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Ep. 87: Teens who hoard: When is a messy room more than a messy room?
249 Plays8 months ago
TW: Self-harm
My guest for this episode goes by the name of That Hoarder.
As a compulsive hoarder, she says she struggles with many aspects of hoarding behaviours, which she talks about on her own podcast That Hoarder - the first ever podcast by somebody who actually hoards rather than by a professional. She started her podcast to keep herself accountable and to help others with this stigmatised and hidden condition, as well as to raise awareness of hoarding disorder.
She says that very stigma is why she does this anonymously. This is a sensationalised and shamed mental illness and speaking more openly about it is an essential way to spread the word and help people. While a lot is still not understood, she told me that there can be signs of hoarding as early as childhood or teenage years.
2:45 - People judge hoarding as being about laziness, but it's a manifestation of something else that's wrong. That's why TV shows that sensationalise the condition aren't helpful. Why clearing the space isn't helpful.
7:00 - Seeing hoarding as a coping strategy. My guest talks about feeling "wrong at her core" and having out of control emotions.
12:00 - Understanding what might drive self-harm.
14:38 - Signs of hoarding in a teenager. Which hoarding symptoms begin between the ages of 10-20, before escalating in later life.
21:00 - What might have helped prevent hoarding disorder developing?
38:00 - Why professional help is needed to help someone combat their hoarding disorder, and what kind is most helpful.
39:25 - An effective strategy for successfully managing self-harm.
56:00 - When is it hoarding, and when is it just a messy teenager? How can parents help a teenager who hoards?
Resources:
- Overcoming self-harm
- Overcome Compulsive Hoarding podcast
- Advice for children of hoarders
- Hoarding Disorders UK
- Mind
More from Helen Wills:
Helen wills is a teen mental health podcaster and blogger at Actually Mummy, a resource for midlife parents of teens.
Thank you for listening! Subscribe to the Teenage Kicks podcast to hear new episodes. If you have a suggestion for the podcast please get in touch.
You can find more from Helen Wills on parenting teenagers on Instagram and Twitter @iamhelenwills.
For information on your data privacy please visit Zencastr's policy page
Please note that Helen Wills is not a medical expert, and nothing in the podcast should be taken as medical advice. If you're worried about yourself or a teenager, please seek support from a medical professional.
Episode produced by Michael J Cunningham.
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Transcript
Understanding Children's Behavior
00:00:00
Speaker
try to see that your child is expressing something or protecting themselves from something else that's wrong. And that while it feels like it's about the stuff, it's not really about the stuff.
Teenage Kicks Podcast Introduction
00:00:20
Speaker
Welcome to the Teenage Kicks podcast, where we take the fear out of parenting or becoming a teenager.
00:00:34
Speaker
I'm Helen Wills and every week I talk to someone who had a difficult time in the teenage years but came out the other side in a good place and has insight to offer to parents and young people who might be going through the same.
Introducing 'That Hoarder'
00:00:48
Speaker
My guest today goes by the name of That Hoarder. As a compulsive hoarder she says she struggles with many aspects of hoarding behaviours which she talks about on her own podcast That Hoarder. The first ever podcast by somebody who actually hoards rather than by a professional. She started her podcast to keep herself accountable and to help others with this stigmatised and hidden condition as well as to raise awareness of hoarding disorder
00:01:17
Speaker
She says that the stigma is why she does this anonymously. This is a sensationalised and shamed mental illness and speaking more openly about it is an essential way to spread the word and help people.
Critique of Hoarding TV Shows
00:01:31
Speaker
While a lot is still not understood, she told me that there can be signs of hoarding as early as childhood or teenage years. I'm going to ask her to tell us her story, what parents should know and how they might be able to help.
00:01:47
Speaker
Welcome to the podcast, That Horder. I was just saying before we started recording, I really struggle to not talk about names and to not be personal, but I guess this is such a difficult condition.
00:02:09
Speaker
that people make judgments and leap to conclusions that are completely untrue and most certainly unfair. Is that a fair assessment? Definitely. I think you only have to look at how people react to those TV programs about hoarding. See, that people think it's about laziness. People can be very judgy or can
00:02:37
Speaker
not see beyond kind of the stuff in a hoarder's house is like a manifestation of something else that's wrong. People don't see that. They just think this is somebody who can't be bothered to such a decree that they have just never bothered to clean or tidy.
00:03:03
Speaker
I, if I was podcasting under my name, I just know I wouldn't be able to be anything like as open as I am. What's your take on those programmes? Have you watched them? Do you watch them?
00:03:22
Speaker
No, I'm not a fan. I have seen them in the past. I've not watched them for a long time. But generally speaking, I think they are very sensationalized. And in order for it to be good entertainment, the person who hoards has to be put under so much pressure. And generally speaking,
00:03:51
Speaker
It's accepted that a very quick clean out like that, like emptying somebody's house in three days, does not fix the problem. It fixes an immediate, you know, they have space after the end of the three days, they can move around their home, that kind of thing. But if the underlying stuff hasn't been properly looked at,
00:04:15
Speaker
then people almost always refill that space and quite quickly and I think the programs, the positive is that it's I think mostly because of those programs that people have even heard of hoarding but generally they feel exploitative and quite
00:04:44
Speaker
lurid and not the solution they seem to be. Yeah, so it's fixing a symptom, a surface level issue rather than actually the problem itself. Yes, yes.
00:04:59
Speaker
Yeah and I mean I haven't, I think I saw one a long time ago and I haven't watched them since but I see what you mean about sensationalising because they're trying to make good TV aren't they? They're not really trying to help anybody.
00:05:14
Speaker
Do the people in those programmes, are they victimized? I'm just curious by the show's producers. I mean, that's a really big, deep question, isn't it? What's your gut feel on it?
00:05:31
Speaker
I think they go into it because they're desperate or somebody around them is desperate. They need some help. And this looks like effective free help. And so it may be that, you know, their children really are worried about them and so call in the TV programme and I can see how that happens.
