Hoarders and Hoarding: Buried Alive

Cafe Society
1

I have developed a secret vice.

My wife is out of town a lot lately (new job) and I am watching the two series Hoarders and *Hoarding: Buried Alive. * I am really ashamed of how much I like watching these shows, but I do. Part of it is watching the slow-motion train wreck that is these people’s lives; part is because, after watching an episode or two, I have a really strong need to clean the house. Seriously. I have a home office, and I have cleared out about 90% of the junk accumulated, and the front room is back to mint condition. And there is all new linoleum on two bathrooms.

Comparing and contrasting the two series - I gotta say I like Hoarders better. Mostly this is because of Matt Paxton, “extreme cleaning specialist”. The way he says this is uniquely reassuring. Matt Paxton is here, and he knows what to do to get the feces-smeared memorabilia out of the fetid, reeking mess. I am watching for the day when he finally snaps, and begins going all Sam Kinnison on some nutcase.

**“YOU CAN’T KEEP THIS JUNK! IT’S COVERED IN POOP! YOU LIVE IN A GARBAGE HEAP! GET A CLUE, YOU LUNATIC!!!” **

It’s like watching the Miss America pageant hoping that some contestant will fall out of her cleavage on TV. Probably won’t happen, but just maybe…

But seriously, some of these people are divided between clueless/mentally not all there, and actively evil. There was that horrible woman married to a fire fighter who did nothing but yell at her kids and browbeat her husband over the mess she made. She seemed to be different from the usual run of people who are simply overwhelmed by their lives - she wanted something (it seemed to me) to use to attack her family. Her kids are going to be so effed in the head.

But there was some other woman, who was living with her friend because she had bladder control problems and had filled up her house with used diapers ( :eek: ), and she had what the psychiatrist (who I recall as a very attractive woman - a major change from that Jewish looking psychiatrist/psychologist who they usually get) said was a major breakthru moment - and all she said was “I don’t know why I let the house get this way”. FWIW, I believe her entirely - it just happened.

But that speaks to what I usually dislike about these shows - the idea that there is a moment of insight, where the hoarders talk about their feelings and then understand why they have nine inches of cat dung on their living room floor. I wonder if that ever really happens, or if it makes any difference at all. Because I would be terrible on that show - I don’t freaking care that you never got over your grief when your sister died five years ago, and that’s why you have a refrigerator full of food that expired during the Reagan administration. Just. Clean. Up. That. Mess. Damn. It. It stinks in here!

I did a search, and the last thread about this is several months old. So as not to revive a zombie - it would probably smell like a hoarder’s bathroom.

Regards,
Shodan

2

I watched the early episodes last year. They were pretty good.

This year it seems more of the hoarders are more stubborn and hostile. They obviously don’t want the house cleaned and get pretty nasty about it.

I still watch some episodes at least until the fighting starts. If it gets obvious they won’t let the volunteers clean then I’ll change the channel.

They had one a few weeks ago with a guy about to loose his kids. His junk was spread out all over the property and house. They had to clean it all or his kids weren’t coming back. The guy was reluctant at first but finally cooperated. He even made some repairs and got the house back to code and liveable again.

3

I love watching this show while I clean. It makes me much more ruthless about what to get rid of, and makes me more effective in cleaning behind and under things.

4

I was married to one of those people. Some of the things they think are “totally normal” will make you wish you could erase memories.

It’s bizarre stuff.

5

This aggravates me as well. They will come up with every excuse and reason they can dream up to justify or explain why things are the way they are. How the grew up, they were poor, they were rich, mommy, daddy etc… like any of that matters at all. No one cares. Be a grown up, take responsibility for the situation you put yourself in and clean it the fuck up.

6

I always like the episodes where the person has a breakthrough and starts on the road to getting better.

This one guy obviously loved his 3 year old son, so he bought him all kinds of toys and stuff. The problem: there was so much that his son and wife couldn’t live in his house.

His mentally fucked-up fear was if he didn’t buy enough things for his son his son was going to have a bad childhood and grow-up messed up.

Professional cleaning psych person: so you’re telling me that in 20 years, your son is going to be pulled into the police station and when they ask him why’d he kill all those people he’s going to say, “I wouldn’t have if only my dad had bought me that random car toy when I was three”?

the Dad:…ok, we can get rid of it.

7

Remember Hanna? What a horrible human being she was.

8

I am such an unhealthily obsessed fan of *Hoarders *that I wrote a song, to be bellowed out in a Cockney accent with the great Lilly Morris (Lily Morris - Don't have any more, Missus Moore (1929) - YouTube):

Mrs. Moore, who lives next door,
She never, ever cleans,
She’s what you call a Hoarder—
She’s got Collyer Brother genes.
I don’t know her idea of a welcoming decor,
I said to her today as she was squeezing through her door:

“Don’t hoard any more, Mrs. Moore,
Mrs. Moore, please don’t hoard any more!
The more you hoard the more you’ll want, they say,
And enough is as good as a feast any day!
If you hoard any more, Mrs. Moore,
You’ll have to take the house next door!
You love your pussy-cat,
But it’s all mummified and flat.
Don’t hoard any more, Mrs. Moore!”

