Hoarding, inability to throw things away?

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The teenage daughter made an elaborate effort to hide her hoarding. She won't let anyone in her room most of the time so when we had insisted she clean her room she was pushing everything into her closet or under her bed. Then when she ran out of space there she just let it pile up everywhere or packed it into corners. This was totally disorganized co-mingled everything, trash, clothes, things, you name it.

When we try to get her to clean, organize or throw away things she admittedly doesn't want or need she just freezes. She can eventually break things down, sort them into logical piles and determine what needs to be thrown away. But she will go to some very elaborate ends to avoid dealing with even a small amount of mess.

Can some of this be an Aspergers issue? I am the total opposite, I want order and will toss or give away something that doesn't have a valid use or reason to keep. Her dad who I don't think is an aspie has horrible problems dealing with throwing things away or organizing so I am in a constant struggle with him to at least not throw everything in a disorganized heap. Her issue seemed almost like his issue on steroids.

I have spent the last 3 days sorting through giant piles of stuff with her to figure out what needs to stay and what goes. So how do I really make sure this doesn't keep happening? She can't be like this as an adult out on her own. We have set rules before but ended up in major struggles over it usually at the same time she was dealing with an even bigger issue like bouts of depression.

I am going to seriously limit what can be in her room after we get it repainted and put new flooring in.
Clothes, books, actual collections, things that are tools like phone, camera, sewing machine. But anything like craft supplies or things she wants to save for sentimental reasons but doesn't actually need on hand, those will have to be somewhere else in the house.

We have tried getting her on routines but she will either not do the things because she just can't get going or will lie about doing the thing to avoid having to get going and do something.

No, I don't believe that it is. My late wife was somewhat of a hoarder, and she was a NT. I definitely don't like a lot of things around.

Hoarding is caused by an emotional an attachment to physical objects that goes beyond their mere utility.

If you just enforce external routines without dealing with the emotional pain and neglect that is precipitating the need to cling to objects, it will keep recurring.

The inability to sort stuff and make decisions about what to throw away comes from executive dysfunction. For each and every item there is a mental anguish when making a decision about what to do with it, and the whole mess itself becomes an insurmountable monolithic thing that can't be dealt with because the person has difficulty breaking the task of cleaning down manageable parts. Yes, emotions are involved, but getting therapy for your feelings still won't make you able to keep a clean room if you have this problem.

I'm not sure that this is hoarding behavior. It could be an executive function problem. She may need help creating categories (clothes, dishes, garbage, etc.). Then she may need help staying on task, or you may have to break the job down into units she can handle. For example, you could tell her just to throw all her dirty clothes in the laundry. Then, later, you could give her a bag and tell her just to pick up all the garbage. The decision-making that goes into cleaning a room may be overwhelming her.
My son is a little younger (10), but he has similar problems. For example, if I tell him to pick up his Legos, he may try to color-code them into different piles or containers. Or, he may feel he needs to separate all the Legos, so that no two bricks are joined together. I have to be very clear about what the job entails, and what is unnecessary work. He is much more willing to pick them up when it's clear that I'm not asking him to do something that takes hours.

It does sound more like executive dysfunction, which is very much an ASD trait.

Hoarding is more about valuing every little scrap of stuff than it is about not knowing how to get started sorting it.

To be completely honest, I have some issues with both, myself. I've created a lot of what my husband calls time capsules over the years cleaning up, because I don't have the time and the will to go through what is, for me, a very tedious and sometimes painful process of deciding what to keep and what not to keep. It still goes much better if I have someone willing to go through it with me. I do permanently store a lot of "memories," and the "time capsules" are mostly mail and paper; by the time I get to sorting them, I can often say with certainty, "yeah, that is 6 years old and I now know I will never need it."

A few past experiences help me keep the level of clutter and over-keep to a somewhat livable level: I've SEEN the inside of some true hoarder homes, and I know I do NOT want to live like that. Things are still worse than I feel comfortable allowing most acquaintances to see, and it is of endless irritation to my husband (I give him credit for accepting my limitations and keeping his grumbling to a minimum), but there is always a point where I get sick of it myself and carve out some time to handle the gruesome project.