00:06:00
Speaker
But although there is some
Hoarding as a Coping Mechanism
00:06:03
Speaker
kind of look at how those people feel about their stuff, it's very surface level and to make good TV, they have to be upset to a point where they have a meltdown
00:06:18
Speaker
that looks like it's about a broken box. When it's not about a broken box, it's about the overwhelm. And if somebody has filled their home to that degree and that feels to them,
00:06:37
Speaker
like some kind of comfort blanket or like some kind of security, then when all of that is ripped away, they're left very vulnerable. Yeah, I hadn't thought about it like that. That makes complete sense.
00:06:53
Speaker
So it's almost by doing that supposed good deed, I'm doing air quotes in my head, of clearing a space for them and making it nicer to live in that actually potentially triggering
00:07:10
Speaker
Um, I don't know what you call it, but, uh, more of an incident, more, more problems. It's removing somebody's coping strategy. It's not a great coping strategy. I'm not justifying it and saying it's brilliant, but that is ultimately what it is. And that looks different for different people, but it's removing that without effectively replacing it with something less maladaptive.
00:07:40
Speaker
Right. That's such a great word. Yes. Because actually all of us are using coping strategies to get through our emotions and daily life. Completely. Whether it's a glass of wine at the end of the day, whether, you know, whatever it is. Yeah.
00:07:54
Speaker
Yeah. I was thinking even less maladaptive than a single glass of wine, which as we know can very easily lead to way more than one glass of wine and then becomes very dysfunctional. I was thinking even people who meditate daily, that is a coping strategy. It's not a bad coping, it's a great coping strategy, but
00:08:17
Speaker
We all need coping strategies. Completely. Yeah. Okay.
Struggles with Identity and Pressure
00:08:23
Speaker
Can we dive into the bit where I always try to start my podcast episodes with what your life was like growing up?
00:08:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's a big question. Okay. Don't panic. Yeah, on the surface I had a very normal middle class upbringing. I did well at school. I was Catholic. Under the surface I was struggling a lot.
00:09:01
Speaker
Um, because doing well at school felt like immense pressure. I couldn't, I couldn't let anything drop. And also I was gay and I couldn't begin to deal with that.
00:09:23
Speaker
It was the 80s and 90s. It was not a time of positivity around the LGBTQ community. And I was Catholic, which added extra layers of this cannot be who I am. It's hard to explain.
00:09:48
Speaker
I couldn't conceive of it being true that I was gay and yet I also knew I was and so I had this real conflict that I had to keep pushing down and it was doing me a lot of damage because
00:10:10
Speaker
I knew, and I almost want to use air quotes for the word knew, I knew that the core of me, I feel like who you love is a real core issue. And I knew in air quotes that the core of me was wrong. And that does you harm. Wow.
00:10:36
Speaker
Sorry, I've got goosebumps listening to you say that because that feels like such a powerful statement and a powerful belief to have about yourself. I knew at the core of me that I was wrong.
00:10:54
Speaker
What does that feel like? I think the fact that it wasn't even I knew that it was wrong. It was I knew that I was wrong. Yeah. It so pervades everything in and so I had to keep performing well and I had to keep being as good as I could but none of it could really
00:11:19
Speaker
disguise from me that I was wrong. And I was, um, I don't know if you use trigger warnings on this podcast, but there's a, I can do trigger. I was self-harming. Right. Okay. Um, I didn't know what self-harming was. It wasn't a time when that was named. He probably was named, but it wasn't in the public.
00:11:48
Speaker
arena wasn't talked about. No, it definitely wasn't. And that was another coping mechanism. It was serving a purpose for me. It was useful in another maladaptive way. Yeah, yeah. And it helped me. It's
00:12:17
Speaker
I have to be clear, like with hoarding, I'm not saying self-harming is a good thing. No, no, no, but I'm interested. What was it doing for you? It was serving several purposes. It was helping me to manage what felt like out of control emotions. If everything in my
00:12:39
Speaker
head and heart felt out of control, I could transfer all of that complex feeling to a quite simple physical pain. Right, okay.
00:12:55
Speaker
She's a thousand times easier to manage. Yes, and to understand. Yes, yes, my arm hurts. That's much easier than everything about me is wrong. Yes, yeah. And I also used it in a self-punishment way, I think, as well. Like, I am bad, this is what I deserve.
00:13:17
Speaker
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've never had self-harm expressed to me in that way before, and as someone who doesn't self-harm, it's always been really quite difficult for me to understand, but that makes complete sense. It's not starting with the pain, it starts with the emotional mix-up of pain, transferring those feelings to something tangible that feels like it
00:13:45
Speaker
justifies those painful, emotional feelings. Am I rephrasing that right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thank you for that because that really, we've got an episode on self-harming, one of the very first episodes I did, episode two, I think. Anybody wants to listen. And it was such
00:14:08
Speaker
a beautiful conversation, very honest. And I felt very connected to my guest, but I still came away not understanding really why she did it. Yes. And so that helps. Thank you. And we could be here hours. There's so many places I want to go.
00:14:33
Speaker
I have to remember that this is a podcast, not a counselling session. That sounds incredibly tough. And so it's no wonder you developed coping strategies. Were there signs of hoarding for you back then? Looking back, yes, but nothing that at the time would have indicated, you know, serious problems.
Early Signs of Hoarding
00:15:00
Speaker
And that
00:15:01
Speaker
So I was just very messy. I was just very messy as a child. If there was one thing I was ever in trouble for, it was that messy bedroom. And I couldn't really get my head round the logistics of how to organize stuff, how to put stuff away, how do you decide what goes with what? How do you decide which drawer something goes in?
