Inappropriate Attachment to Objects

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Yes, I like that description better. Maybe even go so far as to say unusually strong attachment to objects? I have a suspicion that many NTs are also pretty attached to specific things, but as they are more sensitive to other's judgement, they are better at hiding it or don't value it the same way we do. Something like that, anyway.

the word "inappropriate" has been hijacked by authoritarian types who use it to differentiate between desired and undesired behaviors of folks they view as their charges or inferiors. but the word when unshackled from its social baggage of impropriety, simply is synonymous with:

*ill-suited, e.g., somebody wearing a bathing suit in the wintertime cold [a pun]
*incongruous, e.g., a burly wrestler wearing a ballet tutu or an adult clinging to his baby blanket [like moi ] - not a crime!
*unseemly, e.g., a mature adult gossiping and schoozing with teen girls
*unbefitting, e.g., an army general wearing a private's uniform or a fat person squeezing into a speedo [another pun]

*out of place, e.g., a boy in a girl's school
*insufficient for conditions, e.g., bringing a knife to a gunfight or using a spoon to eat spaghetti.

You need a spoon and a fork to eat good spaghetti, though I have chopped up the noodles and eaten it with just a spoon.


Uh, I always have a pocketknife on me, it distresses me more to lose it than my wallet.

I prefer to carry a good stout stick at all times, and have a collection of them upstairs near my reading chair, I like to sit and hold them and think.

I would be more distressed to lose this AWESOME stick I found recently (was from a shrub that was pruned, grew past the pruning point making a great handgrip, and it has really flexible tightgrained wood, yet is taut and durable) than my house, and would save it if the house were on fire and I had no animals or people to save.

I have like 10 pairs of shoes because my woman makes me buy lots of them, but I still only wear my newbalances or my big inappropriate fuzzy slippers.

This is an impportant thread. Thanks, Kansas. I was just thinking about this recently and was on the verge of starting a thread about it.
I have concluded that I am generally more attached to objects than people, and I do anthropomorphize considerably. I fly into a rage if anyone throws anything away that belongs to me. I have warned friends, roommates and especially family to stay the (expletive) out of my room and not touch my things, but nobody really gets how important that boundary is and there are still occasional incidents.
I have terrible trouble throwing things away. My pack-rat tendencies have caused other problems like paying more than I can afford for storage space. Anytime I have to winnow my possessions (for another move) I wind up with more emotional distress than I have ever felt for a dead relative or friend.
I think this is an aspie and maybe generally autistic trait that scientists should pay attention to. We're on to something.

Yes, I feel like this sometimes too. I have a few objects I.. really.. shouldn't keep. (...REALLY.)
But I also have a TERRIBLE memory, so I know that if I get rid of an object I find myself getting too attached to, I probably won't remember it. (Like Memento. OTL) So I've been doing that. (I... think.)
...I'm still keeping this nasty decade-old mushy birthday cupcake in a baggie though. I wouldn't forget my cupcake, nuh-uh.

Wow.

I can't say I'm totally like that, but a lot of my memories are tied to objects. So much so that I found a way to heal from painful events by basically throwing away everything from the time period. If I can remove from my environment things that trigger the memories, I tend not to think about them.

Before I wrote the little chapter on here I read the chapter from my book (side note: This was the first time I have ever read any of my writing. I can't do it as it is too personal and I don't really remember my book word by word. I remember my concepts I lay forth, but not what's in it word for word) and I mentioned some other objects that I don't really remember.

The key thing is that I don't remember them because they aren't here. Change, of course, is very difficult for me. However, like you said, remove the triggers that spring up memories and the event that is gone is just that, gone. I think I have a concept relating to that in my book that says all memories are very much spider webbish in nature in that everything is inter woven and one item can have the most devastating effect because it triggers so many memories.

This isn't to say all items will be forgotten when removed. The loss of two relationships I had started my writing career, but I can't distance myself from those even though one of them has been a decade! I use the example of this, it's much like I am a metaphorical car driving down the road and no matter how far or fast I go my past is just as close to me now as it was years ago. I guess this paragraph is for the 'time issues thread'.

One my example on attachment to objects, or maybe two The first one is when I was 4. My dad had one of those big vans and he traded it in to get a mini van and I screamed and screamed because of this. I can remember the car salesman saying how great the new van would be, but I just screamed my lungs out. Maybe this was my first meltdown perhaps, but I was very much full of rage. Looking back I think I connected with my dad through the van; therefore remove the van and it was like my dad disappearing.

The second example is one of those relations I mentioned. I met this girl at a convention in Minnesota and we talked over Yahoo Messanger for months afterwards. One day she said she was changing her screename and this evoked the same feelings as when the van my dad owned was removed. She wasn't going anywhere, she was just changing her name I'd see on my monitor, but it was enough to make me cry. Just like the van, it was like she was disappearing because the name was how I, in my mind, organized my memories because I, for the life of me, can't remember a person as a person, only through objects do they exist.

