Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the Ask Pastor John podcast. Here we talk every so often about wartime living. And we talk about minimalism, too. But those are not the same thing. The Christian life is not simply about decluttering our closets and living a simpler life. No. We aim at wartime simplicity, which is a more specific goal, a material simplicity in this world that’s on mission, not simply happy with being more organized. You can see how Pastor John has distinguished the two — wartime simplicity and minimalism — in the APJ book on pages 98–101.

Today we look at a new angle to the topic in an email from a woman who listens to the podcast from China. Here’s the email from our friend: “Dear Pastor John, hello to you from Hong Kong, and thank you for this podcast. My question is that my unbelieving husband has the habit of hoarding. He keeps boxes, newspapers from years back, packaging — all the things that average people may regard as garbage once their expected usage is over — all that accumulates in our home. I tried to throw away some things, but it caused disharmony in our relationship. I feel like I live in a rubbish dump. How do I deal with the problem biblically?”

Well, let me admit right away, I am not an expert in either understanding hoarding or counseling hoarders. So, you might say, “Well, why are you even trying to answer this question?” And I’m trying to answer it because it’s so hard. I feel like, as a pastor, I can’t ignore things that I just have not given a lot of thought to. But frankly, I have seen enough of this in the last forty years that I’ve thought about it some. So, don’t take this as a final word — just take it as “Maybe there’s something here that would help me.” And if there’s not, you haven’t wasted too much time.

So, let me at least try to share the kinds of things that I have thought over the years, and then call them together here to show what you can do if you have a friend or a relative or married someone who lives in the chaos of hoarding. And the reason I say chaos is that we almost never speak of a person as a hoarder who saves everything but keeps it in perfect order on shelves, in the attic, in closets. We don’t call that person a hoarder. The house is neat; it’s orderly. Life is functional.

The hoarder is a person who has gotten out of proportion to his ability to manage what he’s saving, and disorder and encroachment is making life almost unlivable. I view hoarding as on a continuum with degrees of messiness, and we are all messy a little bit — some a lot, some a little bit. I think there’s a continuum here.

Why Some Live in the Chaos

So, what are the factors that move people along this continuum to full-blown, almost incapacitating, depressing hoarding?

1. They might not have the inclination to organize.

The first thing I would say is that many people grow up in homes where they do not see or hear anyone modeling or expressing the value of orderliness, or neatness, or cleanliness, or beauty. They may enter adult life with no built-in instinct toward keeping a room or a home orderly or neat or beautiful. It’s just not their natural impulse. It wasn’t built into them either genetically or the way their parents raised them.

2. They might not have the necessary attention.

This lack of any natural impulse toward orderliness may go hand in hand with a kind of attention deficit. As much as we may overdiagnose our children with attention deficit disorder, attention deficit — whether you call it a disorder or not — is a real thing. If you were to ask somebody why they don’t put this or that away — they just leave it there — one honest answer they might give to you is, “It doesn’t register. I don’t even see it.”

Now, those folks leave a trail of things that belong in a drawer, or on a shelf, or in a cabinet, or in a closet, but they don’t put them there for the two reasons we’ve seen. One, partly because there’s no natural impulse toward orderliness, and partly because it just doesn’t grab their attention. They don’t see it. It is as if they are blind to it.

3. They might procrastinate.

There is the complicating factor of procrastination. A person opens a package, takes out the content, and leaves the packaging on the chair or on the counter. “I’ll deal with that later. I fully intend to.” They don’t. So, now you have three factors at work: the absence of a bent toward orderliness, a deficit of attention as though things just don’t even get noticed — they don’t register — and you have procrastination that intends to do the right thing and put something away, and never gets back to it. Now, the effect of those three factors is a room or a house of increasing disorder or messiness or chaos.

4. They might not think to make a plan.

The fourth complicating factor has to do with why it’s so hard to tackle this mess and clean it up once it’s accumulated; namely, many people’s minds simply do not function in a way that makes planning for cleaning and ordering natural. It doesn’t come naturally to formulate a goal. “Okay, this is going to be cleaned up in three weeks.” Conceive of steps to get to that goal. “Okay, I’m going to have my friend and I — we’re going to work on it about one hour a day every morning.” Plan for those times. “Okay, we’ll do it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

That way of thinking seems so natural to some people — it does to me — and it’s quite unnatural to others. They just don’t think that way. If you talk to them about that kind of planning, they might say something like, “I just do things. I don’t live my life that way. I don’t even think that way. It’s a strain on my mind to even hear you talk about it that way.” In other words, they’re not walking through their lives formulating goals, identifying steps to reach those goals, planning how to take those steps. They just don’t approach life that way.

“God in Christ is ultimately the source of our well-being — not orderliness and not messiness.”

