I hope that you all don't get frustrated with my, seemingly, ridiculous questions. I am just trying to understand my son as much as possible. It is hard at times and I know that he gets frustrated with me when I just "don't get it".
Again, all of your responses are so helpful and it's actually uncanny how I have heard him express the same concerns that you have expressed in your posts.
He has told me, time and time again, that we just don't understand how many things are going through his head constantly. Whenever I (or anyone else) try to make plans with him, it simply makes his head spiral and he wants to know every little detail possible. I have explained to him that some details cannot be known.
The reason why I wanted to help him clean up his house was because he was consistently telling me that the clutter accumulated was causing him added stress and anxiety. Over the period of several meltdowns, he had basically destroyed much of his furniture and there was shattered glass and debris from broken items throughout the house. Prior to that, I had always respected his privacy and avoided going into his home.
It was quite an experience as we went through some of the items he had acquired over the years. He wanted to keep all of the broken wood because it could be used for something. I was able to convince him that the splintered wood could hurt his dogs and he agreed to get rid of most of it. There were at least 7 television sets that were broken in one way or another and I really wanted to discard as many of those as possible, however, he insisted on keeping them because he could fix them or use the parts to fix the others. This all sounded very logical to me, however, they have been in the house for years now, untouched. Of course, I respected his desire to hang on to them.
This is how he has been since he was a child with his own room. To me, the room was a disaster with things strewn all over the place. However, while he was in school, if I allowed the cleaning woman to do some light housekeeping in his room (dusting, vacuuming, etc), he would know it immediately and simply go ballistic saying that she "moved everything and now he couldn't find it". At the time, I simply thought that he was acting spoiled and unreasonable. Now I understand and feel horrible that I did not know how he felt back then.
I guess that my biggest worry about this necessity to hang on to stuff is that, at some point when can it be considered hoarding? The thought of someone condemning his home really makes me worry about what effect that might have on him.
By the way, after we 'straightened up' the downstairs he thanked me several times and told me that it did actually make him feel better.
08 May 2012, 2:08 am
