Is hoarding aa part of asd??

[Hedgehog Instigator]

And how do my fellow peoples deal with hoarding?

 

[Bro'Freak]

Clean it up if needs be.
lol
I don't mean to detract but I got lazy a few years back due to outside pressure.
I didnt give a damn about the fact that I made my place uncomfortable.
Comfort..., well I had that up to a point, then I allowed my place to slide into being uncomfortable.
The plus + point of which was I had no more worries about people visiting & stealing..., not a good head space if you want friends.

Just get stuck in & get rid of the crap.., don't let it fester into some insurmountable monster.

 

[Hedgehog Instigator]

Clean it up if needs be.
lol
I don't mean to detract but I got lazy a few years back due to outside pressure.
I didnt give a damn about the fact that I made my place uncomfortable.
Comfort..., well I had that up to a point, then I allowed my place to slide into being uncomfortable.
The plus + point of which was I had no more worries about people visiting & stealing..., not a good head space if you want friends.

Just get stuck in & get rid of the crap.., don't let it fester into some insurmountable monster.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by large clean spaces, my boyfriend says I make little hedgehog nests. But it interferes with utilizable space and I am now faced with a man who won't move in with me unless I et rid of some things. I also have so much interest based stuff like art supplies I just feel like I have to edit my personality when I get rid of my stuff.

 

[Bro'Freak]

It's probably best just to sort it instead of falling into a thought loop on wether it impeads on your personality.. less hassle/bother/stress etc.. One thing I've noticed over the years is that 'if I am Aspie' it's the part thinking about my stance that holds me back/down with such issues. Just get it done & relax/move on etc ( experience talking, i hope )

.2c

 

[Nitro]

I'm not sure if it is an autie thing,but yes,I am a collector(hoarder).

I have a 53 foot over the road freight trailer I use for a shed that houses high performance and antique car parts,a dragster and a four wheel drive truck project. There are (5) five gallon buckets of used automotive fasteners in the trailer plus a ton of new automotive hardware in big retail cases.Not often that I don't have a bolt for a vehicle in stock.My world is a very mechanical related event for sure.Hoarding helps it along without constant trips to the hardware or parts store.

There is a 48x32 foot pole building on my property that is jammed full of stuff that includes a Malibu slated for another dragster project and my Toyota 4Runner camping rig. I have four more vehicles that are kept outside.I recently had to add more cabinets to my building to empty out some of my house to finish some of my remodeling project during the winter months.
The rafters in my building house a full truckload of computers and parts along with 30+ complete bicycles for my pay it forward bicycle and helmet giveaway program and a couple pickup loads of parts for them.Five of the bikes are my personal ones that I have restored from collecting(hoarding) parts and bicycles.There are still five more bikes in my basement area and at least a dozen computers in the house.

Yes,I am a hoarder,but I seldom want for items as a result of it.My mechanical engineering and machining skills allow me to reuse many(hoarded) items for other purposes. I can catalog most everything that I see because I get internal snapshots or moving images to review where items were last seen.If you want to mess with my system of controlled chaos as I call it,just move something.
I can get pretty OCD about my hobby area and my tools,but neglect certain tasks as they aren't necessary for me to function. I should defrost two of my freezers but can't yet because I don't have enough freezer space in the other two to hold my frozen food. My pantry would make a grocery store owner proud as everything is well displayed and cataloged by dates and types of food.My neighbors love me because they can borrow most anything they ask for without going to the store.If necessary,I could live for six months or more on the food that is in my home.I went hungry(mal-nourished) as a child,so now I keep(hoard) lots of food.
I know that it doesn't seem like it would work well,but my father is suspected to have a similar variation of my condition and can usually describe many things that are near the intended object.He has me beat on the hoarder level though because he has had longer to collect

 

[Judge]

Interesting question. I nosed around the Internet to quickly find that obsessive hoarding does appear to be comorbid to ASD.

While hoarding isn't a specific obsession I experience personally, my OCD has me wondering if the opposite is also a compulsive behavior? I tend to purge myself of physical possessions as I consider it orderliness. Often to a point where I later regret it, disposing of sometimes things that I actually should have held onto.

http://www.annals-general-psychiatry.com/content/11/1/16

 

[Sass]

I like my things. I don't hoard, so much as if I see the worth in a thing, I keep it. I keep odd things, like pieces of ribbon and buttons and whatnot. I find bare surfaces sort of confronting. I honestly don't know how people live in minimalist spaces. Where the f*ck do they put anything?