I find it a fantastic birthday or Christmas gift when a relative gives me a day of clean up help! It will always be an overwhelming task for me, and I'm not even full-on ASD with full-on executive dysfunction issues, so having someone willing to give me the gift of their time and patience is something I appreciate. A true hoarder would not, because they don't WANT to get rid of their stuff; they value it ALL (my elderly neighbor was truly offended when anyone offered to even buy any of her "treasurers" from her).

So, I think it is a good sign that she WILL do it, albeit with help. That means she appreciates the value of an organized space, and what she needs most is simply help keeping it. That help is something you can give her, even as an adult. Some great conversations can occur when knee deep in paper and memories

I think for me it's more of an executive function issue.
My room is clean, but messy. I have worked on it several times however and thrown away some useless junk, but there is an entire rack of VHS/DVDs and the top of my closet is stacked full of VHS tapes as well. My closet looks like a bomb went off. You can get to the clothes, but then there piles of uneven boxes, newspapers, school work and other collectibles underneath. Near my bed is a bookshelf that holds awards I've gotten from schools (like Student of the Month) and most of my bottle/can collection. Underneath my bed is my coin/paper money collection, which I very rarely add more anymore.
But thank goodness I'm not at the stage of not being able to reach my bed due to 75 boxes in the way.

I don't have an emotional attachment to the VHS tapes, for example, but I keep a lot of them around for a few reasons. #1 - Many of my tapes (home-recorded ones obviously) include the original commercials, some from over 30 years ago, which I have found at yard sales/estate sales/etc over the years. Nostalgia! #2 - In case we have this terrible situation where we lose cable due to an unpaid bill or a massive outage, the tapes come in handy to watch SOMETHING. My mom is mad when the TV is OFF, she wants it on all day. Finally, #3 - There a lot of good movies in the collection, and it's better on my economy. Who needs all of the director's commentary and alternative ending of "Die Hard" on the special edition DVD when I could go to any Goodwill, find a retail VHS copy for 99c (or less) and watch Bruce Willis be the action star he is?
The tapes may disintegrate decades from now, but I have rental tapes from 1980 and 1982 that still play.

Yep. Sounds like executive functioning problem. It also sounds like me as a teenager.

The solution to this is to develop routines and rules for everything. The problem is that this is nearly impossible to do as a teenager, because you don't even know where to start. I'm not even fully on the spectrum (shadow + ADD), and I didn't figure it out until well into adulthood. You are going to have to help her with it, but that is not as simple as it sounds. Here is where I see you will hit roadbumps:

1) You are going to have to help her with this. Both of you will end up annoyed by this. You because you will start to feel like you "shouldn't have to be helping her with this at this age" and she because... well, she's a teenager.

2) You are not wired like her. In this regard, your pairing is a lot like mine and my mom's. She is neat, tidy, and organized by nature. Despite the fact that it sounds like this should be a match made in heaven, it's quite the opposite. If your daughter's brain worked like yours, her room would be neat, tidy, and organized. You are going to have to help her find the rules and routines that work for her, which will not likely make any sense to you. But you are going to have to help her find them. She may actually develop rules and routines that seem ridiculous to you or others. For example, mayonnaise MUST be on the upper shelf of my refrigerator in the back left corner. If it is not there, I get mad, and people think I am nuts. It isn't that I am some kind of rigid, mayo-police. It is that I am preventing having 5 open containers of mayo in the refrigerator. If it's not there, it is quite likely that I will not see it amongst the rest of the refrigerator contents, and I will open another jar, thinking we are out.

(3) You are going to have to make her stick with this. Preferably on a weekly basis. The exact same rules and routines each time. This is going to cause fights. But you are helping to establish a larger habit that will help her when she is on her own.

OR.

You could just close her door and leave it alone. That is what my mom did, and I ended up being a happy, successful person anyway. Who has a passably organized and tidy house (not my mom's, mind you, but CPS would never take my kids over it )

My mom's way worked, but it did leave me having to figure this stuff out on my own as an adult. I think it would have been helpful if I would have already known it.

