We’re all familiar with the results of typical hoarding behavior: newspapers piled in towers reaching for the celling, old mechanical parts bursting the seams of the garage, or a thousand rolls of toilet paper crouching in the basement just waiting to be used. This kind of hoarding can be ruinous for individuals and their families.
But there is another type of hoarding that can also cause disturbances and disruption: psychological hoarding.
While the term hoarding usually applies to physical items, people with obsessive-compulsive personality also feel the need to accumulate and attach to things that aren’t physical:
Ideas and Rules (which leads to rigidity)
People should always park perfectly between the lines.
I should never sit in the garden or go the park until I finish the bookkeeping, shopping, laundry, etc. ad infinitum.
It’s better to be right than to be happy.
Money (which leads to frugality)
Don’t ever spend money on frivolous items like flowers.
Don’t ever give money away until your retirement account is fully funded.
There is never enough money.
Time (which leads to urgency)
Never waste time, e.g. by bothering with chit chat or social niceties.
There is never enough time to slow down and feel, write in a journal, or go to therapy.
We might imagine these principles would reduce chaos, but holding on to them actually makes it very crowded and noisy inside your head.
While psychological hoarding does not indicate a diagnosis of hoarding disorder, it does cause serious problems in everyday living and significant distress, and may be indicative of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD).
The Buddha warned us that there would be tribulations like this. His message was that attachment, or holding on, is the cause of all suffering.
Contents
Accumulation and The Too-Crowded Mind
Hoarding can result from many factors. Genetics, a history of deprivation, an attempt to build a wall to keep out other people, a family history of hoarding, and many types of insecurity can all lead us to collect needlessly. I don’t have any data to support this idea, but I suspect that some people unconsciously try to compensate for a deep feeling of emptiness by accumulating more and more.
We collect these things with the assumption that they will protect us—from outside dangers and from our own inner disturbing feelings, such as emptiness or shame. We assume that more is more–as if more rules, money and time would make us safer.
But these things don’t accrue neatly and quietly like money at an investment bank. It’s more like we’ve collected scolding, squawking robots and crammed them into the already limited space known as our brain.
They preach relentlessly, “You must do this. You can’t do that.” And not in unison. They often fight with each other: “Give ’til it hurts,” vs. “Never give anything.”
While some of the suffering caused by holding on to rules, money and time are not difficult to see, there is another side effect that we may be too busy to contemplate: the loss of experiences we can’t invite in because our minds are too full.
I’m reminded of the poem by the Sufi poet, Rumi, The Guest House, in which he recommends that we make room for new guests each day—no matter how uncomfortable it makes us at first—because they each have something to offer us. Instead, if you’ve been collecting things psychologically, your mind may become more like a chaotic warehouse than a welcoming guest house—too crowded with robots to let in new experiences.
Let’s fill out this metaphor of the crowded mind.
The Mechanics of Psychological Hoarding
It’s not the rules, the money and the time we hold onto that make it so crowded and noisy inside. It’s all the robotic machinery we put in place to make sure we enforce these. The main ones are rigidity, frugality, and urgency, and they each have endless variations. We use these to make sure that we live according to rules, hold onto money, and are hyper-efficient with our time. These are all “shoulds,” demands that crowd out more new experiences than we could ever be aware of.
But it’s not so easy to just toss them out.
What Gets Left Out
In my own efforts to become a healthier compulsive, I’ve noticed that when my mind is too crowded it’s harder for me to welcome the things I would really like to have inside: peace, presence, compassion, awe, an appreciation for the beauty and wonder of our world. For many people this deficit may not register immediately because they’re caught in survival mode—real or imagined.
I’ve noticed that the posts on this blog that get the most attention are the practical, clinical, and informational posts: how to get along with an OCPD partner, the origins of OCPD, the differences with narcissism, etc. I’m glad that these have been helpful.
But the ones about movies, theatre, nature, books or spirituality don’t get as much interest. I understand that they just don’t seem as effective and efficient to people who are battling maladaptive obsessive-compulsive traits. But that algorithm of what you allow in is part of the problem: a life with no space for beauty, storytelling, or mindfulness is a life vulnerable to maladaptive traits, the robots, taking over—as if they were going to rescue you from an empty existence. Such a life nurtures no grounding, security, or resilience, but instead fosters fears of losing control and the robots that go with them. And that’s what we hoard.
Filling the Emptiness: Returning to Original Intention
But what if the inclination to hold on to some things is actually natural, and we’ve used it to cling to all the wrong things? What if hoarding was a misguided attempt to fill up the emptiness from not holding on to all the right things?
What if rather than holding on to ideas about how things should be, or the money that we think will save us, or the time we hoard for future gratification, we used that energy to hold on to that which is most fulfilling: appreciation of the many hues of blue, appreciation of the inspiration that we get from a line of poetry, or appreciation of the music we hear inside when we’re silent?
I often tell clients and readers that when they want to let go of something, it helps to put something else in its place. This is true but incomplete. We need to find the things that belonged there in the first place, the more meaningful things that we would have held on to had we not gotten caught in survival mode.
