by simply admitting her problem, Sheila Sholl has given her daughter a small measure of satisfaction that many children of hoarders desperately want but never receive.
Her daughter, meanwhile, prefers not to discuss the house with her mother or to visit her there – until the day she must.
“I’m not trying to sound flippant,” she said, “but when I go into that house I will definitely be wearing a hazmat suit.”
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