Other things that have worked in my house, because both of my kids have inherited this trait from me:

They have minimal things in their bedrooms and minimal time is spent in there. They basically sleep in there and use it for when they need down time.

The formal living room was converted into a "kids' lounge." It is where all of their stuff is and where they hang out. Because it is part of the family's "shared space" and not their own private bedrooms, they are more compliant with following my rules and routines for keeping it passably tidy. I'm also able to intervene before it gets to the "point of no return," which is a real point where anyone who has this issue can tell you, once you get to that point, getting things back on track takes monumental effort. This is also an important part of my "success." I have learned where my "point of no return" is. The point at which clutter will take over and turn my livable space into what looks like an episode of hoarders. I avoid that point, and if I sense I am getting close to it, I will spend an entire day getting on top of it.

Another issue that has effected me personally. I am not sure how to fix it, but I wish I didn't have this problem, so maybe you can work with your daughter to avoid it. I either "hoard" things, meaning I keep things that I do not need, will never use, or do not want, because I do not want to have to spend the mental energy of dealing with it, or I go to the other extreme and I purge EVERYTYHING. I have thrown away many things I wish I didn't. My kids' old report cards, their first teeth, their first drawings. Mother's day presents they made for me. Their birth announcements. Things that do have sentimental value that I wish I would have kept for them when they were older. I did keep them for a long time, then one day when I was trying to get organized, I didn't know what to do with them, so I threw them away. I either keep everything, or I get rid of everything. I don't know how to do "in between." So, if you could help your daughter create rules and routines for that, I think it would be awesome.

My messy room might look a little different come June of next year. I HAVE to keep all of my school work from high school, because you never know when a teacher will ask you to pull out an old document from one or two years ago...after graduating next June, it all goes in the trash! Forgot to add that to my original reply.

I don't let any visitors into my room. I feel that they would be mad at me for how messy my room is and how "weird" I am with all of the magazines, VHS tapes and bottles/cans I keep in there.

Thanks for all the advice. After a few days of shoveling out her room and then sub sorting everything again to determine what is really useful or not I have a better idea where her challenges are. When we were down to tasks like what clothes go to donations, trash, keep she was able to work through this without a big bunch of issues. She wasn't struggling to let go of something that obviously has no use. The sub focus of clothes was much easier than the big task of digging through the massive piles of co-mingled stuff.

She was already using these plastic boxes made for scrap book paper storage to store her art supplies. I went and bought two more bundles of them from Costco. She filled those with other things she needed to keep and sort. She also found my label maker to be very useful and made name labels for all of the plastic boxes. But she had to ask me where to put the label on each box. Putting it on the side that faces out when stacked didn't occur to her.

The more we worked through things and discussed what should go back into her room and why, it seems like executive function issues.

Any suggestions what can help learn or work through these executive function issues?

Some of it might be hoarding. We tend to be, contrary to outward appearance, very emotional people who like to cling to material things for the memories of times and people that they represent. Part of the solution to that is to find a way (make a collage, take a picture, choose one or two things to concentrate memories in and let the others go, understand that the memories are not being served by letting the things rot) to separate the object from the memory. The other part is to learn to process the emotions, instead of keeping them in cold storage.

Most of it, though, sounds like executive dysfunction. It's just too damn overwhelming to sort all those piles of crap and figure out what is garbage, what is useful daily, what is useful seasonally or cyclically, what will be useful in the future, what is of no utility but worthwhile emotional value, what is without value to us and needs to be given away, and what is garbage.

I have a really hard time with that. I've HAD TO learn, because there are six of us living in this house and I have no wish to heat, cool, and pay for storage space or rent a unit. It took me, however, well into my 30s to figure it out on my own. My teenage bedroom was a nightmare; so were the first two houses I lived in. I didn't even START to get a grip on it until I had 3 kids in a 1300 square foot cabin (only about 800 sf of which was usable living space, the upstairs being entirely taken up with toys, books, household goods, clothing for the kids to grow into, and Stuff that I didn't know how to dispose of).

Becoming a prepper gave me a system, and a motivation. Motivation: If I wanted space to store food and tools, and to work on DIY skills, I had to get rid of the extraneous Stuff and organize what was left so that I could find it immediately, in the dark, under stress. System: Need it now, need it under the following clearly defined and reasonably possible scenario, love it dearly, or in the way.