This is not mere sublimation—substituting a socially acceptable action for an unacceptable one. Rather, the goal is to find the healthy things we were originally compelled to cultivate and embrace, before we latched onto ideas about how hard we should work, the purpose of money, or how quickly we should be able to get through the grocery shopping.
To replace hoarding with healthy holding we need to return to original intention. Nature gave us this capacity to hold on for some reason, and it’s not the possibility that we will want to read that 1997 Harper’s Magazine someday. Rather, it’s that it is healthy to hold on, lightly, to certain attitudes toward life that give it meaning. For me these include flexibility, generosity and presence, though these may be different for you.
Many of the clients that come to see me first present with more concrete, obsessive-compulsive personality symptoms, but after not too long it becomes clear that there is also a deep fear of a meaningless life, a fear which is both cause and result of the obsessive-compulsive symptoms. And sometimes we need to unearth the connection between meaninglessness and psychological hoarding.
What’s Most Important?
Let’s take a quick Marie Kondo-type quiz:
• Does that rigid rule about how people should park bring you joy?
• Does that frugal constraint, forbidding frivolous items such as flowers, bring you joy?
• Does that urgency about using your time with absolute efficiency bring you joy?
• Might flexibility toward yourself and others feel more fulfilling?
• Might carrying an intention to be generous—to the extent that you are able–bring you more meaning?
• Might holding onto the value of the present moment be more satisfying?
But wait, Gary, aren’t you just filling up our minds with other robots to shout at us?
No, because flexibility, generosity and presence don’t require the same machinery. They don’t take up as much space, and don’t make as much noise as the robotic shoulds that come with rigidity, frugality and urgency. Flexibility, generosity and presence are, in effect, empty vessels open to receive what comes.
Let’s see how this worked out in Barry’s mind.
Barry Clears His Mind
Barry is the kind of guy you can trust unreservedly to load and unload a dishwasher properly. But he has a few quirks that might make you think twice about going on a second date with him. Worse than whether or not he gets a second date is what it’s always like in his head. It’s rife with demands and noise. Lots of really loud robots.
He clings tightly to rules about how people should care for their lawn (“Don’t you dare let your dandelions blow over and infect my lawn!”), how much he should spend on coffee (very little), and how much time he should spend in the shower (very little). These are just examples of the hundreds of shoulds he’s collected over the years. Each of these rules take up space and disturb his concentration.
Without comprehensive rules, he imagines life would become chaotic. He takes a militantly conscientious stance against that.
For him, undisciplined spending is a slippery slope on which he could slide down to impoverishment.
In his mind, time is always in short supply. It’s measured in seconds. Every possible move is calculated for absolute efficiency. Is it quicker to get the milk from the fridge, or the cereal from the cabinet first? Whether he went to a movie was determined by how long it was, how far away it was, and how bad the parking was. He monitors constantly to make sure that he’s going fast enough.
Let’s imagine that he sees how much he’s been holding on to and decides to make a shift. He doesn’t have to keep tabs on his neighbors’ lawn hygiene, limit the size or quality of his coffee, or constantly rush through whatever he is doing to save a few minutes of time. Even better, things get quieter in his head.
Instead, he can adopt values that are less mechanical and take up less space:
With flexibility he can choose what will have the most meaning for him: a perfect lawn or relations with his neighbors? Flexibility is basically open and doesn’t require robotic rules. It doesn’t require nearly as much monitoring on his part.
Generosity allows him to be giving as opportunities arise, giving to himself and others.
Presence allows him to be open to whatever is happening in the moment, savoring the present moment rather than urgently planning and focusing on the future.
Once he makes the shift, he isn’t overwhelmed by robotic dictates. He makes specific decisions about particular circumstances regarding ethics, money and time. None of these take up space.
Clearing
But how?
If you’d like to hoard less and clear your head of robots, here are some steps you can take. Beware though, if you’re really letting go of something you’ve been hoarding, it will feel uncomfortable. And such a shift takes time and perseverance.
• List the specific ways that you hoard psychologically.
• Ask what effect these have had on your well-being.
• Learn the difference between feeling like you are holding on physically, and letting go.
• Ask what purpose the hoarding has been serving for you, albeit unconsciously.
• Label the mechanics you have installed to try to enforce the rules (e.g. rigid, frugal or urgent robots—or however you experience them).
• Choose a few specific ideas or rules that you hold on to and make it a point to refrain from acting on them for the next week.
• Allow yourself to experience the anxiety (or depression or anger) that arises when you don’t act on the rules. You may need to have in place tools that diminish your anxiety such as deep breathing, muscle relaxation, exercise, or support from friends and family.
• Thank the robots for their service and dismiss them. Put more fulfilling values in their place.
For more on this subject, see my previous post, Letting Go and Holding On: The Life Skills No-One Taught You.
Just a reminder, this blog cannot serve as a substitute for professional treatment. If you suspect that you suffer from Hoarding Disorder, OCD, or OCPD, please contact a mental health practitioner.
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