00:15:30
Speaker
Uh-huh. So I was very messy and very attached to my things. I put a lot of meaning and significance on items that most people probably wouldn't. Right. For example? If someone had... So I remember
00:15:58
Speaker
getting Easter eggs one year and the back of the box had like a puzzle on it. And I wouldn't throw away the Easter egg box because even though I never did the puzzle, I was worried that if I got rid of the box, I would regret not doing the puzzle. And I couldn't risk
00:16:26
Speaker
that regret at least or if somebody had given me something I couldn't get rid of it because that felt almost insulting to the person who'd given it me
00:16:40
Speaker
Even if that was five years ago and it had broken and it wasn't something made, you know, it wasn't like a silver locket or something, I was attaching all of these feelings and significance to often quite incidental things. It sounds like you were protecting yourself from possible future difficult emotion.
00:17:07
Speaker
Yes, yes, which is something I'm only really coming to understand now in the context of hoarding, is that a lot of it is about anticipating how bad something might feel in the future and protecting against that. Yeah, yeah. In which case, looked at it in that way. It makes complete sense.
00:17:34
Speaker
you're protecting yourself from something really painful that might happen. And it's put me in mind of, I've been called a control freak before now, I call myself a control freak sometimes. And when I've really looked at that in therapy, I've
00:17:56
Speaker
I've come to realise that I only try to control the things that I don't feel safe around. Yeah. So I'm trying to control my outcomes so that I don't end up in a difficult, painful place. Yeah. Don't make sense. Yeah, completely, completely. And something I've... I did some reading about age of onset, of hoarding.
00:18:21
Speaker
in advance of this conversation. And it was interesting, there were different studies that had different numbers, but the theme was the same, that generally speaking, often, coding symptoms start between the ages of 10 and 20.
00:18:42
Speaker
Right, so classic teenage year to mine then. We should be aware of this as parents of teenagers. Totally, but not to a clinical level. So hoarding disorder, the full-on diagnosis, the numbers varied more in that, but it was kind of late 20s to 40s, was generally the number for the full-on clinical disorder.
00:19:10
Speaker
And what that says to me is that if somebody's listening and sees the symptoms in themselves or in their child at the age of 15, there's time
00:19:26
Speaker
to look at what they mean. And there's time to address some of those fears or some of those control issues or some of that insecurity or whatever it is that's going on before hopefully it develops into a full blown crisis situation.
00:19:49
Speaker
Yeah, that makes complete sense. So you had issues in your life that made you feel because of the society you were growing up in that you were wrong and you developed self-harming and hoarding as a coping strategy to protect yourself from how
00:20:13
Speaker
bad that made you feel from how painful those emotions were. Okay. I mean, that sounds like I've nutshelled a massive thing and I don't want it to be dismissive. It doesn't feel dismissive, don't worry. Okay, good, good. Thank you for the reassurance. I wonder, knowing what you know now,
00:20:42
Speaker
what you would have liked or what could have helped you and at what point instead of
00:20:51
Speaker
what happened, which I'm sort of now asking two questions in one here. But what I'm imagining is parents who would have said, well, yeah, teenagers are bloody messy, aren't they? Let's just get on a case a bit more and give her a hard time. Because that's what we do as parents. We all complain about the mess of the rooms. And that's reminded me of there's another question that I'll need to ask you about later. When is it just a messy teenager? And when is it something to worry about? Let's park that one. What would you have liked back then?
Importance of LGBT Representation
00:21:19
Speaker
I think
00:21:20
Speaker
There are big things and small things that would have helped. I think the big things are changes that we are seeing now, which is just a very basic level of seeing people on TV who were gay.
00:21:42
Speaker
seeing people who were out, whether that is characters or real life people. At the time, there
00:21:55
Speaker
that didn't exist. It's hard to express to people who are growing up now just how much that didn't exist. There were some very, very camp gay men, a couple of very, very camp gay men, but that was it.
00:22:14
Speaker
Yep. And Sandy Toxvig, now a national treasure. Then when she, I can't remember if she came out or was outed, she was then vilified, removed from speaking at a children's charity conference. Wow. Just because of that. Yeah. And so on a kind of big societal level, I needed just some normalization.
00:22:43
Speaker
this is okay, this is fine, this is normal, it happens, it's not a good thing or a bad thing, it's just a thing. And people get on and have completely normal lives, they are just in relationships with girls instead of boys or boys instead of girls and that's all fine. And
00:23:05
Speaker
it heartens me when I see my friends, kids talking about trans boy in their class or a bisexual friend or that they're gay and it's just, and I'm not suggesting it's easy for young queer people now at all. I know it's not, but that one element of it of seeing yourself in the people around you is
00:23:32
Speaker
I still get excited. My LGBT friends my age, we still get excited when somebody comes out or when somebody, you know, there's a gay couple on a TV show. And I love that for younger people, that's a lot more normal. Yes, yeah, absolutely. I mean, what you're saying there, I think is what all of us want is just to be seen and accepted for who we are.
00:24:02
Speaker
Yeah. It's a really basic, it's a really basic thing. And for me.
00:24:09
Speaker
what shifted me from that place where I am wrong to this is fine was leaving home, going to university, meeting other LGBT people and seeing that they were just normal people living lives and having a good time. I think somewhere in my brain I'd assumed that
00:24:35
Speaker
Coming out meant a life of misery. I don't know quite where that came from. Media, by any chance. Probably. But I remember being genuinely surprised at seeing people just having a good time.
00:24:49
Speaker
Yeah. And within a year, I was out and very involved in, yeah, university LGBT stuff and going to Pride and all of those things that were very healing and very fun and great.
00:25:12
Speaker
Well, and in the company of people like you, because you alluded to that earlier, and there's actually an episode where, this is talked about again, it's the episode with Barty on women in tech. So people need to see, and we and kids, teenagers need to see versions of themselves in the real world to believe that that is possible for them.
00:25:42
Speaker
Yeah, you've got to see it to be it or whatever the phrase is. Yeah. That's what she said. Exactly that. Yeah. And it's the same if you're an Asian girl and you want to do a thing that you've only ever seen white women do. Yes. If you're disabled and you want to do a job that you've never seen a disabled person do. Yeah. Yeah.
