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Uhura
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13 Oct 2017, 10:25 pm

I mean sometimes I can donate clothes that don't fit but more often I have a hard time getting rid of things I don't use. I love 'knick-knack' type things. Even when someone gives me a gift, I have a hard time getting rid of the the box if I like the gift.
And when I am given a gift of something I have, I keep my old one too.

Sometimes it doesn't bother me. I can throw away junk papers. But sometimes I wish I could donate things if I am given a new one or throw away boxes if I like the gift that was in it.



Esmerelda Weatherwax
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13 Oct 2017, 10:50 pm

Yes! But not everything. My parents grew up in the Great Depression, so I keep cars for 20 years, etc., but I also get attached to some things. Keeping a 25 year old (still nice!) footstool because a dearly loved cat loved to sleep on it once, and now a new beloved kitty does. Wear the watch I gave my Dad in 1985, that he willed back to me in 1997; 32 yrs old. Have a cut glass pendant I saved up for when I was 9; I'm 62, would never wear it now, can't imagine just tossing it. Stuff like that. I kept a small cardboard box for 15 years at least because a gift from my late grandmother had come in it. Used it for barrettes :)


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17 Oct 2017, 6:43 pm

Perhaps mild OCD(Hoarding type) in both of your cases.

2-5% of the gen. pop. have this behavior.

I know several of them VERY well.

Most important thing to know about it is....................it is NOT about the objects or the quantity of them.

Hoarding is purely a disorder of your psychological relationship to the objects.



Esmerelda Weatherwax
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17 Oct 2017, 6:58 pm

Yep, I've wondered about that. I really do hold on to specific transitional objects. But, my home is tidy (albeit dusty in parts) and uncluttered - no Collyer's Mansion for me, no way no how. Newspapers stack up for about a week, then off I go to the recycle center. I think it's a combination of sentimentality and animism as much as anything. (Note: my heart goes out to people who are fighting this really overwhelming compulsion. I'm throwing no stones.)

[Oh jeez, there's a furniture store called "Collyer's Mansion".]


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slave
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17 Oct 2017, 7:22 pm

Esmerelda Weatherwax wrote:
Yep, I've wondered about that. I really do hold on to specific transitional objects. But, my home is tidy (albeit dusty in parts) and uncluttered - no Collyer's Mansion for me, no way no how. Newspapers stack up for about a week, then off I go to the recycle center. I think it's a combination of sentimentality and animism as much as anything. (Note: my heart goes out to people who are fighting this really overwhelming compulsion. I'm throwing no stones.)

[Oh jeez, there's a furniture store called "Collyer's Mansion".]


I just came back to correct myself......... :oops: :oops: :oops:

https://www.elementsbehavioralhealth.com/mental-health/dsm-v-hoarding-new-mental-disorder-diagnoses/

Hoarding is a separate condition is the DSM-V, and no longer considered to be OCD.

My apologies. :oops:



Esmerelda Weatherwax
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17 Oct 2017, 7:25 pm

Not to worry. No offense taken, clearly none was intended. Thank you for coming back. It is something I've worried about, and watch myself for.


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17 Oct 2017, 7:54 pm

Esmerelda Weatherwax wrote:
Not to worry. No offense taken, clearly none was intended. Thank you for coming back. It is something I've worried about, and watch myself for.


The hoarders in my sphere, have ZERO discomfort/distress and ZERO insight about this issue. The ppl around them, however, are strongly impacted.

The Gr. Depr., which I call GD1(cause another GD is coming) was more damaging than most(today) realize.

I have family that had to eat turnips and cabbage 3 meals per day for MONTHS in the winter...year after year. The poverty and the fear was intense. They were never the same. May we all be spared such a wretched fate.



Esmerelda Weatherwax
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17 Oct 2017, 7:58 pm

slave wrote:
Esmerelda Weatherwax wrote:
Not to worry. No offense taken, clearly none was intended. Thank you for coming back. It is something I've worried about, and watch myself for.


