What Drives Hoarding?

Causes Of Hoarding

A person has to question what has driven them to the point that an average person would consider them a hoarder. There are a wide array of different factors that are involved when it comes to a person developing this behavior.

What Causes Hoarding?

One cause is that the person might have discarded a valuable item at one point. Examples of this might include a piece of jewelry or electronic device. There might be important information that the person may have misplaced physically or mentally. It could be a pass code for a lock or combination that they need or might be the deed to their property or their children’s birth certificate. All those could be factored into an individual’s reluctance to give up items from their past. The past drives some people to hoarding, specifically grief.

Sometimes a hoarder is a grief stricken individual who wants to remember the past, because it brings them back to the cherished memories of a better time. Often times the items they hoard are the personal effects of a loved one an example being a spouse or child. These personal effects to them serve as a crutch in order for them to cope with the grief and emptiness one feels from losing a cherished individual. Most of us have something to remind us of someone such as a picture, stuffed animal, jewelry etc. However a hoarder can often disseminate what is something to cherish, or what is junk. This may also play in the fact that often hoarder's seeing the throwing away of an item as wasteful.

Another common theme among hoarders is that their psychological belief is that throwing away any item is seen as wasteful. This can range from clothing that has gone out of style to broken televisions and in the extreme cases cars. All of the following are consumer items that manufacturers plan in a period of obsolescence built into the product themselves. Even, when the product has reached the period of end life usefulness the hoarder still believes they can use that item later, despite them even replacing the item that has become broken. This goes into our next common thread which is a collection of multiple things of the same item.

A hoarder tends to see the throwing away of items that are beyond their useful life as being wasteful. However, they still need to buy a new item to replace the broken one under the mentality that “I’ll fix it later or if the new one breaks then I’ll go back to the old item.” This can lead to a vicious cycle over the years that multiples of the same item can come into one person’s possession well over the amount they need. Also, this will lead to potential health hazards, since some of the items may contain pieces of toxic material.

Contact Address Our Mess for more information if you need hoarding cleanup, clutter cleaning or animal hoarding clean up issues and need help for a hoarder or loved one who has a collection of items. Address Our Mess is a compassionate and caring company who can help with your cleaning project.

Wed, 04/02/2014 - 16:55 by Kenneth Donnelly