Help For Hoarders

Help for Hoarders

This week I attended the CCVS Community Marketplace at the Firstsite venue in Colchester. I was here working alongside  a community interest company ‘Your Living room’ who have started using my therapy services this last year for their unique person centred approach to decluttering for  their clients that are affected by a hoarding disorder which is impairing their quality of life. Their vision is to make a home as functional, comfortable and organised as possible, according to the preferences and personality of the individual client, whilst improving their quality of life and maintaining their dignity.

Their fully trained staff work closely and empathetically with the client’s family, social landlords, support groups and the diverse professional Essex network. They look to ensure that a realistic support plan is maintained for the client, beyond the decluttering process.

Their clients ‘Care and Support Plan’ aims to ensure that they are able to return to living, in a safe, manageable and agreeable existence, by encouraging them to be involved in the decision making process throughout and help them re-establish their independence.

The care act (2014) states that self neglect, a form of abuse now encompasses hoarding as a safeguard concern. Your living room does some great work in that not only do they help with the decluttering  process but they offer  emotional support throughout and after. That’s where my therapy services are often used. I could explain it as that where they work with decluttering in the home I work with the decluttering of the mind.

For the most part to begin with I use some cognitive behavioural therapy to identify a hoarders regularly occurring cognitive distortions which have created the psychological distress leading them to suffer from depression/anxiety leading them to hoard. These are what would trigger automatic subconscious thoughts influencing their actions creating a subconscious fear. Normally these would have been formed around their early years. By recognising these emotions and and the thought pattern attached to it we can use therapy to reframe those negative thought patterns and also clear repressed negative emotions. Often with hoarders this can be loss which makes sense that in their minds they need to hold onto everything feeding their fear of ‘losing’. This is not always the loss of a loved one, but, as in one case that I worked with, can also be the loss of material things or having things stolen from them. Off course, as always in therapy, we cannot presume that the originating problem is always going to be loss either.

Normally after doing reframing work using congnitive behavioural therapy I would then be looking at using Emotional Freedom Technique. What I love about this form of therapy is not only the work that we can do one to one but also that it is a fantastic self-help tool that I can teach the client so that they still have something to use when we are no longer there to support them. EFT or ‘tapping’ as it is often referred to can be described as emotional acupuncture without the needles. It is a way of tuning into a negative emotion that we feel about an event and decreasing the intensity of that negative emotion. When I first became involved in EFT it was a difficult concept for my mind to grasp because as a hypnotherapist I was always so used to working with positive suggestion that to focus on the negative was quite an alien idea to me. When I started using the process in the hypnotherapy consulting room in Essex though I found that I was not only getting quick but also lasting change with clients. I have to say that I also have used it on myself for many things including pain relief with fantastic results.

Not only is it a good tool for the hoarder because they will be suffering from a lot of anxiety about letting go of some of their things or they could be suffering from depression which EFT can also take a load of their shoulders. It is also a good way of back tracking through feelings to get to the root cause of what may have caused their symptoms. If this can be done then it is possible to get everlasting change which could make such a difference to their lives.

Working alongside your living room is an absolute pleasure because I know that I am working with good professional people who have a genuine compassion and empathy with their clients.

Your living room also have a sister company viventium which they use for training. They offer hoarding awareness training in which I also go along and talk about therapy for hoarders. I am also hoping to work with them in the future with some training packages that I am putting together.