Stuff (10 page)

Acquiring free things isn't limited to people who scavenge dumpsters or castoffs. Colin, a gay man in his mid-sixties, retired from a lucrative career as a gallery owner and arts producer, had a similar problem, though you'd never catch him in a dumpster. "I'm living in an earthquake—Bergdorf Goodman slammed into Saks Fifth Avenue. Clothes are just everywhere," he said. "I'm such a capable person, but I'm addicted to clothes. I constantly need a fix." When Colin refused to allow a visit to his home, Gail interviewed him at her office.

He arrived dressed to the nines in expensive leisure clothes: a well-draped and zippered dark shirt with fine white piping, matching sports pants, and soft leather shoes that cradled his feet. He lounged casually in the office chair, punctuating his responses to questions with gestures that embellished his words. He complained that his possessions "seem to be controlling me. It's getting a bit dangerous; they trip me and fall on me and make me late. I just can't get a grip." His grammar implied that the objects, not him, were in control. Colin said that he hadn't noticed a problem of accumulation and disorganization until two or three years earlier when he felt he couldn't find things he was looking for. He wondered with amusement if he needed glasses.

Colin owned hundreds of fine cotton and silk shirts, dozens of gold cuff links, and scores of expensive watches, designer suits, and wingtip shoes, his favorites. "I have all colors," he reported with some pride, "three dozen of each." Imported tweeds were a special pleasure—the feel of the fabric, the colors in the weave. When he was working, he used to change his clothes five or six times a day, but now in retirement he did so only twice or maybe three times. It was important, he noted, to wear the right clothes for each social occasion, day and night, and since he still had free dry cleaning from his arts producer days, there was no need to worry about cost. "But now I can't find what I'm looking for," he said, adding that it sometimes took him two hours to dress as he struggled to locate the right item in his mass of clothes and accessories. "I live as if it's a dressing room."

Colin acquired nearly all his clothes for free. His designer friends and former colleagues regularly sent him haute couture for his personal use. These gifts were intended to gain his approval and pay him back for favors in the past. If Colin merely mentioned to a friend that he might need something for his travels, it arrived on his doorstep from London, Moscow, or Paris. Because his income was now fixed, Colin relied on these former colleagues and friends to support his "habit." "When I travel, I go to boutiques and look at their stuff. But I'm not paying for any of this," he said. "I gave them their start. If I want something, I make it known, and it arrives." On his way to Europe to join some friends and hobnob with royalty, Colin found time to request cuff links, shirt collars, sock braces, studs, more wingtips, and flowers for various people, all to be delivered to his suite on his arrival.

But Colin confessed to scheduling fewer social events lately in case he was unable to get ready in time. Locating the right clothes and accessories was becoming harder and harder. He expressed concern that his friends were enabling his penchant for too many fine clothes, and he also wanted to reclaim more living space. Traveling now provoked mild panic, as he couldn't decide how much to take and what would fit in his oversize suitcase.

As for a number of other people we have interviewed, perfectionism made almost everything more difficult for Colin. "Don't tell me looks don't matter. Of course they do. Pullese!" He gesticulated with a flourish of his hand. While clothes may make the man in some situations, Colin carried this mantra to an extreme. "Everything has to match, including my underwear," he said. Getting dressed became a struggle as he sought to precisely match the belt to the shoe leather. He took pride in his fifty pinstripe suits, each a slightly different color of blue. From his point of view, color mattered, and it was important to have exactly the right combination—the perfect tie to match the suit and shirt, not to mention the shoes, belt, and cuff links. "I start at perfection and then make improvements," he declared proudly.

He acknowledged being "really tightfisted," and volunteered, "I hoard money, too." When he dined out, he made sure others picked up the check. Although he could be tight, he nonetheless took pleasure in helping others and found charity work interesting. He paid tuition anonymously to support children's education in a Third World country. On one trip to a poor country, he randomly selected several of the most unattractive men in a gay bar and handed each an iPod as a gift. "It really makes a difference in their lives," he pointed out.

