We've all seen the reality TV shows, the amazing messes that are out there. How do
you help a hoarder clean their house?
So I promised you that you get to have a
specialist today and I've got my friend Marla Dee with me.
Welcome, Marla! Thank you for being here. Marla is this amazing person that I
found who helps people to organize their space really and, Marla, you are on my
show, the podcast Live On Purpose Radio and I just remember the feeling when you
said, "Imagine, Dr. Paul, you are surrounded only by the things that you
use and that you love." I'm like, okay, you got me you got me
and you've devised some
tools and strategies for people to use to organize their space so you were
obviously that person that I was going to call for this particular issue. Some
of our subscribers have asked, how do I help a hoarder clean their house. I'm
just going to throw it out to you and let you respond however you would like. - Well
and you realize that since I've been I was called a professional organizer
for 18 years, that means I have been in thousands of homes and offices,
thousands so I like to tell my audiences all the time when I speak, I
have seen it all, Paul. There is nothing that would scare me and I've seen the
chronic disorganization and I've seen the hoarders and I've seen the pain so I
was really tickled to come and talk here today about you know how can I help
a hoarder to clean out their house because it's loaded, it's loaded issue so you
want me to dive in? - Well it is. Can I tell them what you told me on the phone?
- Please. - You can't. - You can't. Don't go there. - So can I
just introduce this with a little bit of psychology Hoarding, now if you found
this video, you were searching for this or somebody shared it with you,
this word hoarding is such a complex constellation of behaviors
and emotions and manifestations, it is not a simple thing but there's a range
too and I think you're going to help us understand that. This is something that
requires a high level of specialized intervention and training and experience.
I'm a clinical psychologist, you're a professional organizer, neither of us are
certified professionals to deal with hoarding the
way we typically think about it but having said that, I think that there are
some principles that are important to acknowledge and notice and so.. - There
truly are and I like to tell people to make it easy to understand that if you
needed heart surgery, you wouldn't go to a dentist so it is an area of
special need however, just to try and help that everyday person who's
struggling, let's give you some ideas on what you can and can't do. So first of
all, don't go in and try and clean out the house. I see this all the time, they
get to gather this big group, right. - We're going to do an intervention. - We're going to do an
intervention, we're going to go there get all that stuff out it there and that
will do more harm than good, I promise it will. It would be like sending a person
through massive surgery on multiple parts of their body all at the same time
so their physical body and their emotional body is connected to all that
stuff and a lot of the times that stuff is their safety so if you now remove all
that stuff out of there, you have just created a very scary road for them and
that's why they recreate it, that's why they then go in and start filling
that space back up again. You run in three months later and it's in the same
condition so don't do that. - Well that's frustrating to the person
that's intervening too. - It is really frustrating and so what I also hear a
lot is, I live with a quote unquote, hoarder, right? Because it's now a
catch phrase it's this thing that everybody uses right and so if you live
with somebody who really has chronic disorganization going on, one of the
things that I like to bring up is that you can assert your own boundaries, you
can say to that husband, okay, your stuff is now filling up the
garage and the basement, it does not get to come into our bedroom, it does not get
to come into the living room so the common areas, you can have boundaries and
say you don't get to take over that space and you limit them to certain
areas that's completely healthy and appropriate to do. - And it tends to be
more effective? - It's way more effective, yes, because then that person still feel
safe, they're not being attacked, right? But the person can continue
living with them because otherwise what happens so often is the person ends up
moving out, the partner moves out because they can't handle it.
So the other thing that you can do though is you can get a professional and
the great resource that I wanted to share with all of you out here today
that so many people don't know about is the Institute for Challenging
Disorganization, it's ICD and we'll be giving you the
website address for that but it's just challengingdisorganization.org and on
this fabulous website, they will give you all kinds of information and resources
whether you're the person who's struggling trying to clean up, whether
you're the family member, whether you're a friend, whether you are a professional
even who's trying to help this individual. It's packed with great
information and one of the pieces that they'll give you, let's share this with the
audience, is their clutter hoarding scale. It's a quick reference guide. - Look at
that. - Isn't that awesome? They even use colors and you'll notice that there are
actually five different levels of clutter and hoarding and most people
just glop all those together and so by using this little scale which is free,
you can just download it, you can read through this and get a better
understanding of what that person is going through and what level they're at
and then it's going to make the cleanups so much easier. - So I think I'm hearing you
correctly, Marla. Don't charge in with the cavalry and start cleaning things up,
it's going to do more harm then good. First of all, we don't
have that person's enrollment necessarily at this point. - No, most the
time they don't but they think that somehow they're helping. - Right and then
they wonder why it goes back to the way that it was and this causes all kinds of
judgment which makes it worse, it strange relationships which makes it worse.
