Ways To Help A Family Member Who Hoards

once you identify this as a problem in a loved one um probably the best approach is to sit down and talk with them about it in in as calm and reasonable way as possible the worst thing you can do is to volunteer to go in and throw things away for them or to go in and throw things away when they're not around while doing that while clearing out someone with a hoarding problem might solve the immediate condition of the home the problem with the immediate condition of the home in the long run these these attempts are usually failures because what happens is in short order the person fills the home up again and now there there is such a strain in the relationship that uh that they're unlikely to seek help or to seek out um their family member for help again so what we advise is that people sit down with the person and try to come to talk through these issues to help to educate them about about hoarding behavior as a problem and about ways in which they can maybe try to do something to reduce the risk that's associated with this behavior for themselves now ideally the situation would be to get them into some kind of treatment for hoarding disorder oftentimes people aren't willing to do that and so the next best thing is to engage them in a conversation so that that they recognize this is a difficulty or a challenge and that they're trying to do something about it frequently what we see is people who who hoard recognize this at some level but they're unable to admit it to their family members because of the relationship that's developed over the clutter with their family member oftentimes people who hoard have spent years doing battle with their family members over their possessions and so their relationship is colored by these fights they've had and and the person with the hoarding problem tends to be very defensive whenever this issue comes up with a family member so it's very hard sometimes for family members to be able to communicate with a person with a hoarding problem so the first thing is to get through that somehow and and the the ways that we've seen their most effective is the person if the family member pulls back and and is not quite so pushy about throwing things away in fact when we in therapy when we deal with people with hoarding problems if our therapist and we we do lots of studies where we supervise therapists but if any of our therapists if we find them trying to convince the person to throw something away then we know they're on the wrong track because what we want to do is to get this person to the situ into the context where they will be making the arguments for why they should be throwing something away if someone's trying to convince them to throw something away then we have a dialogue set up where this helper is trying to convince something someone to throw something away and the person is trying to convince the helper of why they should keep the item and that's not the proper dialogue for any kind of behavior change the person may agree to throw away a few things here and there just to appease the helper but in the long run it's unlikely to have any influence on their behavior the thing that that that makes the most difference is when the person decides that they need to do something about it and they understand enough about the problem and that's key i think once they understand enough about the problem they understand that they're going to have to push themselves to challenge their attachments to these possessions to be able to get rid of them and that's one of the things that we do in therapy we've also been experimenting lately with self-help groups and what we're finding is if we can get people on their own to stand up and start challenging their own attachments to these possessions we do see some positive benefit from it you

Channel: International OCD Foundation

Views: 72,076

Keywords: ocd, obsession, compulsion, hoarding, mental health

Id: JkT0NioIPbk

Length: 4min 28sec (268 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 26 2012