But giving things away now seemed harder. "Objects now seem to matter more: they're accumulable," he observed. "I
am
older. I used to be considered very attractive, interesting, and desirable. Now experience and perceived wealth are the things I can trade on." Although he didn't say so, he seemed worried that the current source of his expensive apparel might dry up, built as it was on old obligations that would one day expire.

Concerns about his own personal value seemed to lie behind Colin's addiction. "I keep more of the things people give me [rather than those he himself acquires]. They make me feel more valuable." Colin acknowledged that sometimes he now felt invisible, whereas before he used to be the center of attention. "I'm crankier, more short-tempered; things annoy me more easily now. When did I go from being Dennis the Menace to Mr. Wilson?" The pathos of his words echoed that of many hoarders whose self-image has become dependent on the objects they believe represent them.

Billie was a seventy-five-year-old grandmother of six. Because of a hip problem, she used a walker. She had been to a number of my talks and corresponded with me about her hoarding problem, but not until a friend called on her behalf did I learn that she also had a habit of stealing.

An exceptionally bright and active woman despite her mobility problems, Billie always seemed to be on the go and always had a project or activity that commanded her attention. Yet she'd had a lifelong struggle with hoarding, clutter, and compulsive buying.

The stealing began when she was struggling with a serious shopping problem that she couldn't afford. To control the problem, she invented excuses for not buying things. Her best one was "For the money this costs, it's not worth it." One day after making this excuse to herself, she thought,
But if I just take it, I wouldn't have to pay anything.
With her major defense gone, she started acquiring again. She knew how to shoplift: as a child, she had worked in her uncle's store watching for shoplifters. In no time, stealing gave her a thrill, a "high" she couldn't get from anything else. Could she outwit the store clerks and security? She pitted her cunning and grandmotherly charm against their vigilance. One day a few years earlier, while in a department store, Billie stuck a small book about golf in her pocket. She didn't play golf, but her son-in-law did, and this would be part of his birthday present. Unbeknownst to her, the book contained a code that set off a sensor when she left the store. The alarm sounded, and clerks came running. As she made her way back into the store, she acted as though she didn't understand what was happening. When they found the book, she coolly explained that she'd put it there because she was afraid it would fall out of her shopping cart. She must have forgotten she had it in her pocket. Though frightened inside, she acted calm and cool, pretending to be befuddled—j ust a confused granny. She convinced them it was not intentional and let them help her out to her car. She recounted the episode to me with some pride. She showed no shame or concern over the consequences.

Billie seemed to fit the profile for kleptomania: She never planned her stealing; it just happened. She no longer had financial problems and had ample resources to buy the things she stole. And most of her stealing involved things of little or no value. We suspect that disorders such as kleptomania are part of a cluster of problems including hoarding, compulsive buying, and even pathological gambling
^*
Certainly, kleptomania and compulsive buying are related to the acquisition we see in hoarding. What may unite these disorders is a psychology of opportunity. Walking away from something that could be acquired means walking away from the potential benefits of ownership. Most of us learn that any action we take means pursuing one opportunity at the expense of another. For people afflicted with this problem, the fear of losing an opportunity is greater than the reward of taking advantage of one. Consequently, all opportunities are preserved, but none are pursued.

A few weeks later, Billie's friend called again. "You have to do something! It's like your conversation with Billie opened a Pandora's box. She's stealing everything." I called Billie. Although her friend had exaggerated, Billie had had several stealing episodes that were more serious than usual. Her favorite jewelry store had marked down a box of stuff—bracelets, rings, and necklaces. Normally, each was between $40 and $50, but they were on sale for $5 each. She bought two bracelets and pocketed eight more. She planned to keep the two she bought and give the rest to her daughter.

For Billie to get control of this behavior, she needed to examine what her stealing meant to her sense of self, and she needed to experience the consequences of her actions. I asked Billie what she thought about herself when she reflected on her behavior. She said that basically she felt like an honest person, but not an honorable one. She couldn't quite articulate the difference. I asked her what it would take for her to be an honorable person with respect to the items she had stolen from the jewelry store. At first she just said she should stop stealing, but I pressed her about this episode. She said that perhaps she could send back the stuff she had stolen anonymously.