00:26:05
Speaker
Yeah, exactly the same. I'm just reminded, I was watching, I think it was a TikTok of, oh god, I can't remember the name of the girl. Have you seen that show on Netflix one day? It's on the book and the film. There was a book written and then a film, but it's been turned into a Netflix series now.
00:26:26
Speaker
She's Asian and he's white and it's about a young couple at university getting together, falling in love over a period of, I don't know, 15 years or so, probably longer. And she says, I turned that role down because I didn't see myself in it because I've never seen a brown girl in a romantic lead.
00:26:51
Speaker
And I just thought, bloody hell, really? I mean, that's my flipping inherited white privilege, isn't it?
00:27:02
Speaker
I didn't realise, but when I thought about it, it's like, oh, you're right. That's true. Yeah, I don't know if you know the comedian Rosie Jones. Oh, the name rings a bell, yes. Yeah, she's great. She's quite filthy, but very, very good. Good. And she has cerebral palsy and is gay. Oh, yes. And she didn't come out for ages because somewhere along the line
00:27:30
Speaker
she'd learnt that you couldn't be gay and disabled, like that just wasn't an option. And so she
00:27:40
Speaker
just tried to, like I did, tried to just get on and not be gay. And then eventually, and you know, she's younger than me. And I don't know how old she is in her 30s, something like that. And it was relatively recently that she realized that those two things could coexist. And she's
00:28:03
Speaker
a smart, funny, you know, well-loved woman, but had never seen that combination. Yeah, yeah. So that kind of leads me onto another question, and we're getting away from the nuts and bolts of hoarding. Well, we haven't even gone there, really. We're a podcast about hoarding.
00:28:27
Speaker
As it should be, it's about what's underneath the hoarding, isn't it? What did it take for you to get to that point where you realise that being gay and Catholic and a bit of a perfectionist at school, whatever, was okay and you could live that life?
00:28:48
Speaker
I think leaving home was a big part of it. I needed kind of a new start where I could, I mean, it's a bit of a cliche, isn't it? You kind of reinvent yourself a bit when, if you go to university and that's, and so I was, I met people I have never met. I met the town I grew up in.
00:29:14
Speaker
was quite, it was very white. Most of the people I knew, because I wasn't only Catholic, I went to Catholic schools. So everybody I knew was Catholic, all my mum's friends were Catholic. No wonder you were a perfectionist at school. Exactly. And so I was meeting diverse people of all stripes.
00:29:42
Speaker
and living in a city and just knew avenues were opened up for me. One of those was meeting queer people and seeing that as a starting to see that as part of just the tapestry of life. There are lots of kinds of people. I met
00:30:11
Speaker
I know there are people who say that like trans identities are a new thing and they are not. I knew trans women in the 90s and they were not a new thing then. And so my horizons opened really. Right.
00:30:35
Speaker
The perfectionism, I would like to say, I shook off along the way.
Perfectionism and Hoarding Realization
00:30:41
Speaker
I didn't really. What I try, I try these days to focus it on the important stuff. My personality needs some degree of perfectionism. So if I can focus that, for instance, on my work, then I can try and give myself more of a break in other aspects of my life.
00:31:03
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it's like a compromise deal. Yeah, I'm just thinking about it because I can be perfectionist and I'm a recovering perfectionist because I've realised that it doesn't serve me, but that's a really good strategy to focus it on somewhere where it's useful. Yeah.
00:31:23
Speaker
And then, I mean, we shouldn't need to let ourselves off the hook elsewhere, should we? But if we needed a trade-off to make that process easier, then yeah, I can let myself off the hook by being on the sofa for a bit longer in front of Netflix than I otherwise might think my perfectionist would allow me to be.
00:31:41
Speaker
Exactly, exactly. It may be that one day I can let go of it altogether, but I feel more able to give myself a break in one area if I'm allowing that to be louder in another area. So when did you first realise that hoarding was a thing and that you had a problem with it?
00:32:08
Speaker
It was one of those things that was a very gradual realisation. Initially, because I'd never heard of it, it wasn't well known condition. And then I remember it would have been in the early 2000s.
00:32:28
Speaker
I don't know how. I must have maybe read an article or something which was the first time I'd heard of the concept. And I remember by that time I'd finished uni and I was living in a flat that was incredibly messy. And in terms of kind of the progress of my hoarding, the way I see it is that I was a messy child that carried on when I left home and then
00:32:57
Speaker
after uni for various boring circumstances I ended up for having a period of six months with no income and then a period of about another 12 months with
00:33:18
Speaker
very low income. And what happened at that point? First of all, it's only recently that I've been able to acknowledge how absolutely traumatic that was. It was a horrible time, but it's the kind of thing that when you're in it, you're just putting one foot in front of the other and getting through. But I think what shifted
00:33:47
Speaker
for me at that time was whereas prior to that I'd found it difficult to get rid of things. During that period of time it became dangerous to get rid of things because if I got rid of something there was no way to replace it, there was no way to replace anything.
00:34:12
Speaker
So if I got rid of something no matter what, and I then needed it later, I had no option to get another one. And so what shifted, I think, during that period
00:34:30
Speaker
was from messy to nothing must ever leave this house. And do you know why that shifted then?
00:34:42
Speaker
I think my financial, I think just my financial situation, I was in such desperate state. It was a kind of choosing between toilet roll and menstrual pads, choosing between soap and shampoo. And so everything took on this extra value. Yes, makes sense. Yeah. And then when my financial situation eased,
00:35:12
Speaker
that had just become my norm. And it had also, because I'd lived in such dire financial straits, I couldn't shake off
00:35:28
Speaker
the knowledge that that could happen again. And so even though I've got some money now, I still can't get rid of anything because if that happens again, I'll be stuck. And I think that's when it kind of cemented in my head that I must keep hold of everything. And it also then took on these extra significances of kind of
00:35:54
Speaker
It's just some kind of safety preparation. I will not be left unprepared. I will not be left without.