Dr. Tonya Hoarding came and started in to gag—
The toilet’s on the fritz, so she was crappin’ in a bag.
A possum leaped out of a pile of garbage with a spring,
Dr. Tonya and the possum both began to sing:

“Don’t hoard any more Mrs. Moore,
Mrs. Moore, please don’t hoard any more!
The more you hoard the more you’ll want, they say,
And enough is as good as a feast any day!
If you hoard any more, Mrs. Moore,
You’ll go crashin’ through the parlor floor—
All that glitters isn’t gold,
It’s bacteria and mold.
Don’t hoard any more, Mrs. Moore!”

1-800-Got Junk? trucks pulled up into the drive.
Organizer Matt looked in and said, “Well, sakes alive!
I’ve seen sail-cats and bags of poo inside a hoarder’s house—
But here’s a first, I just pulled out a mummified sail-spouse!”

“Don’t hoard any more Mrs. Moore,
Mrs. Moore, please don’t hoard any more!
The more you hoard the more you’ll want, they say,
And enough is as good as a feast any day!
If you hoard any more, Mrs. Moore,
I might lose my esprit de corps!
You’re too nuts for TLC,
So just right for A&E—
Don’t hoard any more, Mrs. Moore!”

“Don’t hoard any more Mrs. Moore,
Mrs. Moore, please don’t hoard any more!
The more you hoard the more you’ll want, they say,
And enough is as good as a feast any day!
If you hoard any more, Mrs. Moore,
You could open up a Goodwill store!
You’ve got clothes like a bazaar,
But you still can’t find a bra—!
Don’t hoard any more, Mrs. Moore!”

9

Was she the one who had all those animals, like chickens in crates and stuff? And was really, really nasty to everyone?

10

Yep

11

i don’t know. they obviously have extreme psychological issues or they wouldn’t be hoarding to begin with. it’s not as easy as just tough loving “grow the fuck up already”.

this is not to say that there aren’t professional victims among hoarders, cause lord knows there are, and as you note, there are the ones who want to throw every excuse in the book out there instead of trying to do the work to make themselves better.

i get really frustrated watching the show too, especially because many hoarders tend to hoard animals, and the animals always suffer because of it. i’m another who cleans as a result of these shows. i always have my blinds open, windows open when weather permits, so it’s light and airy and not closed up and dim. ugh.

all this by way of saying i don’t think it’s as simple as saying “just clean it up, you lazy fuck”. i both pity and am frustrated by the people portrayed on these shows.

12

Seriously? What the hell, dude? Please tell me you didn’t mean this to come out quite so offensively.

13

Yeah, the percentage that I’ve seen where the person actually seems to “get it” is relatively small. A lot have real, serious, deep-rooted psychological issues, and if you just chuck stuff out they will have a breakdown, kick everyone out of their lives, and make the hoarding situation worse.

There was one a few years back that really hurt. It was a teenage guy who had dealt with a lot of crap in his life, I think the death of his mom and stuff, and he absolutely knew he was messed up. Among other things, he couldn’t bring himself to throw out his beloved dog’s shedded fur because he felt like it would be a rejection and would bring about the dog’s death sooner. He knew how totally crazy that was, and yet he still had such anxiety about doing any of it. Rather than accepting it, though, he really didn’t want to do this any longer. He was practically triumphant when he was scooping up some dog hair and tossing it out, while pep-talking himself. I was so glad when the epilogue said he was improving and continuing with therapy.

One of the episodes that made me mad was the guy had stacked so much crap on the stairs in their house that his wife fell and broke her wrist. That didn’t motivate him to change. She said she might have to leave him; same thing. The cleanup attempt failed; he wasn’t serious about changing and IIRC told them to leave before the end. From the epilogue, I don’t remember if it took her having heart problems for him to finally shape up, or if that didn’t even do it.

I am just amazed by the professionals on this show. I don’t even know when I’d be able to get through an hour without hyperventilating, screaming, or just running out of the place in any of those situations.

14

The psycho ex I lived with for 3 1/2 years was a hoarder and the above was absolutely true for him. Basically, he regarded everything as HIS, trash or not, and couldn’t bear to give any of it up in any way. It was a pathological case of monstrous selfishness along with fear of losing control, on his part.

One of our biggest fights was when I decided to get rid of some cases of rusted, stained, leaky, nasty canned pineapples in the basement, aka Botulism Central. After he went to work, I hauled the two cases out to the curb on trash day, then went to work myself.