I guess if I feel the need to keep something, especially for its aesthetic qualities, then I want to see it. I don't keep things packed away for 'best', I use the things I love when I need them. Sure there's a bit of tatt that goes along with that that I could probably have binned, but that's what cupboards are for LOL.

I don't know if I'm hoarding so much as collecting moments that made me feel good.

 

[ChurchTheArtist]

Interesting you ask this. I have been dealing with this problem a lot lately. I swear my parents have aspergers, my dad especially. I actually come from a family of hoarders. My grandparents were particularly old and lived through the depression so my dad's side is used to saving everything. There are probably many intricate reasons why people with ASD may become hoarders. I never really attributed much to it but come to think of it, many of the people I have met with aspergers seem to have a level of that.


I know that hoarding can be tied with ambitions never met. We have a graveyard of vacuum cleaners that are like an evolutionary chart on household appliances dating back to the 80s. The mindset usually stems from "I'll fix it later" or "I'll need this again one day." It reminds me of my younger days as an ambitious college teen. Often I would take on these grand projects with such an extreme idea in my head and then never get far into it at all. Seems similar. Is it related, not sure. *shrug* I wonder...

How to deal? The best thing I found is disgust and desperation. I know that's really negative but that doesn't mean it's bad. Just watch Inside Out and you'll know what I mean. If the hoarding doesn't bother you or anyone and isn't a problem... then don't deal with it. If it's not broke, don't fix it. If it's causing problems, start looking at the problem with some serious measure. Taking in my hand a box of pens and pencils that I have had in storage for 15 years I have to run many questions through my head like "do they still work?" "should I test any of them?" "do any of these hold specific value?" and so on. I then remind myself that within the 15 years these have been in storage, I have accumulated a similar box of pens and pencils back home. It could really go either way but I have to look at what I'm doing with an ounce of disgust and say "this is stupid, I don't need this stuff." I really do think that mechanisms for dealing with hoarding should be crafted specifically from your reason to fix the problem though.

 

[Nitro]

Taking in my hand a box of pens and pencils that I have had in storage for 15 years I have to run many questions through my head like "do they still work?" "should I test any of them?" "do any of these hold specific value?" and so on. I then remind myself that within the 15 years these have been in storage, I have accumulated a similar box of pens and pencils back home. It could really go either way but I have to look at what I'm doing with an ounce of disgust and say "this is stupid, I don't need this stuff." I really do think that mechanisms for dealing with hoarding should be crafted specifically from your reason to fix the problem though.

I have a half a dozen boxes of pencils that have never been sharpened. My pencil sharpener is an old rotary one from my childhood like we had in school.
I keep one pencil going until it is hard to hold that is usually swiped from someone else.

 

[Elemental]

I tend to purge myself of physical possessions as I consider it orderliness. Often to a point where I later regret it, disposing of sometimes things that I actually should have held onto.

This is my experience also although I never until quite recently had many possessions to hoard, what with being poverty itinerant or living in quite small spaces i.e. rooms or trailers. Things I did have would get lost or stolen or be destroyed too. Now I have more space, I am quite precious about it being uncluttered, partly because I lived with somebody who was a compulsive hoarder & found this difficult. I notice that when out, in new spaces, I am prone to taking a few items from my bag & laying them out in front of me, like a little protective barrier or barricade.

I have to work hard at organizing & that includes basic housework too; I can create a lot of clutter & mess when in pursuit of a task & I can have a big capacity for ignoring this; the upturned contents of a filing drawer I was trying to locate a letter in stayed in a mound in the midst of my living room for many days, necessitating walking around it & occasionally tripping over it because I couldn't face sorting it all.

 

[Mia]

Actually from what I understand, hoarding is related to OCD, which is an anxiety related disorder completely different from a person who has Asperger's and autism. Some people with autism do have OCD, but it's considered a co-morbid condition.


This is part of a blog that describes the associations of hoarding:

Hoarding is considered an offshoot of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), but recently this categorization is being reevaluated. It’s estimated that about one in four people with OCD also are compulsive hoarders. It is possible that some time in the future hoarding will become its own distinct category. In the meantime, it’s very real, and more and more people are opening up about the difficulty hoarding presents in their lives.

Without exception, hoarding is always accompanied by varying levels of anxiety and sometime develops alongside other mental illnesses such as dementia and schizophrenia. Recent neuroimaging (link is external) reveals peculiar commonalities among hoarders including severe emotional attachment to inanimate objects and extreme anxiety when making decisions.