00:36:07
Speaker
it stuck. But this is of course with hindsight, I had nothing like that understanding of it at the time and I didn't recognise it as hoarding and then I heard about hoarding and I thought that sounds like me and read a book on it and one of the early books and then what characterised probably the next 15 years was that I then
Cyclic Patterns in Hoarding
00:36:34
Speaker
put it to one side mentally and got on with my life and then it would come up again a few years later and I would try and address it and I would go this is too hard I don't know what to do and put it to one side and get on with my life. Yeah well I'm reminded of you at school putting to one side the fact that you were gay.
00:36:55
Speaker
Yes, I'm very good. I'm very effective. It doesn't work though, does it? Yeah, exactly. It comes back up. It comes right back up. It's like, what's that game where your things are... Oh, I know what you mean. With the hammer where you're rubbing things down, they keep popping back up. Exactly. Oh, what is that called? That's going to annoy me now. Well, it'll come to us. If it's important, I always say it'll come to us before the end of the conversation.
00:37:22
Speaker
So yes, that and then... Whack-a-mole. Whack-a-mole. There we are. There it was. I kept thinking of Hungry Hippos, but that's a different one. And so, yeah, and so much as I pushed it down, it would reappear and I was carrying on with kind of the thoughts and behaviours in the interim. I just either was facing it for a bit or I wasn't facing it for a bit.
00:37:52
Speaker
And I think because when I was facing it, I would be all determined to, I'm going to fix this now. And then I would realize I had no idea how to fix it. And I would start trying to fix it and I would feel like it was a drop in the ocean and pointless. What's the point of trying to
00:38:14
Speaker
fix this pile when there are 42,000 piles. And so I would get overwhelmed and I would get stuck and think I can't do it and switch off again. And that was a pattern for a lot of years.
00:38:32
Speaker
And I suppose what you're going to lead up to with this is you needed help to manage this situation. And that's the same, we say this all the time on the podcast, it's the same with any overwhelming feeling or situation that a teenager or a young person or anyone is in. It's too hard to do things like this on your own for most people, most of the time.
00:38:58
Speaker
Yes, I had had mental health support over the years. I had been under the mental health team during parts of my 20s and 30s. I was struggling with depression, with PTSD, obviously with the self-harm that I
00:39:21
Speaker
I still don't say I stopped doing it. To all intents and purposes, I stopped doing it, but there's something in my brain that has to know it's still an option. And saying I stopped feels final. Whereas what I actually did was just try and spend longer and longer without doing it.
00:39:42
Speaker
Yes, I'm going to take us completely off track, but I'll swerve right back on. What would that do to you, telling yourself that you stopped? It would make me immediately want to do it. Right. I think that's important to say that. It is. The way I'm happy to go into exactly how I started to get it under control. I almost did it. If you think that's relevant,
00:40:12
Speaker
Well, yeah, go for it. This is all relevant. I mean, nothing's ever a single issue, is it? Nope. Nothing's ever a single issue. No, and I think it's important for parents to understand because I've seen so many parents, unfortunately, self-harming is quite common. And I've seen so many parents completely freak out about it. Totally naturally, I would freak out about it if it was my kids.
00:40:36
Speaker
and lay the law down and insist and ban. I saw someone saying the other day that their partner was going to keep their child off school and take all the knives out of the house and the scissors until... I think it's counterproductive, isn't it? It is, but I completely get it. It's an alarming thing to see your child do. And of course you don't want them to.
00:41:06
Speaker
For me, it was very entrenched. I'd done it for a long time. You know, it had had more intense and less intense periods. But what I ultimately did was I, if I got the urge to do it, I would say to myself, you can, but do it in 30 seconds.
Managing Self-Harm Urges
00:41:29
Speaker
Not now. And then I would try to wait 30 seconds and then I would still do it.
00:41:36
Speaker
And then once that started to feel like something I could do, then I would say, okay, you can, but do it in a minute. And this all took time. And then once that became something I felt I could do,
00:41:56
Speaker
Then it became a minute and a half or two minutes or five minutes or half an hour. And then it got to a point. And this was hard. I think one of the things about self-harm is that it's a very immediate payoff, if you like. Yes. I got relief very quickly from all of the big emotions.
00:42:22
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it's like drink or drugs, isn't it? It just takes all of that emotional pain away temporarily and you've got to remind yourself it's going to come back. It's temporarily and it causes different problems. It's not like it fixes things. It transfers the problem to a different place. But taking that immediacy out of it,
00:42:49
Speaker
helped me to feel a bit more like I was starting to control it rather than it controlling me. Yes, oh that's a really good point. And then when it got to a point where I could delay about an hour then I was finding that sometimes by the time an hour had passed
00:43:13
Speaker
I didn't need to do it. Right. And it was vital for me that I always had permission. The wording to myself was always you can but in a bit. Yes. And I was surprised when it got to that point where sometimes the urge had passed.
00:43:36
Speaker
But I tried to just be like, okay, that's interesting and carry on with that strategy overall.
00:43:45
Speaker
And then after a while of that, I realised that what I was saying to myself had changed a bit to, you can, but later. I wasn't specifying a time. It was just, you can, but later. And having the permission helped me calm down a bit. And then I was sometimes even forgetting, rather than like the early days,
00:44:10
Speaker
where I was literally counting down the 30 seconds. It became sometimes enough just to say you can, but later. And just over time, I realised it was longer and longer and longer since I'd done it.
00:44:26
Speaker
And I'm not saying I've never done it since then, but we're talking a handful of times, and I still have it as an option. And I sometimes think, this is it, I'm going to do it now, and I still usually don't.
00:44:45
Speaker
Yeah, I'm just struck by that hour of time that that's how long it takes for painful feelings to be around and for you to be able to tolerate them before they settle down and don't cause you so much pain and I think that's worth
00:45:06
Speaker
highlighting for people because, well, for teenagers and anyone who does things they wish they didn't do in order to avoid their feelings. 100%. And it didn't matter how many people had said to me, if you just sit with it, it will pass. I did not believe them. My feelings were bigger than that. My feelings were more painful than that. They just didn't understand.
