choie, Swallowed My cellphone - Have you ever seen The Brave Little Toaster? Abandoned toaster, along with his friends Desk Lamp and Electric Blanket and Vacuum Cleaner go out in search of their boy. Here’s the synopsis from imdb:
StG
You guys are trying to kill me, right? 
Yes, I’ve seen TBLT and that bleedin’ Ikea commercial (though I admit it was funny because it totally played on our weaknesses!) and don’t even get me started on goddamn Toy Story and Toy Story 2. I feel sorry for the grotty first Bobo in the PetSmart commercial, though at least the dog gets a new one.
Swallowed My Cellphone – wow, do I relate to your cousin. I’m a writer and I would say my strong suit is empathizing with my characters, probably not surprisingly.
ANYway, I asked the question before but haven’t figured this out yet: does the program – which I’ve never seen – address the difference between hoarding and ‘cluttering’? I think I have the latter issue but not the former. There is definitely a distinction and I’m wondering if the show just focuses on hoarding. Which is, after all, the title.
From what I’ve seen from the two episodes, it looks to me like hoarding. I think the mother in the first episode was probably a clutterer living with a hoarder (her husband), though. Their kids, especially the little boy, were learning hoarding behavior from them.
I’m pretty sure that clutterers don’t typically let their places get to the point where they have actual filth in spots, and they don’t get panicked when they’d agreed to someone coming in with assistants to clean and organize. I suspect most clutterers - if presented with this option - would get weirded out at first and then think about how great being organized would be, and the cleaning process would be relatively freeing instead of anxiety-inducing.
Even the single gentleman in the most recent episode (who ended up thrilled and proud of the results) was stressed during the cleaning process, and everyone’s house was at the point where some places were impassable or very close.
It would be hard for me to have someone in my house cleaning or organizing. even as a child I’d freak out if one of my siblings went through my stuff. Don’t touch! MINE!
StG
Yeah, but these people agreed to have someone in to help avoid their children being taken away/avoid eviction/finish the divorce. I think that at least most average people who are facing imminent eviction or losing their children to Protective Services would be extremely motivated to sort and clean up ASAP, and probably very glad for the help. However, if someone is in that situation and has unnaturally strong attachments to objects, then you get the severe anxiety that these people were displaying.
Yeah, she could tell you what mood the drapes are in. 
As a kid I remember she had weird little collections of stuff, like rocks and bottles caps that she felt had sort of “bonded” with her, I guess. But she never went overboard. She could throw out the plastic cup from the fast food restaurant, for example. She doesn’t believe that inanimate objects really have feelings. She can empathize with things to which she’s projected a character/emotions, but she can also tell herself, “Don’t be stupid, it’s a candle shaped like a pig, that’s too crumbly to keep!” It’s like objects are just objects until you infuse them with character.
Once she got older and got involved in the arts and puppetry in particular, it seemed to be quite an asset. Even the way she speaks is very vivid and colorful, so the most mundane story is really fun because she uses these incredibly descriptive and animated words, like “winking school buses” or “rain laughing from the eaves” or “recalcitrant software”… stuff like that.
I half-watched the show last night. Before it came on I thought my girlfriend’s ex-roommate was a hoarder - and I still do, but she has nothing on these people.
don’t get me started on poor little (or big) stuffed animals on the top of the trash pile. oy! i can hear them whimper from fear and cry from not being loved anymore.
thankfully, many trash collectors feel the same way and they become mascots on the vehicles.
i still laugh about the ikea commercial. you really did feel for the lamp out there in the rain, cold, wet, and unloved. then i would laugh because the dang commercial is making me have an allergy attack. also, the guy’s voice, accent, and manner with the " you feel sorry for the lamp". just perfect.
Watching these shows has two effects on me:
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Makes me go around the place obsessively tidying up and looking for things to throw away.
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Makes me feel better when I look around my living room and realize that the two Matchbox cars on the carpet near the armchair, and the train set pieces not put away, and a couple of dishes in the sink, are nothing. My house is pristine compared to the houses on this show. I have issues left over from having a neat-freak parent and never really feel like my house is clean enough, so it’s good to get some perspective.
I finally saw this show, two episodes on this morning. If it continues to run Saturday mornings, it will segue nicely with my fairly new habit of picking one thing to clean, organise and declutter every Saturday.
The woman who hoarded food was horrifying, or rather, her house was. I don’t have a lot of hope for her, not at her age. She really reminded me of my husband’s grandmother. I’m amazed that she isn’t dead. How much yoghurt can you convince yourself you’ll eat?
