An Object Lesson

In some ways, our stuff is ourselves. It tells a story about who we are, and hey, if it sticks around, maybe we will too. It becomes a kind of talisman against death. But that doesn't explain why some of us develop pathological attachments to things. Ruined that movie with Tom Hanks, he got attached to the ball and he named it Wilson. I think that was part of his survival mechanism, is to feel like he had a connection to something or someone.

And so people often who have been hurt by individuals throughout their lives through by people, turned to objects and or even animals to feel like they have a sense of connection. That's dr Rebecca Beaton, a psychologist and director of the Anxiety and Stress Management Institute. We talked to her about why we project ourselves onto objects and how these projections can morph into insidious relationships with our belongings.

But first, let's explore the mounting evidence that most of us have a lot of stuff, perhaps too much stuff. That's the whole meaning of life, isn't it. Trying to find a place for your stuff. Sometimes you've got to move. You gotta get a bigger house. Why too much stuff? You've got to move all your stuff? And maybe he's put some of your stuff in storage. Imagine that there's a whole industry based on keeping an eye on your stuff. That's from George Carlin's appearance at Comic Relief in nineteen

eighties six. His observation of our quest to accumulate was spot on. According to the Self Storage Association, it took the industry more than twenty five years to build its first billion square feet of space ah, but it added its second billion square feet in just eight years between two thousand and five. In nine six, Carlin was tapping into a preoccupation with storing our stuff. This preoccupation is

very much an American thing. Household throughout the United States have used self storage at least one in the last ten years or so. The latest numbers showed that nine point five percent of all US households have a self storage unit that they're actively using, and that comes out to a little less than eleven million people in the United States right now, and Canada and Australia have somewhat really United States resident here are the ones that really

you felt storage more than in any other country. That's freelance writer and editor of Midwest Real Estate News Dan Rafter. In he reported that the American landscape was studded with nearly fifty thousand self storage facilities, eclipsing familiar landmarks like McDonald's to become one of the most common roadside buildings. Turns out we use self storage for lots of reasons, but most boiled down to change in the form of death, divorce, downsizing,

and dislocation. Dan Rafter isolates three high profile examples of people who paid money to store their extraneous goods. For Reynolds, the actor came up a lot. Apparently he was a big user of self storage, and one of his self storage units he had stored the canoe from delivering and then Joe Jackson. Michael Jackson's father had a storage unit and he had about two seventy unreleased recordings from Michael jacks and stored away in there that he had forgotten about.

We're just one I found. I had read that there was a storage locker. A person who owned it had passed away, and they went inside and they found something wrapped in tinfoil, and when they opened up, they thought it was me, but it actually turned out to be this person's amputated leg. And want problem there? I have a one humans. It's from manasal got me grows down. Here's what I found out about the third example. Sometimes people default on their self storage payments and their items

are auctioned off. In two thousand and seven, Shannon Whisnant bought the contents of a storage unit and discovered a severed foot inside of a grill, and, as detailed in the recent documentary Finders Keepers, a legal battle over ownership ensued between Wizman and the man to whom the foot originally belonged. John Wood was just like three years ago, and that's just one hurdle light has thrown at him. Over by stating dump truck electro charity. I've been an

unbelievable character, isn't it. It's an example of layering an object with meaning and in this case, ultimately coming to represent for both men the idea that if they possessed it, it couldn't make them whole. Tricky logic, for sure, But the more you learn about their individual stories, the more you come to understand that the root of their logic is steeped in trauma. I lost my leg in the plane crash, and I lost my father. After the crash, they send you home campf con and nobody says anything

about the indiction. That's what about killed? And I would have just kept on what I was doing. It's really all I had was that leg. Trauma is front and center when it comes to Dr Beaton and her clients,

particularly those who suffer from hoarding disorder. A lot of people who are are connected to things to the point of causing functional impairment in their lives, either socially or emotionally, uh with their occupations or there they've come to the point where they are actually hoarding, have experienced tw more trauma than the average person. That's a lot of trauma, and these generally have to do with people hurting them

or loss of individuals. Did you you need look no further than an infant whose physiological development is wholly dependent on a connection through touch to see that the need for attachment is hardwired into all of us. Our nervous system does not operate in a vacuum. We have to

regulate our nervous system by connecting with other individuals. There's actually a whole theory about the vague nerve that you've got to stimulate your vague nerve in order to process emotions uh intellectually, cerebral e and in order to activate our entire system to work properly. And you have to have human connection with somebody that's safe and secure. So there there's these biological reasons for connection, and when somebody's not connecting to humans, they've got to find something to

connect to. It's an elaborative processing problem, a kind of cognitive processing that deals with assigning meaning and importance when making decisions. It's the reason why someone who hoards assesses an object differently, with a wider net of associations that allows them to see details and uses for things that most people would never conceive of. There's an acronym ount there which I don't like because it's not very positive.

But it's sick S I, C K. And the part I do like is what it stands for is S this for sensitive, I is for intelligent, C is for creative, and K is for kind. Most people who hoarde have all those attributes. They tend to be very intelligent. I mean often in times they have advanced degrees. Then you've got the creative component, where you know they just see so many options in one small item, and they they want to do something creative with each of these objects.

They anthropomorphize items where everything has feelings. They are really kind individuals. Certainly you can see you can find a hoarder that has become sort of hardened over time that doesn't come across very kind at first, but usually underneath it all there's a soft center. This is perhaps why there's an irrational fear of letting go of an object.