00:45:35
Speaker
But ultimately I kind of worked out my own way and resentfully they were right. Yeah, but look, no one ever learned anything from being told it was so. We learn through experience, don't we? So I just think that's a great strategy, 30 seconds then. Well, we call it expanding your window of tolerance in counseling. But yeah, just give yourself a time scale and then see if you can increase. It's a great strategy. I love it.
00:46:04
Speaker
Moving back to that, that was so useful. Thank you. And, you know, this is going to be a this isn't already a really useful episode for so many reasons. Good luck titling this one. Well, this is what I'm thinking. The people who've come here thinking it's about hoarding, wanting some insight and some help. Let's get into that. What do you feel like you've got your hoarding under control?
Progress with Hoarding Through CBT
00:46:31
Speaker
I feel like I understand it a lot better and I understand myself a lot better and I am making progress in my home but it is slow and it is hard and it is taking a lot of work. So I feel like my head has made a lot of progress but my surroundings still need a lot of work.
00:46:59
Speaker
Okay, so there's still that need to cope with something. Are you in therapy? You don't have to answer that question if you don't want to. Yeah, no, I'm happy to. I am. I had some CVT specifically around hoarding.
00:47:17
Speaker
which was really helpful. And I was surprised. I had very low expectations, if I'm honest. Right. I was expecting a formulaic kind of somebody working through a list of things that may or may not apply to me. And what I actually had was a very tailored, very personalized, genuinely useful
00:47:46
Speaker
teen, I think, sessions with the CBT therapist. And I learned some techniques in that that I still use daily. One was
00:48:08
Speaker
this is where the perfectionism comes in. I would want to do something about my surroundings and then I would think, well, there's no point because I can't do it properly.
00:48:21
Speaker
Oh, right. You've got to do the whole job. Yeah. Got to get it right. It's got to, you know, and so I would, I would think, well, there's no point trying cause I can't, I can't do it properly. So I wouldn't try. And one of the things that CBT gave me was that
00:48:45
Speaker
between sessions we would kind of set me a goal, take out five bags or do some work on the kitchen, you know, something like that. But instead of that being a task, the way the therapist would frame it was as an experiment.
00:49:08
Speaker
And just framing it that way helped me a lot because if something's an experiment, it's not something you as a person pass or fail. It's something you're trying and it works or it doesn't work. And you can build on it and learn from it.
00:49:39
Speaker
So if I had a task of taking two bags to the charity shop, then I could pass or fail that. Yes. If we were doing an experiment where I was going to try and take two bags to the charity shop, I could either do it and then we could talk about
00:50:04
Speaker
how that went and can we experiment with three bags this week? Or if I couldn't do it, we could look at why and then adapt it to see if we could find a way I could do it. And it really helped that perfectionism where previously I couldn't start anything because I knew I couldn't do it properly.
00:50:29
Speaker
Yes. To suddenly, oh let's try the thing and it will work or it won't. Yeah well and see what happens and I'm you know it's feeling very much like what you just described to me about the self-harm. Yes. Let's just try this and see how it goes. Yeah and the other thing that I also use daily was say my
00:50:58
Speaker
task experiment for the week was to do half an hour a day in my bedroom. Then what quite often happened was I would walk into my bedroom with intention and then go, nope, and walk out again. Right. And you mean intention of cleaning up? Yes, yes.
00:51:22
Speaker
And what CBC taught me to do was to not stop at that nope, to say, what is that nope? Yes. What's the resistance? And I was quite resistant to that at first. I was going, no, my brain just stopped at no, there was nothing more. But she would push a bit and I realised that it was usually one of a few things. It could be a perfectionist nope. I can't do this properly, so there's no point.
00:51:52
Speaker
But then if it was a perfectionist note, I kind of knew how to handle that. Or it might be an overwhelmed note, like there's just too much. This is impossible. And then I could go, okay, I have some strategies for overwhelm. Let's try those. And so questioning what I thought was a very final, I can't.
00:52:16
Speaker
Yes. Often helps me to work out what's actually going on and often I've got like a mental toolkit and often I just if it's overwhelmed I open up the mental toolkit and go oh this helps with overwhelm and that helps the overwhelm. So for me with overwhelm break it down I'm not trying to sort out my house I'm trying to sort out
00:52:45
Speaker
this bit of this pile. So they were two really useful things I got from CBT. And now I see a counsellor initially, well, not just about hoarding. I mentioned earlier that I've got PTSD, so some of the trauma stuff kind of reawakened and I wasn't coping well with that. So sought out counselling.
00:53:12
Speaker
That but it's more of a it's less focused than CBT. It's more holistic. And so other stuff. You know, we kind of talk about the all which is really what I need at the moment. I think the focus CBT was great at that point.
00:53:33
Speaker
And at this point, this is what I need. Yeah. Yeah. There's definitely value in CBT. That's not my mode of counseling, but, um, I have experienced it and it worked really well for me with insomnia, um, several years ago. Uh, so I am a fan of CBT and my understanding of CBT is that it's kind of.
00:53:55
Speaker
teaching ourselves to reframe situations so that we can cope with them better and they don't bother us so much. Is that how you experienced it? Definitely. I had a lot of ways of thinking that were very entrenched and very kind of me digging my heels in that things were a particular way. I did the same. My first two sessions of CBT were stand-up arguments.
00:54:23
Speaker
Yeah, he just wasn't taking me seriously. I thought. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, and she would kind of gently just push a bit. And yeah, it was I was because it's got in some ways quite a bad reputation. I think if I always say I don't think CVT is a complete solution.
00:54:47
Speaker
No. But I do think that as part of an approach, it can be really, really valuable, especially if you've got something specific you want to look at. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly it. It reframed my fear around not getting enough sleep to the point that I didn't have to worry about not getting enough sleep. And so I started sleeping. Yeah. Yeah.