Hoarding both relieves anxiety and produces it (link is external). The more hoarders accumulate, the more insulated they feel from the world and its dangers. Of course, the more they accumulate, the more isolated they become from the world, including family and friends. Even the thought of discarding or cleaning out hoarded items produces extreme feelings of panic and discomfort.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hope-relationships/201409/the-psychology-behind-hoarding

So, the above is what Psychologists detail as hoarding behavior and its associations with a metal state of anxiety and loneliness. Inherited my Grandmothers home, which was filled to the rafters with things she kept for a long life span of 100+ years. I spent the first few years divesting myself of some of these 'collections'. To her, these were a history of her and two families lives, she lived through two world wars and the depression.

Many of the things I discovered, in closets and the attic and the basement were related to her and my Grandfathers working lives, and social lives. The detritus of long lived lives. Hundreds of glasses for dinner parties, train related items, cloth for her loomed blankets, beads for her charity work, log books and notebooks for nursing and engineering, a bag of many pairs of false teeth, pre-war sheets and nylon and silk stockings, a complete first aid nurses kit, she saved every letter and postcard, he saved every negative and photograph, she saved every valentine he sent her. It was and still is a history of their lives, a documented one that I can put together into a clear history of their two lives.

For me this is a great gift, to actually feel that I know something of their lives and circumstances. It's a picture and a story of relatives. In no way will some of these things ever be garbage. Many of the things I donated to charity, the paper records and letter and negatives I've kept as a history and a time and place. It's given me great insight into my own family and their struggles and triumphs. Which somehow seems familiar. I'll never consider this hoarding, it seems to me to be a history left behind, of people much like a memoir or a living diary.

 

[ChurchTheArtist]

I can relate there. Lots of grandparent stuff like beams, rafters, pews and cotton equipment. When my grandmother passed, we had to spend months cleaning her house out. She had things in jars that dated back in the 1920s!

 

[Hedgehog Instigator]

Actually from what I understand, hoarding is related to OCD, which is an anxiety related disorder completely different from a person who has Asperger's and autism. Some people with autism do have OCD, but it's considered a co-morbid condition.


This is part of a blog that describes the associations of hoarding:

Hoarding is considered an offshoot of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), but recently this categorization is being reevaluated. It’s estimated that about one in four people with OCD also are compulsive hoarders. It is possible that some time in the future hoarding will become its own distinct category. In the meantime, it’s very real, and more and more people are opening up about the difficulty hoarding presents in their lives.

Without exception, hoarding is always accompanied by varying levels of anxiety and sometime develops alongside other mental illnesses such as dementia and schizophrenia. Recent neuroimaging (link is external) reveals peculiar commonalities among hoarders including severe emotional attachment to inanimate objects and extreme anxiety when making decisions.

Hoarding both relieves anxiety and produces it (link is external). The more hoarders accumulate, the more insulated they feel from the world and its dangers. Of course, the more they accumulate, the more isolated they become from the world, including family and friends. Even the thought of discarding or cleaning out hoarded items produces extreme feelings of panic and discomfort.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hope-relationships/201409/the-psychology-behind-hoarding

So, the above is what Psychologists detail as hoarding behavior and its associations with a metal state of anxiety and loneliness. Inherited my Grandmothers home, which was filled to the rafters with things she kept for a long life span of 100+ years. I spent the first few years divesting myself of some of these 'collections'. To her, these were a history of her and two families lives, she lived through two world wars and the depression.

Many of the things I discovered, in closets and the attic and the basement were related to her and my Grandfathers working lives, and social lives. The detritus of long lived lives. Hundreds of glasses for dinner parties, train related items, cloth for her loomed blankets, beads for her charity work, log books and notebooks for nursing and engineering, a bag of many pairs of false teeth, pre-war sheets and nylon and silk stockings, a complete first aid nurses kit, she saved every letter and postcard, he saved every negative and photograph, she saved every valentine he sent her. It was and still is a history of their lives, a documented one that I can put together into a clear history of their two lives.

For me this is a great gift, to actually feel that I know something of their lives and circumstances. It's a picture and a story of relatives. In no way will some of these things ever be garbage. Many of the things I donated to charity, the paper records and letter and negatives I've kept as a history and a time and place. It's given me great insight into my own family and their struggles and triumphs. Which someone seems familar. I'll never consider this hoarding, it seems to me to be a history left behind of people much like a memoir.