I think this may be more an example of hoarding, a bit different from being strongly emotionally attached to a few important objects, such as most folks are talking about. Hoarding is recognized as a syndrome in and of itself. There are socially facile people who hoard, so I don't think this is a specifically autistic trait.

I have no problem throwing out all sorts of stuff, have had my house broken into and my stuff stolen twice, and the one thing that still haunts me is my pocket knife that got ripped off... not my computer, not my TV, not my jewelry. A $20 pocket knife that I'd picked up in Salzburg which not only reminded me of that trip, but I had a fondness, an affection for it in its own right. 25 years later I still think about it and miss it.

It seems that there are two sorts of unusually strong attachments being talked about here: one object which acts as a symbol or memory trigger for a person or event [the can, the van], and another object that is loved for itself, like the plunger.

My stolen pocket knife combines both elements... I bought it because I loved it when I first saw it, and because that happened in Salzburg, it also carried those memories.

Yeah, I have those. There is this one necklace with chunky wooden beads that I rescue from my mum's junk pile whenever she helps me clean my room. I also have a giant stuffed panther that I carry around with me everywhere, some bits of ribbon, some books, and a pile of arcade tokens that I stack up and align, and an old blanket that I think my mum's going to want to throw out soon.

Well I don't care, she's not getting it. It's not a crime to keep an older blanket, or coins, or plungers, or soda cans. I think that anyone who says it is should try getting attached to an object sometime.

Make that 3 for a pocket knife. I have always had a swiss army knife. I have them stolen, borrowed and not returned, etc over the years and I always immediately replace it.

I always keep it in a certain spot. I do use it frequently too, but if one of the kids or wife move it for some reason I have raised a bit of a fuss. There is just something about owning it , knowing where it is, that I find, I don't know, comforting, predictable, stabilizing.

I think that it's not seen as especially strange/inappropriate for someone to be attached to an item because it reminds them of another person ("My boyfriend won that doll for me at a fairground" "That tea set was left to me by my grandma - I was really close to her") but it is very often seen as strange to be attached to the item for its own sake. I am attached to books, stuffed toys, kitchen utensils, pieces of furniture and lots of other items for their shape, their smell, their touch, their familiarity - for themselves as a being, for want of a better word. If a book, for example, were lost, an exact copy would not be an acceptable replacement, because it would still be a different being - the 'soul' of the item is not the same.

My greatest fear about death is what will happen to my things when I'm gone, when there's nobody to take care of them.

i am still very attached to a sausage shaped pillow from childhood. It has share a bed with me since I was 6 - and i am now 32!

I personally use a spoon to eat my spaghetti. Makes dinner that much more fun!

As I have mentioned a few times before on WP, exactly one week before I left to go to a huge state university three hours from home, my husband was severely injured and nearly lost his life when he was T-boned by a dump truck. He survived, against the odds, and I am profoundly grateful for that.

However, he was driving MY JEEP at the time. He had tried to get me to trade it in and get a newer vehicle before school started, but I refused because the Jeep would be the only thing in my life once I went off to school that would still be the same. And then it was gone. It was unrecognizable after the crash, and everyone said that they could not believe anyone could have survived the impact. (I have graphic photos to prove it).

WHile I am so glad that I still have my husband and that he is not having nearly as many problems as he could have had, given the severity of the wreck, I am still missing my Jeep. I am horrible at dealing with change, and to this day I have never gotten a chance to "process" the loss of the Jeep, what happened to my husband, and a few other nasty things that happened right before all that, and WHOOSH!, I was off to a new school in a new town and the whole thing got off on the wrong foot and quickly turned into a disaster. I think things would have been a LOT easier if he had wrecked his own car instead of mine.

I would actually physically kiss that Jeep and joke that if it was a person and I was single, I would have sex with it. I mean, I really really really loved that Jeep. I know that most people would be so focused on my husband that they would be appalled at my issues about losing my Jeep. I also know that most people would not understand why I am now driving a 2007 Ford Escape with 50K miles and would trade it even-up for a red 4WD 1999 Jeep Cherokee Sport with 160K miles. Every time I see a Jeep like my old one, I make this little whining noise, whether I am alone or with others. So yeah, I was/am really attached to it...

i became very self-conscious when i recognized that i almost never take photos of people (and when i do it's because someone has on a great pair of sunglasses or something), just objects and animals. i take between fifty and a hundred pictures a week.

there was a similar thread on attachments to objects recently.

I have a brush, a pen, a jar of petroleum jelly, a nail file, and a choke chain with me pretty much at all times. Some of these things I bring with me to whatever room I'm going to be in. I have copies of them in my purse, and when I leave the house I can't be separated from that purse, not even at a friend's house. I have a nail file in every room I spend time in, and I file my nails several times a day. I don't so much as walk down the hall without that choke chain.

I have a special glass that I use daily that no one else can use.

I still own the car I got at 17, and I'm now 44... and this isn't a car anyone would rationally choose to have their entire life, trust me, it's ugly.

I have a bunch of stuffed animals, and I think it would be physically impossible for me to, for instance, hit one; some part of me believes that they can feel.

Odd attachment to objects, check!!