Because we’d had several disagreements about “his” mounds of trash everywhere, I didn’t realise how deeply paranoid he’d become. Turns out he made a habit of coming home on trash day and checking to make sure I hadn’t thrown any of his treasures away. He called me about the pineapples in an absolute spitting, aplopectic rage. Really bizarre. I left him shortly after that.

He also filled a two-car attached garage and a 6-7 car pole barn with so much shit we couldn’t fit a single vehicle in either. When I bought myself a very nice and somewhat rare sports car and tried to negotiate clearing a space for it, he completely shut down and told me I had my priorities wrong. :rolleyes: I ended up renting a storage unit nearby for the car, since I didn’t want it sitting out in all weather when I wasn’t driving it.

He was a sick and strange individual, and a doctor no less. Other oddities included never using turn signals so he wouldn’t wear out the bulbs, not doing oil changes and maintenance on his cars - when they crapped out, he’d stuff the old one in a barn and buy another - stealing salt and pepper from restaurants so he never had to buy it for the house, buying Burger King burgers by the dozen when they were on sale and keeping them in the freezer…once he lived for months without water in one of his houses, before we lived together. He had some plumbing issue, but the plumbing company he called refused to climb over the mountains of crap in his basement to get to the plumbing, so he gave up and lived without water until I got it cleaned out.

If you met this guy, you’d have no idea how weird he could be, he hid it really well and was charming and professional in public. (Maybe I was the crazy one for getting involved with him but that’s besides the point…!)

15

The primary difference between Hoarders and Hording: BA is that Horders focuses much more on the clean-up. Which, honestly, is where the shameful viewing pleasure comes from: watching some woman insist that she needs to personally pick through a garbage bag full of urine soaked phone books because"there might be something I need in there". Hording: BA really glosses over the nitty-gritty bits of the clean up operation.

Plus Hoarders had Dr. Renee Reinardy aka Dr. Dimples (who I haven’t seen in a while and assume she’s moved on). I was always amused by her little trendy outfits to pick through someone’s mound of 1965 National Geographics and cat skeletons.

16

I think I married your ex’s brother or something.

Mine ended up with leaky kitchen sinks that he (of course) never got round to fixing. So, he piled up the dirty dishes in the bathtub (and never cleaned them) only leaving a small spot in there for him to squeeze in to take a shower.

17

Do you really have to ask this?

I saw this episode. Honestly, while I am generally sympathetic to 80% of the people they have on the show, this guy totally annoyed me. The histrionics were more than a little over the top. He had a boyfriend so he was, at least in theory, partly functional. But you’d never guess that based on all the tantrums.

His father was a big ole jerk, though.

I really don’t like these kinds of programs. The people are sick and in need of real help. But the viewer can’t help but to feel judgmental and even hostility towards them. How is that helpful? It’s not. It’s just a circus, and not even an educational one either. I imagine that real hoarders intentionally avoid the show because it’s too painful to watch. Perhaps it keeps nascent hoarders from going down the slope–which is a good thing–but otherwise it just gives “normal” people an excuse to point and laugh. I hate that.

18

I’m giggling in agreement with others in the thread. I love to watch this, and after about 10 minutes, I get up and start "commercial cleaning’ (what my mom nicknamed the act of cleaning the house while commercials are on), and I have TiVo. :smiley:

This syndrome needs a “sniglet” something to call that urge to clean while watching a house full of used adult diapers.

I’ve noticed this show is a great appetite killer too.

19

A friend tried to get a mutual friend on this show and even got her the questionnaire from the producers because she, the hoarder, had sounded like she might go for it. She ended up backpedaling out of it because she does not want to be seen on TV. I don’t think she would even agree to have her face blurred or her voice disguised. She works for a major entertainment company and is terrified that her colleagues would see how she really lives.

20

My ex’s late mother was a certifiable hoarder. She collected everything she saw that wasn’t nailed down. She would minesweep cafes and pubs for old newspapers, beermats, etc. then put them in huge piles back in her house. The trash literally went from floor to ceiling in every room and she lived in a tiny corridor between the front door and a camp bed in the kitchen. She did this while the kids were growing up: nobody had been in the living room for 30 years; the sunlight had rotted the curtains. They never had playdates or sleepovers at their house.

In her case, she wouldn’t admit she had a problem. When they were adults her kids tried to help by renting a dumpster and clearing two rooms when she was in hospital, and when she got home she flipped the fuck out and screamed at them and wept.

Some hoarders may be people who are overwhelmed, but many are suffering from mental issues. For her it was the flipside of OCD, some kind of control issue. Others cleaning the mess made her feel uncomfortable and upset, because she felt there were items of significance within the detritus (much like the weird Semitic stereotype embedded in the OP), not that she would ever have been able, or had the motivation, to look for them.

She’s been dead a few years and the house is still a complete mess. Nobody’s yet had the heart or energy to empty the place.