My mother had 24 boxes of bread mix in her bedroom, so I can relate to being related to a hoarder. She was both a bit of a hoarder and a shopoholic, and never cared for housecleaning when there were so many more interesting things to do. I find myself going back and forth between acquiring and disposing. Opening a closet and seeing only what we need and use, and it arranged in an orderly manner really makes me pleased.
I too have the reaction when watching stuff like this: it gets me off the computer and tackling a mess, and it makes me realise that our place isn’t so bad…
Four boxes of stuff to go to charity now, too! Even my husband sorted out clothes to donate last weekend.
Donating stuff makes it easier for me to let go–at least someone somewhere will get some use of it, I hope.
That’s a big issue – what to do with usable stuff.
I just spent two weeks in Seattle, and when I wasn’t having fun going to movies and restaurants and hanging out with the kids, I was having fun helping my son with his house. He bought my mom’s house after she died (8 years ago) and a lot of her stuff was still there, in addition to stuff from when his brother lived with him. Teensy house, overstuffed.
Except for the old food and dead electronics and cans of hardened paint and chemicals, it was mostly good stuff. But between his job and his WoW addiction, he hadn’t made a dent in it. He didn’t know that Goodwill will take even dead electronics, and that he could put recycling on the curb even if he had more than the bin would hold.
And he didn’t know that he could put good stuff on the curb with a “Free!” sign on it, and people would take it. He also didn’t know that there was a place where he could take all the chemical stuff.
It helped that he’s young and healthy and has a car. I think a lot of hoarders/clutterers are older/infirm folks who just can’t deal with it. It used to be that charities would pick stuff up without charge, but we weren’t able to find any.
I have a hoarder next door and everybody gets to see all the junk piled in the yard all year long. I don’t think I could watch a show about hoarders as it hits to close to home.
I don’t know if that would make me more diligent about my own yard work or not!
Makes you wonder what the inside looks like, when the outside’s bad…
Well, just watched tonight’s episode. That is a pretty sad family, and the background and history make it a little more understandable, but I also can see the kids’ frustration. My god, what a sad life Betty has and continues to have. So limited and disappointing.
Tara seems like she might overcome it.
I’d sure like to see follow-up episodes in a year or so.
Betty seems like a hopeless case, considering she’s in such denial. “I’m not a hoarder, I’m a saver.” Sure. I bet the clean rooms became so irritating that she just went out on another junk shopping bender, unless the city threatened to come back for snap inspections. She’s very bitter and her relationships with her children are pretty damaged. I feel sorry for her.
I hold out some hope for Tara but as the episode went on it appeared that she’s really quite mentally unstable. She freaked out over her Peanuts comic strips cut from the newspaper being almost thrown out, and she kept wanting to put stuff off and deal with it later, which is pretty much the root of her problem. I was disappointed to see that she refused mental health counselling. She seemed very happy to get the help to get organized, but then she started her melt down. It will be a struggle, that’s for sure.
I agree with what the organizer said about Betty – that perhaps she was accumulating and making the house worse so her husband *couldn’t *come home. I thought it was pretty clear that the substance abuse and serious mental illnesses of the husband and daughter pushed Betty into illness herself. I wish there had been a pscyhologist on this case, as it seems that the husband and daughter should both be in care; sheesh, Betty is almost 70 and can’t even take care of herself!
Yeah, the hyper-religiosity was also a bit nuts.
The comments on this thread give me the impression hoarding is a lot more common than most people think. Almost everybody knows someone who does it. My wife has an attachment to things that I can not understand. When I threw out the bicycles, both hers and mine, she got upset. She had not ridden it in 20 years. It was rusted out, the tires were rotted and it did not work. But she kept saying it is MY bike. No ,it was a decrepit piece of junk.
Do they start each episode with the phrase “For the Hoard!”?
I blame dolls and toys for encouraging me to anthropomorphize from an early age.
I’d love to hear more about the psychology behind it all, at least in off-camera segments. They do sort of point you in the right direction via editing, though not as much as on Intervention, but I want more. It is odd what a fine line there seems to be between poverty – which people often associate with having no stuff – and hoarding. Sort of like the rise of obesity among lower classes. There is just so much stuff to be had, and on the heels of a generation or two that had nothing.
Imagine someone’s British grandmother who saved string and wax paper during WWII. After that she came to America with the same sort of mentality, that everything’s got to be saved ‘just in case,’ that you never know what’s around the corner. But she’s got a Dollar Tree next door. And people give her half a dozen gifts every birthday and Christmas. And notices that her neighbors are constantly throwing out ‘perfectly good’ stuff. So what might have been a rubber band ball at one point is now 60 cracked vases, piles of faded cards and grand children’s art work, and a room stacked full of old newspapers (my friend’s dad actually had that last one. I never asked why.)