It wasn't perfect; it still isn't. There are things-- like filing papers-- that are so damn stressful for me to try to process that one of two things happens: Either my husband ends up doing it, or on one given day every two or three weeks, it is the only thing I do that day (because I have to start when I'm fresh, I have to take a lot of breaks to let my brain cool down, and when I'm finished there's nothing left-- I'm serving leftovers, reading a book, and going to bed early).

I'm not suggesting that the child become a prepper. That worked for me because it was something I had long had an interest in and finally let out of the box around the time my second kid was born. She does, however, need to find an internal motivation-- be it the ability to find her craft supplies, or having room to actually work on a project, or whatever. Notice I said "internal motivation." "Avoiding parental disapproval" probably won't work. It will, in fact, be counterproductive-- it is very difficult to come up with the mental resources to engage in executive tasks when you're diverting resources to thinking about how mad Mom is/is going to be.

Start here: Clean it, all of it, with her. Put on some music she likes, and DON'T COMPLAIN. Don't gripe, don't b***h, don't nag, don't even try to think of ways to prevent this from happening in the future. Make 3 piles: Keep, donate, and trash. Trash the trash, donate the donate, and put the keep away. The rule is: If we can't find a place to put it, neatly and tidily and accessibly (but not necessarily conventionally-- the goal is health, safety, and organization, not BHG décor), then it needs to be donated or thrown away.

When that's done, move on to prevention. Start with cleaning it up WITH HER about every other day (the goal being to do the tasks while the tasks are small). Don't nag, don't b***h, don't complain-- in short, don't make it a value judgment. These are skills that don't fully mature in the average NT child until the early to mid 20s if they're not actively taught. Set a timer, keep it short (at 37, I'm a fan of the 20-minute pick-up). The ability to get it done quickly and move on to something that doesn't suck may eventually become in intrinsic motivator.

Eventually, you will hit on a system that works. It just takes time, practice, and patience (and probably won't be a system that you come up with and impose on her-- God knows I tried everything from BHG to Flylady to absolutely no avail before I finally found a method involving lots of shelves and bins and quarterly "spic and strack sessions" in which things are sorted out, donated, and made once again perfect that actually functions for me-- and AFAIK isn't in any book, magazine, or manual).

I don't think it's an AS thing, however, my husband who is diagnosed with AD/HD cannot seem to throw things away either. He keeps all his clothes, never throws anything away. Bills, can't throw anything away. If it weren't for me, we'd be on Hoarders lol Once I discovered about his AD/HD I began reading about it and found that he was truly no able to figure out what to throw away and what not to throw away. For about a week a month ago, every day that he came home I took out just ONE of his boxes of stuff (stuff that he has never looked at for at least a couple of years...ugh) and took everything out, had him sitting right in front of me, put three piles (just like the show ) and little by little we were able to get through all his stuff.

By the way, I purchased this book and it has helped greatly. Maybe it can help your child as well.

ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life: Strategies that Work from a Professional Organizer and a Renowned ADD Clinician

Also, I have read enough now that MANY of the ADHD symptoms are very similar to AS, yet of course, there are some minor differences. It seems that now they are finding out that possibly some kids may be misdiagnosed with AS or ADHD and actually have the other. Also, some years ago many thought that you could not have BOTH, but in fact, you can. In fact, my son was diagnosed as PDD-NOS by one doctor, AS by another doctor, ADHD by another...he has an AS mom and an ADHD dad...we can now clearly see what is related to ADHD and what is related to AS.

Good luck!

I used to worry I might have hoarding tendencies until I learned that hoarding is not the same as collecting things as a special interest. Collectors organize and display the things they get and collect certain types of things like Pez Dispensers or teddy bears. Hoarders just let junk pile up everywhere even when it gets really gross and unsanitary.

I've watched enough of those hoarding shows to know that they usually suffered some traumatic experience or had parents who were hoarders themselves, they don't think they have a problem even when it's so obvious to anyone else that it is, and just suddenly throwing it all out is going to send their anxiety through the roof.