Therefore, what seems like a simple cleanup project to some, to them seems absolutely daunting, which means now that if all those factors come together — absence of any natural bent toward orderliness, a deficit of attention, a bent toward procrastination, the absence of any natural inclination to form a plan in handling the growing chaos — the effect is discouragement, hopelessness, paralysis, isolation (nobody is going to come to their house) and sometimes depression.

5. They might be inclined to collect things.

Which brings us now to the final complicating factor of this tendency toward hoarding. On top of an ever-increasing chaos of things that never get put away, you have this added impulse to collect things and rarely throw them away. I don’t think hoarding is a separate and distinct tendency from all those other things that I’ve just mentioned. I think they’re all interwoven in greater or lesser degrees.

What Feeds the Impulse to Hoard

As I’ve tried to understand this impulse of hoarding that gets added into the mix, it seems to me there are two general ways to describe what’s feeding this impulse.

1. We can find our identity in our possessions.

One is a deep, distorted association in a person’s mind between having and being. Now, that may sound a little philosophical, but it’s not. Everybody can understand this. Let me try to explain. To have stuff is to be okay. “I’m okay. I’ve got my stuff I have, and so I am okay.”

The reason I say it’s distorted is because all of us experience some measure of good feeling that comes from just having, right? This is not weird. We all do this. We collect coins or baseball cards or butterflies or antiques or books. There’s a satisfying sense of well-being that comes from just having a thing, having a collection. What is that? Well, there it is. It’s universal. Most people experience having as part of their well-being.

But with the hoarder, this has been distorted so that the person’s sense of significance and well-being is preserved not by an isolated healthy collection, but by a life dominated by collection. It feels good. It feels significant to have more stuff, even if it’s old newspapers or tools or wrapping paper or buttons or scrap metal. I’ve seen people collect and fill their houses with the most bizarre things.

2. We can find it too painful to discard our possessions.

The other thing that feeds the hoarding impulse is the anxiety caused by getting rid of stuff. Now, this is just the flip side of the good feeling that one has by gathering stuff, but experientially it’s a different feeling. And so, there are two impulses, not just one. Once you have comforted yourself with some acquisition — “I’ve got a lot of stuff that feels good. I feel secure. I feel content. It does good for me” — and you surround yourself with this stuff, then that sense of peace is jeopardized (there’s an anxiety that comes) if you contemplate getting rid of any one piece of the stuff.

It might be the one piece that you’re going to need to complete your well-being, and a huge anxiety is created by thinking, “I don’t think I can give that away because if I give that away, then I might give all this away. And if I give all this away, I have no idea how we’ll feel good anymore about my life.”

How to Help a Hoarder

So, what do you do if you must deal with a friend or a roommate or a relative or a close relative, like a spouse? Here are five suggestions (very briefly).

1. Don’t get angry.

Get beyond anger. The Bible says that the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God (James 1:20). It is so easy to get frustrated and angry. And you will discover that’s not going to help. That’s not working righteousness for anybody. We have to find a way to subdue the anger that rises so that we can talk and relate in a way that doesn’t come from anger.

2. Try to talk about it.

With as much patience and kindness as you can, see how far your friend or relatives will let you draw them into a conversation about what you perceive as a problem. They may not. They may. They might admit it’s a total problem. They might not see any problem at all. Don’t go first to the problems that it creates. “The chaos is killing you.” “It’s going to make a fire hazard.” “It’s unhealthy.” Don’t go there first.

First, go to the kinds of things that may help you understand them. How did it get to be this way? What’s driving them? And they might be helped by your suggesting some of those five things that I mentioned earlier. See if they recognize themselves in any of those traits.

3. Consider how you can compromise.

See if they are willing to think in terms of a both-and, a kind of compromise with you, where both of you can accomplish some of what you desire. I knew one family, for example, that basically solved the problem (more or less) by making one room in the house total chaos. And nobody gave a thought to it; nobody attempted to fix it. If you’re going to store something, throw it in there. And if you opened that, you’d say, “What is this?”

I remember doing that — and it was far away from Minneapolis, so I won’t identify anybody. But I thought, “This seems like a normal house, and that one room is absolute, bizarre chaos. What is that?” It’s a compromise is what it is. They found a way to live together. And I thought, “Okay, that’s what it has to be.” So, that’s number three. See if you can get a both-and — a compromise of some kind. That may not be it, but something like that.

4. Suggest seeing a counselor.

If the problem seems severe enough to be hindering friendships and hindering health, putting life at risk, you might ask the person to see a counselor with you and get more help than I can give. And I don’t mean that there are any magic bullets. I just mean sometimes a third person listening carefully can help both of you talk more clearly, more fairly to each other, and so move you forward toward a solution.

5. Seek your ultimate fulfillment in God.

Finally, God in Christ is ultimately the source of our well-being — not orderliness and not messiness. So, seek together to find your deepest sense of identity and well-being and happiness in him.