The hoarders in my sphere, have ZERO discomfort/distress and ZERO insight about this issue. The ppl around them, however, are strongly impacted.

The Gr. Depr., which I call GD1(cause another GD is coming) was more damaging than most(today) realize.

I have family that had to eat turnips and cabbage 3 meals per day for MONTHS in the winter...year after year. The poverty and the fear was intense. They were never the same. May we all be spared such a wretched fate.


You're on to something, I do think it's a response to deprivation on some level, and now that I'm thinking about it, it makes sense that the more acute and traumatizing the deprivation, the more extreme the response.

I'm also in agreement that another GD is coming; I'm surprised it didn't hit long ago.


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18 Oct 2017, 3:27 am

Esmerelda Weatherwax wrote:
slave wrote:
Esmerelda Weatherwax wrote:
Not to worry. No offense taken, clearly none was intended. Thank you for coming back. It is something I've worried about, and watch myself for.


The hoarders in my sphere, have ZERO discomfort/distress and ZERO insight about this issue. The ppl around them, however, are strongly impacted.

The Gr. Depr., which I call GD1(cause another GD is coming) was more damaging than most(today) realize.

I have family that had to eat turnips and cabbage 3 meals per day for MONTHS in the winter...year after year. The poverty and the fear was intense. They were never the same. May we all be spared such a wretched fate.


You're on to something, I do think it's a response to deprivation on some level, and now that I'm thinking about it, it makes sense that the more acute and traumatizing the deprivation, the more extreme the response.

I'm also in agreement that another GD is coming; I'm surprised it didn't hit long ago.


As am I. What lead you to believe GD2 is coming??

The vast majority are utterly oblivious to said calamity and more importantly they wish to remain so.



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18 Oct 2017, 6:55 am

I like to see myself as more of a preservationist than a hoarder and like having my things around me.

I seem to be the one people come to when they need something too and mostly they get what they came for so everyone is happy.

I don't like waste and value the work which has gone into things so throwing things away is hard for me. I am much better at this than I was years ago but I now know what I want to keep and why rather than hoarding everything which has come into my possession.

My cupboards and freezer are usually full in the kitchen too which points to a fear of deprivation when I was younger so I am enjoying reading all of your comments and understanding about this. Thank you for stating this thread.



Esmerelda Weatherwax
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18 Oct 2017, 10:55 am

slave wrote:
Esmerelda Weatherwax wrote:
slave wrote:
Esmerelda Weatherwax wrote:
Not to worry. No offense taken, clearly none was intended. Thank you for coming back. It is something I've worried about, and watch myself for.


The hoarders in my sphere, have ZERO discomfort/distress and ZERO insight about this issue. The ppl around them, however, are strongly impacted.

The Gr. Depr., which I call GD1(cause another GD is coming) was more damaging than most(today) realize.

I have family that had to eat turnips and cabbage 3 meals per day for MONTHS in the winter...year after year. The poverty and the fear was intense. They were never the same. May we all be spared such a wretched fate.


You're on to something, I do think it's a response to deprivation on some level, and now that I'm thinking about it, it makes sense that the more acute and traumatizing the deprivation, the more extreme the response.

I'm also in agreement that another GD is coming; I'm surprised it didn't hit long ago.


As am I. What lead you to believe GD2 is coming??

The vast majority are utterly oblivious to said calamity and more importantly they wish to remain so.


I'm not a historian - my "superpower" is pattern recognition and it's really hot on behavioral patterns (when I'm paying sufficient attention). I've read enough history to have a sense of US society just before the crash, and the get-rich-quick-devil-take-the-hindmost mentality, along with a truly horrific increase in magical thinking (stocks on margin then, vs. subprime mortgages recently), willful obliviousness to consequences of one's own behavior, and perverse admiration for antisocials (gangsters admired... then in the Mob, now on Wall Street and in C-suites) has had me on edge since the early 1980s. Back then, I was sure we were going to crash within the next 2 decades.

