How long do you think that it took for all these volume of items to get here?
How many months, years? What would be a rough estimate? I say close to 20 years. You
know I'm a trans woman and so the transition was very difficult because I
was married, and I had a lot of stuff. And, the things that came out of that was a
divorce, a lot of pressure, and I was very much alienated from all of my
surroundings, my work, my wife, my family. And so what else could I hold on to?
Things. There are often a lot of myths about hoarding. Hoarding in of itself
is a genetic condition. It's not something that somebody chooses to have
so a lot of times people think that they are being lazy or messy or just not
picking up their items. But in reality, this is a mental health disorder that
requires treatment, and it's not going to get better on its own. The reality or the
misconceptions that people have about hoarding is that you can just throw it
away. I see everything as a future project or
a future repair. It's not easy to get rid of it. This is still valuable. You know if
you added up a what it originally cost, it's all unaffordable. So when a referral
is made, we will go and do outreach with the clients. Sometimes we go right to
their home and then we do an assessment to determine if they do have hoarding
and then we enroll them in care. So what will happen is that they are provided
with in-home care, for the most part. Sometimes folks are able to come to the
office, where we go in and we teach them skills that will improve their executive
functioning, and so we teach them those basic tools and then we start the
process that actually treats the hoarding, which is exposures to
discarding. Have you given any thoughts about the advanced exposure that we
talked about? I have other people helping and getting
a big container. I have and I'm really looking forward to that, but I'm not
looking forward to the stress that will be there because I've been thinking
about it more and more, and I think we should just start as quick as possible.
The first time that I started working with Ri, I make sure that I
wanted to know more about her. I want her her story I wanted to know. I
didn't want to start asking questions because sometimes you know you're in a
hurry to do an assessment to do all these clinical. But I think in our
program one of the very important things, you know, is to empower the client, to
know a little about the client, to get to know the client before you start
asking personal questions. So, well, do you want to start today with some exposure?
Have you picked a box for today? I always have plenty of boxes. Yes. I have a
mix of everything, some of the stuff that's come in, I have my my boxes set up
already. The trash, the giveaway box or donate
and then the keep. Okay. We go over area that Ri might be working on, which
include and a lot of these things include items that might be in creating
high stress for her. So what we do a typical session, we we set up. We get the
items she wants to go through. Ri also helps me to see where she is in the
treatment in how she's handling the stress we call the stress level, which is
anywhere from zero to a hundred and is the distress level when she's going to
the process, which is the basis of the treatment. I think this program has
changed my personality permanently. I didn't have much hope. I just thought
that in the end all of this would just be pushed into a pile and thrown away.
Well, that's very scary. The hope is for me that I'll get through a majority of
it or most of it within a couple years, you know, and it doesn't stop. This is a
a process you start and you learn more and more, little activities that that you
can incorporate in your daily tasks that it just sort of keeps getting better. So
there's a lot of hope.