What'z up with these hoarders?

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I've had people wrongly tell me that I'm a hoarder. My reply is that I'm not a hoarder, just messy.

I'm completely unlike a real hoarder. Real hoarders go out of their way to buy crap they don't need and probably can't use and then stack it up around their house like it is some kind of treasure. I don't buy much at all of anything if I can possibly help it -- I just don't throw away anything that I am reasonably likely to use.

A good friend of mine is a hoarder. Or was before he got married. He used to go to auctions and buy just about anything and then store them in his house. When he filled up his house, he started renting storage units. The last time I knew how many storage units he had, it was 7 large units costing hundreds of dollars a month in storage fees.

One time I was visiting him and I said something about forgetting my comb and going to the store to buy one. He told me that I didn't need to do that and took me to one of his storage units where he rummaged around for a few minutes and then pulled out a box full of combs and gave me my choice from the box.

He then asked me if I need a pen. I said sure. He pulled out a large box full of pens for me to pick one. Every pen I picked out had been there so long that it was dried out. I don't think there was one good pen in that entire box of pens.

When his house got full, he bought a new house and moved into it. He had a pretty good start on filling that house up, too, when he got married. It wasn't long before they bought a new house together, but they still have the first two houses.

At one point, he cleaned out the first house, fixed it up, and rented it out for a few years. I don't know what the status on either house is now.

I am a hoarder, though nowhere near as bad as those on the show. The reason is basic insecurity. I don't know, being on benefits, what my financial situation will be in the future because of cutbacks, so I hoard clothes, books, toilet paper, hair dye, cooking foil, toiletries etc. I keep an old barbecue which a friend gave me incase I can't afford gas or electric in the future. I have a lot of home recorded DVDs incase I can't afford a TV licence in future so that I could watch them on my pc.

I find those documentaries quite upsetting. I do hoard things/develop attachments to random objects and keep onto them for a while. I don't think it would ever get as bad as in those shows though.

Hoarding is a form of OCD, and as someone Dx'd with OCD I do have some hoarding behavior with regards to books, though it's not to the pathological extent as the people on the TV shows have.

I hoard Transformers.

Thing is, I have encountered several that are actually worse than me on the internet in regards to this. I have over 60 in varying shape. I've heard of some with over 100+ and many a fan with duplicates of certain characters.

Kinda makes me glad my obsession is not too out of hand.

In one episode of Hoarders, the people actually speculated
that the guy had a form of autism, I got so excited hearing such a mention (s6e3, Alvin).

There have been a couple other episodes of the show (in s5e10, Vance & s6e9, Chris)
that I've seen where my "Aspie-dar" went off, and I swear these two guys (in separate episodes)
were on the spectrum of ASD, but nobody on the show said a thing about it.

I'd guess they hadn't been dx'd, but I was just about yelling at the screen,
saying "bring them for assessment, all this will make so much more sense
once they get the Asperger (now a defunct label, but you get the idea) name".

my house doesn't look like that i can't even throw away old train/bus tickets.

Several of my extended family members are bona fide hoarders and most of them are pack rats. My mother is a hoarder, my house is moldy to the point of making us sick, though my mother won't admit it. She realized that it is a problem, but she is too afraid to get rid of everything we don't need, she wants to "sort through" which means rationalize keeping, everything she attempts to clean out. I believe she only wants to go to a lower level of hording as an ideal goal.

Being raised with those thoughts that "this is still useful", "we might need this someday", "someone can use this" makes it difficult not to become a hoarder. I have become one.

Hoarding is actually pretty common in my area. The less severe hoards are actually accepted. I think there are actual classifications of severity of hoarding? Does any one know what they are?

I have a mild tendency to hoard. I need some willpower to get rid of things. If I don't try hard, things tend to accumulate easily. At the moment I have piles of empty boxes of cookies etc because I'm really stressed about some things and can't be bothered to worry about tidying up my place.

I've never watched that show and I'd be kind of scared to. I think it would make me upset that people are in their house and removing their stuff. Once in a cab my mother was talking to the driver about how we moved and he told her about a time he and his wife moved and years later realized that they had some boxes in their shed that they never opened. He said they threw them away without opening them figuring that if they went that long without the stuff they didn't need it. I was shocked that someone would do that. Anything could have been in there. They should have at least looked through it before throwing it away.

When we moved we actually managed to get over 50 bags of garbage out of a 2 bedroom apartment. That was our choice though and when we were done it looked like we still had about the same amount of stuff as when we started. Now we are in a three bedroom flat so we have a lot more room to keep stuff and aren't cramped in a tiny 2 bedroom with no dining room like before. In that apartment we did the hoarder thing with stuff piled up everywhere and paths to walk around.

I think it makes sense that a lot of the hoarding tends to start after a traumatic event or "perceived loss..." I think I started "rescuing" old and abandoned stuffed animals in earnest after my mom moved out of state because of my stepfather's work....it just made me sad to see sweet, adorable stuffed animals who had never done anything to hurt anyone that had just been "left behind," the way I felt I had. It was also around that time I started overeating/emotional eating, too. I got to see my mom on holiday breaks and some weekends, but that didn't really make the feeling of loss completely disappear. I still feel it every now and then, even as an adult, but it doesn't feel as bad now.

Complicating things is the fact that my stepmother doesn't seem to understand why I can't "drop my mother's hand" and want to go visit her at every opportunity I have, because "she was the one who left." If she's going to be so insensitive about the matter, I'd rather she not bring up the topic of my mother at all. I mean, my mom made some pretty big mistakes with me during my childhood, but at least now she's gotten to a point where she can accept me for who I am, and my stepmother still can't, for whatever reason. I don't think I'm THAT bad of a person.

However, I now do a periodic cleanout of my room where I set aside bunches of stuffed animals to give to a drop box belonging to a children's hospital/charity, so that the animals can go to children in the hospital, ones who have suffered accidents or trauma, etc.