I thought for sure the 2008 recession was going to be It. There's a new element that has me even more on edge now, which is the increase in self-destructive spite - AKA I don't care if my loved ones all starve or bleed out in artificially created impoverishment, as long as the outgroup I dislike starves or bleeds out faster and harder.

This is relatively nonspecific, because it's my gut doing the processing for the most part on this, so it's largely preverbal. What portents do you see? (If we're seeing the same things from different points on the political spectrum, however much or little separated, I still have no trouble believing that I can learn from your observations and perspective.)

We can move this discussion to its own thread if that would prevent threadjacking of the OP's question. I'm still a noob, I'll defer to your judgement on that. (Thanks, Uhura, for starting this thread - serious food for thought.)


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22 Oct 2017, 7:52 am

Nope I'm the exact opposite.
Especially when I feel like things are out of control or not proceeding efficiently/smoothly, I go on sprees of chucking out as much useless junk as I possibly can, and reordering my system into sleek, minimal, neat, manageable efficiency.
It's soothing, and gives me the illusion that I am setting things in order. I did this today after what I'm coming to see as the most severe meltdown in years.
Perhaps both behaviours are based in anxiety? People seem to hoard items (I live with one at the moment) because they believe they will be in lack later on if they get rid of things. This distorts into keeping items that cannot possibly have a later use.


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Temeraire
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22 Oct 2017, 8:00 am

I completely agree with you.
Took me years to realise what I was doing and longer than that to deal with it. I still am.



crystaltermination
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04 Nov 2017, 2:37 pm

I'm good at getting rid of most material items... except books! It pains me still but I eventually forced myself to switch to an E-reader for the sake of literally having no more space available for them. Every year or so I go through my wardrobe and mercilessly divide between what I wear, and what I really don't: I'm lucky to have a lot of charity shops local to me that will accept most donations.


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04 Nov 2017, 4:21 pm

I'm terrible for hoarding. In fact, most of my family are terrible for it. I think my hoarding issues stem partly from my granddad, who liked to keep little knick knacks and random stuff for nostalgia and "just incase". I also get it from my dad, who was very prohibitive about spending to the point where even going on holiday was a nightmare because he didn't want to spend too much money (of course, he had no problem spending on tobacco, alcohol and street drugs). Well that explained the stinginess, anyway. The thing is that he was crappy at being stingy because he would buy "bargains" that were crappy and didn't last long or he would compulsively buy stuff from charity shops just incase it was an antique. At least I actually got a first edition copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix from a charity shop (it's not worth much but I still have one).

For me, I do fit that profile of having loads of knick knacks and random stuff. At one point I collected flyers and cut outs that were graphically interesting. I didn't really do much with it except look at it for inspiration. A lot of the bulk I have are books and I do use them for reference so they stay. I could laboriously scan every page but most of these books are really big picture books and I'm not scanning hundreds of pages. The books stay. I'm thinking about getting another DVD storage book to save space and I'll just get rid of the boxes. That would help to reduce bulk and it will save me time trying to pair the right disc to the right box. For everything else, I don't know - I'll just have to see.

A part of me would love to be a super organized Swedish minimalist but a part of me kind of likes the chaos. Maybe I should find a way to satisfy my right brain and my left brain.



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04 Nov 2017, 8:57 pm

I don't really feel sentimental value & I don't have a problem getting rid of most things if I don't use em or they're not something I'm collecting like knives/blades & similar type things. There are some things like cloths that I keep till they're very holey because I don't feel like spending the money to buy new 1s, cant find cloths I like better, or just don't get around or think about it. I'm still using a Droid 4 phone because I like the physical keypad. My comp is like 9 years old but I decked out when I got it & it's still works good for the things I do on it & I don't have the money to buy another one. I may upgrade the processor & should change the hardrive when I have extra money thou. You guys get the idea.


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