There's an anxiety component here and as you were saying, sometimes these people
have created around them these shields stuff, it's like a protection
or their safety, their comfort zone so we don't want to go in and just
destroy that but there are ways to start approaching it that could be helpful. So
you've shared this resource, the Institute for Challenging Disorganization.
- It's fantastic because here's another fun scenario we get all the time.. We get a
call from the partner who says my wife's going to be gone for two weeks, I want you
to come in and clean it and clean the house and we don't want to do that and
this brings up another point that I really wanted to mention to each of you
out there. How would you feel if somebody just showed up at your front door of
your house and went inside and started moving your stuff around and cleaning it
out and cleaning it up? How would that make you feel? - You're throwing it away.
- I'm throwing it away. So as a professional organizer, I also train
organizers who are launching their own business, I've done that for 14 years now
and the hardest thing for me to teach them is that they're not fixing that
person, they're not going in there and moving their stuff around because
right now it's broken and I need to fix it and so I often times ask them, how
would you feel about another professional organizer, myself for
example, coming into your home, walking around seeing everything and starting to
move it and change it? It would be so vulnerable and so loaded. I'm actually
the only organizer that I know that intentionally hires other organizers to
come into my home in my office, I've done this for 17 years now, I've had hundreds
of them come in so that I can experience what that feels
like so before you march in and want to clean up somebody else's space, just ask
yourself, how would you feel if somebody was doing that to you? - Which doesn't mean
you can't help. - It doesn't mean you can't help and I'll give one tip on that what
you can do, right. We've told people lots of things they can't do.
Start with one area so how the conversation with that person and say if
we could do one area, what would it be? So would it be the bedroom? Would it be a
little sitting area? Would it be a part of the kitchen? You know, would it be
their pantry so if they're on board, yes, you really can go in you know work
alongside them if you keep it super simple, okay, and you use the guidelines
that you're going to get from the ICD. Another thing that you can do is, I wrote
a sweet little ebook, is it okay if I bring that up? - Oh, please, yes. - It's called The
Art Of Letting Go. - I love it. - And art stands for Acceptance, Release
and Trust but the reason I love this little book and one of the reasons I
wrote it is because it helps that person kind of come to a place of yes, I really
want to do something and then they pick a small project and then this
little book steps you and that person through getting it done so it gives
you this real simple step-by-step guide so that yes, you can free the top of the
dresser. You know, oftentimes, it's the floor that is covered because that's our
past and we start piling stuff down but maybe they just want that little area
that they can sit in and I'd love here to just share a little story. The last
quarter that I did work with, we got to go in and help her because it was a wife
of a dear friend of mine and she was getting ready to have major
surgery and she needed to be able to come home and walk through her space so
I met with her and we chose a part of her living room that she would want to
be able to sit and we cleared that area and we cleared the kitchen so that she
could go back and forth right between those two and then we did also get to do
the hallway down to her bedroom but that's as far as we could
get, that's as much as she would ever be comfortable with and then what's kind of
sad is, she had the surgery and she actually died on the process of the
surgery but the family was so grateful that we had died of what we had done.
- You had made that progress. - That we made that progress and that honestly, the last
three months of her life were meaningful. You know, she was getting to share some
of her stories in her history with another human being and so you can also
help by being a friend, by being their witness, by cheering for them, right.
Don't beat them up, don't be negative like I'm doing to you but applaud them,
encourage them, you know, involve them in what is it that they really want, help
them create a vision for what it is they want. - Yes, and your book is so helpful
along those lines because this, it gives really the greater perspective that it's
not about a mess in your loved one's home, that's not what we're talking about
here, this is a much more complicated and multifaceted kind of an issue and there
are stories too and I remember that's one of the things that you helped me to
understand, Marla, is that our stuff carries stories and as we connect to
those stories, that's part of what the art of letting go is. You'll find
some other really great stuff on Marla's website, I'm just saying. We'll keep some
some links and in the description down below so you can check there for that.
Marla Dee, isn't she amazing? And she's helped us to understand this problem a
little bit better, probably there's some things that we can all do.