00:55:15
Speaker
Which just sounds ludicrous, even saying that out loud now, but it happened. So trust the process, guys. If you're thinking about counselling of any kind, get into it and give it a few weeks before you throw the baby out with the bathwater, as it were.
Recognizing Hoarding in Teens
00:55:33
Speaker
Right, so I would love you to tell us, as parents of teenagers, that's who mostly is listening to this podcast, when should we be worrying and looking to step in and gain some support for our children?
00:55:53
Speaker
When are we just looking at a messy bedroom for the seventh time this week because teenagers are tired, lazy, inherently trying to break away from the constraints of their parents' rules? Yeah. As teenagers with messy bedrooms, completely normal. I think the things to look out for, definitely an unusual attachment to the things.
00:56:21
Speaker
If they can't get rid of things that you feel are objectively, not necessarily rubbish, but really not worth keeping, my Easter egg box, there was no real reason to keep that. But I couldn't see how I couldn't see that myself.
00:56:47
Speaker
No, well, you couldn't see that you, you couldn't see how to let go the potential of the Easter egg box. Yeah, completely. So I think unusual attachment to those things, I think acquiring more things than are needed and obviously teenagers don't generally have much spending power, but that can be things like
00:57:12
Speaker
if someone's, you know, it's nice people leave things out in the street to be collected, if they're bringing things home that somebody's left out for collection, or if, you know, their friends are getting rid of things and they take it all, that kind of acquiring, or if they, you know, if they've got a part-time job and they, you know, they do have some spending power, keep an eye on whether that acquisition feels
00:57:42
Speaker
Like it's tipped beyond, I need some clothes for this party into something a bit less. I hesitate to use the word rational because it's not as objective as it sounds. But that kind of thing. And also distress at the prospect of getting rid of things.
00:58:07
Speaker
Yes. If somebody has a messy bedroom, but no particular attachment to their stuff, they can tidy up if they put their mind to it. Yes. If you change the wifi password until it's tidy. Yes. And, um, you know, they can do it if they just can't be bothered or they've got too much schoolwork or whatever, but if they put their mind to it, they can do it. If
00:58:34
Speaker
despite promises of good things or promises of bad things, they really, really just can't. I think that is the kind of thing to look out for, I would say.
00:58:50
Speaker
Yeah and then the second part of my question was what should we do about that as parents? I think it's tempting to insist like you were saying about self-harm it's tempting to say well you've just got to do it you've just got to you're not you know you're grounded till your bedroom is tidy yeah and I get that parents are
00:59:12
Speaker
exhausted under a lot of pressure. Parents just want their kids tied to their bedroom, you know. Basically. Yeah, I get it. I get it. But, you know, there are many reasons I'm not a parent and dealing with that kind of stuff is one of them. It was a very conscious choice I made. You're very wise about it because I've learned that through experience. I have to tolerate hard things because it's not the right time or the right way for my children.
00:59:43
Speaker
I think try to see that your child is expressing something or protecting themselves from something else that's wrong. Yeah. And that while it feels like it's about the stuff
01:00:00
Speaker
it's not really about the stuff. The stuff is how it's manifesting and materializing in the same way as it might manifest as not being able to eat or as self-harm or as drinking or as skipping school or any of those things. So frustrating as that messy bedroom might be, if you can look beyond
01:00:26
Speaker
and try and figure out what's actually wrong. And if that means getting outside help for your child, that's a good thing to do. And I know some parents can feel a bit threatened by that. Like, what are they going to say to the counsellor about me? Are they going to just talk about how, you know, I'm a terrible mom or
01:00:54
Speaker
Oh, that, yeah. We have to put that out of our heads because it's about the kids, it's about what help they get to come through it. Exactly. And you all know far better than I, counselling is not all about blaming the parents. No. Young people, especially nowadays, live in a vast world
Teen Challenges and Online Exposure
01:01:19
Speaker
of so much information and so much input. Yeah. And while that's good in some ways, they can Google how do you know if you're gay in a way that I could not. And that's amazing. But it also has a negative side. It has a dark side where they are seeing, you know, if they might be seeing videos from Palestine
01:01:49
Speaker
in their daily life because they open Instagram, they might be seeing homophobic hate preachers on TikTok. They might be seeing
01:02:00
Speaker
porn in a way that damages them because they do not understand what they're seeing and they don't know how to process any of that. We don't know how to process a lot of that. No, and it may not even be anything that damaging from our perspective, it may be anxiety over grades.
01:02:24
Speaker
or just trivialised it, just a friendship issue. Which is such a parent thing to do. They're huge. We've all got anxieties. One of my episodes is on climate change anxiety. Because some kids really get distressed about that. So it could be anything, nothing catastrophic for them in that moment.
01:02:50
Speaker
but they're still dealing with anxieties and better that they talk to someone than no one. And family relationships will come up in counselling, but that's... and I'm sure that's awkward for the parent who's picking the kid up at the end and has to say hi to the therapist and thinking, what have they just heard about me?
01:03:14
Speaker
But I think it's so important to be able to get past that. And if your child can't explain to you what's wrong or they can, but between you, you don't know how to deal with it. Looking outside, asking school, do they have any resources? Anything like that. Finding reputable websites with good mental health information that is appropriate for their age.
01:03:43
Speaker
These are all things you can do that put in a patchwork can help the child to start to address what's wrong now, rather than that really getting deeply in there and being an issue in their forties and fifties and sixties and yeah.
01:04:08
Speaker
Yeah I also want to say that the the most important thing we can do as parents in any situation is try and check, put to one side our own fears and insecurities when our kids have got something going on for them and just listen and do that thing that we talked about right at the beginning of accepting them for who they are
01:04:31
Speaker
and asking them what help they think they need rather than trying to fix it, which is so hard. I say this to parents all the time. It's so hard. We've been fixing our kids' problems since the day they were born, turning them into an independent adult. It's a process of stopping fixing, and that's hard, actually.
