Sunday 5 November 2017

When a hoarder meets a perfectionist...


I once acted for a husband who was dead set on divorcing his wife mainly because she is unable to do these three things - align the shoes properly, arrange the laces so they do not touch the floor, and keep the socks folded and neatly tucked into the shoes. 

Amongst other habits that he can't stand, the demanding shoe-neatness fetish was his last straw because that was the first thing he sees when he comes home from a jaded day at work.

In my view, my client is clearly a perfectionist. And the one thing about marrying a perfectionist, especially a neurotic one, is that it makes living together almost impossible; unless of course, your partner shares the same neurotic obsession with you. 

But then, the nitpicking between the couple would be endless since nothing is ever enough for a perfectionist. (and to have two of them living under the same roof would be to double the neurosis). 

In today's papers, Dr Chong Siow Ann however wrote an article about another habit that could destroy marriages too. He entitled it "The hoarder's anguish and inability to discard things."

Dr Chong started his article with the Collyer brothers who lived in Manhattan in the first half of last century. They became the textbook example of how living with hoarders would look like. Their lives were in fact "fatally intertwined."

The Collyer brothers were no ordinary hoarders. They came from a respectable family. Their father was an eccentric gynecologist who would canoe to work from Harlem to Bellevue Hospital.

They also lived in a four-storey mansion and were highly educated too. Homer had a law degree and Langley studied engineering. 

One day, they just stopped working, retreated into their mansion and lived in complete isolation, shut out from the outside world. 

Homer eventually became blind and depended on his brother Langley who would only sneak out at night to buy food. 

In 1947, a neighbor called the police as the caller suspected that the Collyer brothers may have died in their mansion. 

What the police found were "more than 170 tonnes of amassed items; toys, bicycles, guns, chandeliers, tapestries, mantel clocks, violins, a cello, thousands of books, bales of newspapers, 14 grand pianos, an organ, the chassis of a Model T Ford, a horse's jawbone, and Dr Collyer's canoe."

Homer's body was found "keeled over with his head on his knees." And Langley was found just 3m away from where his brother.

But because of the mess, it took the police 18 long days to discover Langley's corpse. 

How did Langley die? 

Well, here's how Dr Chong described it:-

"Running through the jam-packed rooms was a labyrinth of tunnels rigged with booby traps to foil burglars. Langley was apparently bringing food to Homer when he was snared by one of his booby traps which buried him under piles of debris."

As a result, Homer died of starvation. 

Lesson? One.

When you live with a hoarder, I guess it is difficult to understand why he/she does the things they do. 

While it makes little sense, if at all, for one to keep things that most people would discard at a heart beat like piles of receipts from two years ago, stacks of tissues taken from various restaurants after a wedding dinner, plastic bags of impractical junk, and expired canned food piled up at one corner of the house, just to name a few, Dr Chong's article actually shed some light on this compulsion that I find helpful to understand people laboring under this obsession. 

He wrote: "Hoarders have a paralysing indecisiveness when it comes to discarding things - they are convinced of their future usefulness or value so they avoid making (or postpone perpetually) any decision about their disposal....

They are unable to categorise and organise their possessions which they heap haphazardly in a proliferating number of piles (a process referred as churning); and by mixing important and valuable things with worthless items, they inadvertently exacerbate their terror of losing valuable possessions and so will not risk throwing out anything."

According to Dr Chong, hoarders are "extremely difficult to engage". He said that "they are more hapless victims of an irresistible and consuming urge to acquire and accumulate items than willful prevaricators." 

That means that sometimes a hoarder is not lazy, but they genuinely identify with their massive possession (or junk) for various psychologically compelling reasons that are often beyond our layman's comprehension. 

Many of them see "their possessions not only as an extension of themselves but may even anthropomorphise these objects - animating them with human-like properties, and forming such a bond with them that they would agonise over wanting to ensure (and assure themselves) that their discarded possession remains unharmed or goes to a good home, or not at all."

I have seen a few clients of mine citing such behaviour as one of the reasons for divorcing their spouse. 

While I always tell them to "live and let live", they will always tell me this: "How do you live and let live when there's no more space to live and let live anymore?" 

Well, my unspoken rejoinder to them is this: "When you can't make physical space in a limited house, then make more rooms in your heart to live and let live." Too idealistic?

But nevertheless I see their point to some extent. 

When you are living in an avalanche of worthless mess, inviting disgust, discord and filth, and endangering your mental and physical health, one has to draw the line somewhere. 

Even love has her limits too, right? 

Alas, maybe the worst couple to invite down the aisle for a lifetime of marital union are a certified perfectionist and a compulsive hoarder?

And while Dr Chong is of the view that there is no generally effective treatments for hardcore hoarders, although CBTs have seen some successful cases, maybe what men can't bridge, love may just overcome? (I writing this with much trembling anticipation here).

If not, and one has to resign to such atrocious condition, maybe early prevention would be better than cure then. And excited pre-newly-weds had better go for an additional test apart from the usual blood test to ensure a reproductive match.

And the additional test is to ensure that the couple are psychologically compatible before they risk taking a plunge into a world of agonising polar opposites that is capable of turning just one day of living together into a lifetime. Cheerz.


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