And it looks like this. Now you have seen countless hordes, if you've stepped inside people's homes hundreds, yes, yes, when you go in, do those hordes tell you a story? More specifically about what's happening absolutely, because every hoarder is a little different, and there they could. I mean, at some point, I think they're going to come out with different types of hoarders because you have more of your addictive hoarder where they are addicted to shopping that cannot

stop acquiring or dumpster diving. I've seen that and they have just bags of things they've never even opened up everywhere. We're just just dumped in places because they're all about the acquiring and there's no rhyme or reason to where everything is. Then you have the hoarder who is hiding behind a bunker. You walk in and there's a wall of clothes or stacks of boxes blocking certain areas, particularly like entrances or windows, or blocking off certain rooms because

of memories in those rooms. A marriage that went sour in the bedroom is the first place it gets hoarded. The hoard basically just tells a story what happened. So how common is hoarding disorder and how much of it is genetic? It is actually becoming more and more common. It's become a disorder now officially and our our manual psychiatric disorders a few years ago that people are realizing, oh, that's what my aunt is doing, or that's what my grandma was doing when I was growing up, because we

didn't really understand it before. Three to five percent of the population has hoarding disorder to the point where they meet the criteria for functional impairment of some kind due to the hoarding. People diagnosed with hoarding disorder have an eighty four percent chance of having a first degree relative who also has hoarding disorder. We know that there's this hereditary component, there's also learned behavior involved. We want to

think about the nature nurture question. If you've got a first degree relative of a parent that's hoarding, they're teaching a child how to hoard as well. So you've got this propensity one way or the other, and then the loss on top of it sort of sets it off exponentially throughout the years of life. Hoarding also tends to show itself in adolescents but then manifest later in life.

People who have hoarding disorder tend to either begin the disorder in childhood or adolescents have just a touch of it where they're just a little bit, you know, more attached to things than the average person. But what happens is throughout the course of life, they have more and more trauma and more stressors. They have a lot more loss and so they show up with hoarding disorder generally around age fifty five. That's the mean age. One thing that surprises a lot of people is the fact that

there are more men who hoard than women. That always seems to come as a shocker. I do think that men are more reluctant to get social support, They're more reluctant to ask for help, and they also historically have had we're talking about, you know, a mean age of fifty five. Historically they've had the burden of being the provider in the family. That's changed, of course in modern times. But we're talking to, you know, people in their fifties

and sixties right now. Those folks the idea of providing was on their shoulders, so they've got to make sure they've had that item just in case they needed. Dr Eaton says that for small hoards, it can take up to two years for someone to work through their stuff. I think of a web of associations gold up like the knots and a pile of wires or necklaces. Those associations that bind the object to the person have to be teased a part carefully, and because language is freighted

with emotion, it's also important to use select words. You have to use certain language around letting go to because if they've had a lot of loss, letting go is probably not the appropriate word. Um Finding a new home for it almost always works. So if you can find a charity that they really like, somebody's going to be able to use the item on a daily basis. That

if you you can. You know if they say if they love animals, that they find a charity that benefits animals, and most of people who hoard love animals, by the way, that just goes along with it. There's so many components of non acquisition. Teach them how to organize, Teach them how to find new ways of keeping the memory or working with the items so they can actually part with them.

Without this understanding, someone trying to help could do some serious damage by rushing in and bagging up with facey as useless items. It is such a complicated disorder. I encourage people to learn about it. Two, if you're a professional and you want to work with people who who are you need some serious training. This is not an easy disorder to work with. The one thing I would want people to know is this is truly a mental disorder. This isn't the fact that they're stubborn or messy or dirty.

That this is a mental disorder, and that there's so much trauma generally involved. These individuals are in a ton of pain, and to have more compassion for them, we all cling to something for comfort, and then something started in childhood with a favorite phrase, edge blanket or a worn toy. What we now know as transitional objects meant to bridge a child's inner world with his or her

outer world. So it's easy to see how someone could turn to objects over and over again as a source of stability and contentment, especially if we recast our understanding of hoarding disorder as a processing disorder. After all, we accept that there are synithets people who senses are crisscrossed, like someone who perceives a deep blue color when she sees the number eight, or another person who hears guitar

music and his ankles suddenly tickle. Is it possible to accept that people who hoard might inhabit a similar realm, one triggered by trauma, in which a simple lifeless object becomes animated in the imagination and takes on a rich emotional life. The Stuff of Life is written and co produced by me Julie Douglas. Original music and sound design is by co producer Noel Brown. This episode also features music by the artists Mad and Fields, Ohio. Editorial oversight

is provided by Heavy Protection Jerry Rowland. So what is it that you can't part with? And why the one thing I have kept from my high school years. It's kind of help me as a sort of a geeky guy, but I played the clarinet in the high school band, in the marching band, and I haven't played it since graduating in school. But I really enjoyed being in the band, so I haven't been able to get rid of that. For me, it's a mound of pyrite with a silver

wizard perched on top. It's sat on my dresser between the ages of thirteen and eighteen and represents all the awkwardness, wonder and terror of being a teenager. Email us your story about your object of action at the Stuff of Life at how stuff works dot com and if you like what you hear, make sure to drop a review on iTunes and you can also find us on Twitter and Facebook as the Stuff of Life.