Today I'm gonna talk about hoarding.
Hoarding is a mental disorder that is extremely misunderstood.
One of the things I always try to mention to people when I talk about hoarding
is that hoarding is an obsessive disorder.
It's not just someone being lazy or something.
It is an actual imbalance in the brain that is causing something to go wrong.
One of the things that people can't wrap their minds around is why someone would
become obsessed with holding onto trash and the thing that you're missing
when you say it that way is that the things that they're holding onto
are not trash to them.
Hoarding is not about keeping trash, it's more about the inability to distinguish
between what is trash and what is treasure.
People with hoarding disorder tend to assign an undue amount of
emotional or financial value to physical items.
Now there are any number of reasons why someone might begin ot hoard.
Sometimes it's due to a specific trauma, sometimes it's due to financial hardship.
And of course every person is going to be different.
Now the reason that I'm talking about hoarding today is because I did grow up in a
hoarding situation, though I am not personally a hoarder.
Now growing up in that situation there were certainly a lot of things that were confusing to me
and so I've done a lot of research and a lot of learning and joined some child of hoarding
support groups in order to better understand my situation as well as to ensure that
I'm taking the proper steps to not fall into that behavior myself.
There are generally considered five (5) stages of hoarding.
The five stages of hoarding range from level one (1) hoarding where there is just light
clutter all the way up to level five (5) where there
is significant structural damage, the inability to use basic utilities, the majority of the space
being unlivable due to the hoard is when it's classified as level five (5).
I'll put a link in the description which breaks down more
specifically what the levels are.
Now when I was growing up, the worst that our home was at was a level four (4).
Most of the house was semi-usable, but not completely useable.
There was a never-ending array of dishes that needed to be done.
There was no running water in the bathroom. We had to flush the toilet using a bucket.
If you've never had an un-working toilet, that is a manual way to flush a toilet.
We would shower at my grandmother's house once a week or every other week.
There were constant head lice issues.
I distinctly remember wearing someone else's very long socks in order to prevent
fleas from getting onto my leg because as soon as you would put your leg on the floor,
you'd have a ton of fleas all over you.
The bugs are definitely the things that I remember most about that location, as well
as animals.
Animals are often involved in hoarding.
For us it was cats that were not spayed and neutered and would reproduce
and then we had sixteen cats.
So this is just my introductory video to kind of
open the conversation about this.
One of the things surrounding hoarding is that there
is always a lot of shame and a lot of silence.
It can be really difficult to talk about this kind of thing but not talking about it
is how you end up in really dangerous situations without people being aware.
Now one of the things I should mention is that in these videos
where I talk about this, I am primarily going to be talking about myself and my experiences
as someone who has grown up in this, not so much the experiences of the people surrounding
me and the reason for that is really just that
it is not my story to tell.
I feel comfortable talking about myself and how it
impacted me, but I don't really think it's my place to share anyone else's story.
But uh here I go, I'm sharing mine!
This is something I'm going to talk about in a few other videos so if you'd like to
leave some questions for me, I would love to see
what kinds of things you want to know from someone who grew up in that kind of situation.
And for those of you who are long-time viewers who are like "hey, Kym, where have you been?"
I've been doing a lot of things.
Quarantine was not the easiest for me, I definitely had a
lot of issues surrounding it.
One of the things that has been kind of cool is aquariums.
So I will be talking about aquariums in some future videos because that has been my
quarantine obsession but another huge thing is that I am now moving on in my PhD and I
have just completed my dissertation proposal so
I am beginning my dissertation.
So, ya know, we can just blame all of my lack of videos on
dissertation if you want.
It's much easier to blame anything else but me.
But I do have a number of video ideas that I'm kind of
excited about so welcome back to me, I guess!
I hope you all have a wonderful day.