01:04:53
Speaker
because what you think they need might be different to what they think they need and if you're overruling that and saying no I know because I'm not a parent but I am a fixer and I do have to hold that back in myself you know just if a friend's got something wrong I want to go right let's do but I have to I have to quite proactively say no just listen they just need to tell me and then
01:05:19
Speaker
Yeah, because otherwise you run the risk of invalidating them all over again and making the whole problem worse. And if their issue is that they're not feeling heard, or they don't feel they can be themselves, then trying to control what happens next is not what they need.
01:05:39
Speaker
Are there, you mentioned resources online, are there online resources for particularly for young people, but for people with hoarding issues?
Resources and Support for Hoarding
01:05:49
Speaker
There are some, there are not a lot, but it is growing.
01:05:54
Speaker
One of the reasons I started the podcast was that I wanted this podcast to exist and it didn't. Right, exactly. I wanted there to be a podcast from somebody who hoards and being a fixer, I guess.
01:06:11
Speaker
And also, ironically, being somebody who fills spaces, there was a space that needed filling. And so I started doing it, not really thinking anybody would listen. It was quite cathartic for me and it was to be accountable. And then people did listen in.
01:06:36
Speaker
You know, in some numbers, I've had something like 170,000 downloads. Right. And it's very interesting that often the messages I get from listeners come to me in DMs or by email because they too cannot publicly
01:07:03
Speaker
acknowledge that this is a problem for them. They don't want to reply to me on Twitter because people will see. And so it's been that normalizing thing, like with being gay, part of the experience of the podcast for me has been other people are listening and feeling like, oh, there are other people that think this.
01:07:29
Speaker
but then they're contacting me and I'm going, oh, there are other people that think this. And so while there are more resources, I think, than there ever have been, there are still not close to enough to fill these gaps. And I don't know
01:07:50
Speaker
of any offhand specifically for young people, I will have a look around and if I find anything, I will let you know and you can add it to the show notes. I will do, thank you. I know there are some support groups, but not specifically for young people, although I'm sure young people would be welcome.
01:08:10
Speaker
Um, but there's, for instance, in, I know listeners will be all over the world, but in the Midlands, in the UK, there's a social enterprise called Cloud's End, and they do some work directly with, um, people in that area who hoard. There are, there is another social enterprise called Hoarding UK that does very good work and has some
01:08:37
Speaker
support groups that meet I think in person and then there's the odd thing here and there it's not very connected up and and provision is not what it might be but I do think it's improving.
01:08:53
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm just resonating because that's the reason that I started this podcast, because I still wanted support and ideas and insight into parenting teenagers. And there's loads of parenting support and insight on social media and online until your kids get to secondary school.
01:09:16
Speaker
And then the support only comes from the so-called experts because the parents stopped talking about it because their kids would hate them if they found them talking about their stuff. So that's why I do this.
01:09:31
Speaker
So that makes complete sense. I will put all of your links in the show notes, but just tell people where they can find your podcast and you online. The easiest place is probably my website, which is overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.uk. You can find the podcast in any of the podcast apps, it's called Overcome Compulsive Hoarding with That Hoarder.
01:09:57
Speaker
and links to my social media and everything are there. Right. Brilliant. I will put all of that in the show notes. Is there anything else that we've not talked about today that you think really needs to be out there that families need to know? If a young person is growing up in somebody else's hoard, if their parents hoard, and they are growing up in that,
01:10:26
Speaker
That is really, this is hard to hear for the parents, but that is really damaging to the young person. I've interviewed two children of hoarders on the podcast and they talked about feeling like to their parents, the stuff was more important than they were.
01:10:52
Speaker
They would try to get through childhood with their own bedroom being a place of safety in the midst of the chaos of the home. But then often their parent would start filling up their bedroom as well as everywhere else because more space was needed.
01:11:12
Speaker
Yeah. I spoke to somebody who their parent, her own bedroom got full up and so she had to share a bed with her mum because of the stuff, which is very invasive. When you're a teenager and you need privacy and you can't invite friends over because of the state of the place and so you're having to keep
01:11:42
Speaker
Your parents' secret, all of that is really damaging. And that's not to say the parent is a bad person, it's to say the parent is really struggling. But it feels important to say that we can't ignore that it does do damage to the young person.
01:12:06
Speaker
And if you're a parent in that situation, don't use this to beat yourself up. Don't use this to hate yourself or berate yourself. But do use that knowledge as a motivation to do your best to make changes. Get some help. Yeah. If this has been a wake up call for anybody, then
01:12:33
Speaker
Yeah, that's the advice, isn't it? Ask for help, reach out, get some support to help you start turning this around, even if it's just a little bit. Yeah, I do know of some online support for Children of Horders, which I will pass on to you again for the show notes.
01:12:54
Speaker
Look, thank you so much. This has been such an enlightening conversation and useful in so many more ways than I imagined when we first started to talk. So thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. Thank you for having me. It's such a stigmatised condition that if I can do anything to
01:13:18
Speaker
humanize it a bit and explain that it's not what it looks like on the surface, then I'm happy to. Thank you.
01:13:29
Speaker
Thank you so much for listening. I really do appreciate it. Thank you to everyone who's already rated and reviewed the podcast. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Amazon, it would mean the world to me if you could leave a review. It really helps get the word out, as well as making me very happy to read what you have to say.
01:13:49
Speaker
If this episode strikes a chord for you, please share it with anyone else you know who might be in the same boat and hit subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. If you have a story or suggestion for something you'd like to see covered on the podcast, you can email me at Teenage Kicks Podcast at gmail.com or message me on Instagram. I am Helen Woods. I love hearing from all my listeners. It really makes difference to me on this journey.
01:14:18
Speaker
See you next week when I'll be chatting to another brilliant guest about the highs and lows of parenting teens. Bye for now!