I know this but ocd is often a misdiagnoses because there are similar symptoms. I don't have ocd but have been diagnosed such. Fact of the matter is I don't fit the criteria

 

[clg114]

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by large clean spaces, my boyfriend says I make little hedgehog nests. But it interferes with utilizable space and I am now faced with a man who won't move in with me unless I et rid of some things. I also have so much interest based stuff like art supplies I just feel like I have to edit my personality when I get rid of my stuff.

Wow, this is really between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, you do not want to get rid of your stuff(I do not blame you). On the other hand you want to be with your boyfriend, maybe he is "the one". May be you two could combine your resources and get a larger place. That way it would both of yours. Remember, both of you have to give a little. Good luck.

 

[Mia]

I know this but ocd is often a misdiagnoses because there are similar symptoms. I don't have ocd but have been diagnosed such. Fact of the matter is I don't fit the criteria

Hedgehog Instigator, Please don't think that I am in any way implying that you hoard or have OCD. It's an association with extreme 'hoarding' and its very general and not specifically meant for you as a definition, only information as a guideline by psychologists.

That does not mean that many people hoard, not to the extremes seen on the 'hoarders' reality television show. Not only is erroneous to think that people who collect things are hoarders, it pathologizes people cruelly making them seem somehow wrong. Many of the examples on the program seem lonely or abandoned and have other difficulties that are not related to OCD or any other illnesses. The show has brought to light an issue, but it seems to have pointed fingers at troubled people. Who simply need help and understanding.

 

[Vinca]

Sometimes if I am sorting through a pile of hoardings, I'll just pick out what I am certain can be thrown away. If there isn't anything that can be or that I want to throw, then I start brainstorming ways of organising more effectiently. (Alot of my hoardings aren't efficiently organized and if they were, would probably take up less physical space.)

If you feel ovewhelmed by large clean spaces could you store, where practical, your hoardings in some form of tray so that it could be picked up and moved, if the space it is occupying were needed?

 

[On the Inside]

The people in my family who aren't normal, myself included, all had/have "problems with stuff". Things saved because they might come in handy sometime, junk collected because it's hard to sort through and make decisions, things kept because they are reminders of those who have passed on, or of happier times. I have been diagnosed with ASD, my sister with OCD, the rest of my weird relatives I'm not sure of, certainly a few more with ASD, depression, Bi-polar, all with an accompanying "problem with stuff". But I would say that the only one who really has problems that resemble hoarding is my alcoholic sister. I don't know what her underlying problem is, but she reacts like a badger when her stuff gets messed with.

 

[ChurchTheArtist]

Another thing to do is look at it progressively. Start actively fixing things, reading books, using art supplies, building, using, cleaning. If you haven't fixed something because you don't know how, start actively looking into how to go about it. When you read a book, put it away or sell it but don't keep it close by. Don't bother fixing something if you get by just fine without it or have already gotten something to replace it. If you have art supplies, start using them. There is a special zen that comes with fulfilling those long awaited goals. Also, it turns hoarding into more of a collection of trades.

 

[Naturalist]

I have more than I would wish to have, and occasionally I will feel crippled by some of my accumulated possessions. Then, I go through and purge a portion at a time. I think just because you have a lot of possessions and perhaps not enough time or space to organize, does not make you a hoarder, and manically purging yourself of all your possessions could be just as unhealthy. As you can see, many people who might appear to hoard things, have very logical and practical reasons for doing so. As with your art supplies.

I have lots of odd things I have saved for my use in art especially. Think weird stuff. My garret looks like an old-school witch's house: feathers and animal bones and dried plants and acorns and lichens and bits of rusty hardware and broken ceramic; scraps of leather and fur; crystals and broken glass and pages from vintage books or sheet music. It is everywhere. Some of these are spread out over the floors where I can find them easily. But it does not create a good living space. So I started putting the things on trays (1 for each project) and am looking for a bakers rack which can hold the trays. This would allow me to pull out a tray relevant to the project I am working on, place it on the table or floor while I work, and put it away when I need to make space again. It's a trick we use in the archaeology lab.

I like the idea of someone going through my house when I am gone and feeling as if they have stepped into my life. I manage a small herbarium which was the work of one particular woman over about 40 years or more. She saved everything. The plant specimens are stored in old pill-bottles and hosiery boxes and stationery boxes, or are folded into the pages of old newspapers. I know a lot about her even though I never met her, just from handling her collections on a daily basis. Not a bad thing at all, in my book...

 

[Nitro]

I tend to put related items together,but also utilize the space they take up in the most efficient manner possible.