"Is that the honorable thing to do?" I asked.

"No," she said.

"What is?"

"Perhaps I could bring it back and say the extras got put in my bag by mistake or that I accidentally put them in my pocket and forgot to pay for them."

"Is that the
honorable
thing?"

"Maybe I could bring in one or two of them to the sister store in a different town. I know this is a chain."

"Is that the honorable thing to do here?"

"No, it's not."

"What would it be?"

"I should go in and confess to the store manager and tell him what I've done."

"And then what would happen?"

"I don't know."

"Perhaps we should talk that through. What is he likely to say?"

"Well, he'll be mad, I'm sure. And he'll probably call the police."

"So tell me what it will be like when the police show up."

"I guess they may arrest me."

"Put you in handcuffs maybe?"

"Yes."

"And what will you have to do?"

"I guess I would have to call my daughter to bail me out."

"So your daughter will have to come to the police station. Since she has young children, she may have to bring them along, right?"

"Yes."

"So you are at the police station, and your daughter and grandchildren come in and the policeman explains to them what you did. Can you imagine what that will be like?"

Billie was crying at this point, but she continued to describe the scene, the disappointment on her daughter's face and the confused, worried looks on her grandchildren's.

I wanted her to follow through with the story so that she could experience something of the consequences that her behavior might set in motion. Her initial description of the stealing was colored by thrill and excitement, with no attention to the likely consequences and no sense of what it said about her as a person. Imagining consequences seemed to change how she felt about her behavior.

At the end of our conversation, she resigned herself to making things right and accepting the consequences of her behavior. A few weeks later, her friend called me again. "I don't know what you said to Billie, but she stopped cold turkey. She hasn't stolen anything in weeks and says she's got no desire to do so." I later heard from Billie, who said she had indeed stopped stealing. Whenever she had the urge, which was now seldom, she thought about her daughter's and grandchildren's faces at the police station. "It's just not worth it," she declared. But she never returned the bracelets, probably precisely because of these images.

Luckily, only a very small number of people with hoarding problems steal. However, the vast majority of hoarders have other problems controlling their acquisition. Research on compulsive buying gives us some clues as to why. As we've seen from the cases described here, the act of collecting is a central feature in the lives of many hoarders. Their sense of themselves and their self-worth seem to be tied to their possessions, but not in a simple way. Our recent studies show that rather than being associated with low self-worth, as is the case with depression, compulsive buying and hoarding seem to be related to people feeling ambivalent or uncertain about their worth. A question rather than a conclusion defines them: "Am I a worthwhile person?" The question provokes them to seek evidence regarding their worth. Our culture provides, and perhaps encourages, several tangible forms of evidence, such as accomplishments or material possessions. When self-worth depends on tangible markers such as these, emotional problems follow.

Being "in the zone" brings intense satisfaction and pleasure, but what follows can crush the self-esteem of even the most well-adjusted person. The catch-22 is clear: the taker is damned if she does and damned if she doesn't. Fixing this problem takes a heroic effort. It requires bringing the full context of one's life into focus during the decision-making process—something few of us do on a regular basis. It means relearning how to react to the sight of a desired possession. Instead of narrowing and focusing his attention, the person must learn to expand it to consider how this object fits into the fabric of his life.

Janet's therapist helped her understand how shopping functioned in her emotional life. Together they identified the different ways that shopping lifted her mood. Since she was "in the zone" during shopping episodes, Janet had never recognized any of her real reasons for buying. When she did, she began to see how her shopping fit into the bigger picture of her life. Answering a few subsequent questions had a big impact on Janet. Does buying really give you these things (resolution of family problems, self-worth, control, excitement, communication with your husband) in a satisfactory way? Is buying the way you want to achieve these things? Knowing that she used shopping as a way to manage her bad moods and that its long-term costs far outweighed the instant gratification, Janet had the motivation to work with her therapist to develop more appropriate ways of managing her moods.