CLUTTERERS ANONYMOUS

[MajestyJo]

What Clutterers Anonymous Offers

Physical:
This is the behavior that results in the stacks, the piles, the
objects, that fill our home, our car, our workplace, our world.
Whether organized or strewn about, it is all so overwhelming.
We find ourselves drowning in a sea of clutter. We have become
owned by our possessions.

Emotional:
This is the fog we create in our heads -- resentments, unfinished
thoughts, emotional baggage, daydreams, worries about the
future, and regrets about the past. Our mind is in a constant
spin, we lose today because our time is spent living in yesterday
and tomorrow.

Spiritual:
This is the deep emptiness that we feel inside -- the emptiness
we compulsively try to fill by clinging to useless objects, non-
productive ideas, meaningless activities, and unsatisfying
relationships.

Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over clutter -
that our lives had become unmanageable

My Mother is a clutterer, collecter or hoarder, which ever term
you want use. She loves going to yard sales looking for
bargains, but most of what she buys are dolls, stuffed animals
and wicker baskets. She's been doing this for years, but adding
dementia to game has brought on some major problems in her
life. She and my setp-father live in his house in town and he
has his own collections. Between the two, the house is over
flowing.....

Mom's house in the country, has every room stacked with
stuff.... Her garage, a travel trailor and two sheds are also full
of her stuff. She used to have an occasional yard sale and
would try to resell some of what she'd bought, but she's no
longer interrested in getting rid of any of it. My older sister
has been trying to go through some of it, as it got damp and
has mildewed and ruined a bunch of it. Wet books are of no
use to anyone.... My mother is 86 and her husband 90, they
do not believe they have a problem.

Are you or do you know anyone who needs help and hope
with this? I wasn't aware that there was a 12-step group
for this disorder. I'm including a link for Clutterers Anonymous

http://sites.google.com/site/clutterersanonymous/Home

[MajestyJo]

Clutter Cleaner's Matt Paxton: A Hero to the Hoarders
Matt Paxton helps compulsive hoarders clean out their homes and clean up their lives -- earning him a prominent role on the A&E reality series Hoarders.

By Geoff Williams

However unlikely, hoarding has become part of the pop culture landscape. There are books like Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, and you can't channel surf these days without finding a reality series about hoarding. Animal Planet has Confessions: Animal Hoarding. TLC has Hoarding: Buried Alive. And A&E's series is simply called Hoarders.

In the midst of all this is Matt Paxton, president of Clutter Cleaner, whose Richmond, Va.-based business is routinely featured on Hoarders, which returns on Sept. 6. But Paxton, 35, isn't just a reality TV creation. He started Clutter Cleaner in 2006, three years before Hoarders started airing. He brings in about half a million in revenue and employs six full-time employees and two part-timers.


We recently caught up with Paxton to get his take on why hoarding -- the compulsive act of collecting everyday possessions and then failing to use or discard them -- doesn't just make for compelling television, but is the basis for a solid business model. And it's a business that requires a lot of employee training, since the Clutter Cleaner team is working with homeowners who, rightly or wrongly, have a lot of emotions invested in their stuff. Without that training, Paxton says, "really, we're just moving boxes."

You had to put off our first interview because of an emergency. You said you had to clean up "dead cats."

We get them more than you would expect. We'll walk into a place and say, "How many dead cats do you think we'll find?"

Wow? Why are cats the preferred pets of hoarders?

We call it easy love. It's much easier to love a cat than yourself or friends or family. Spending time with a cat might be one of the few moments of happiness in these hoarders' world, and they lose their boundaries and decide, "I want more cats." These hoarders have so many cats that they're not aware they're reproducing in the back room. They believe they have six cats, but they have 35. Denial is a major part of hoarding. They can justify anything. I understand that. I used to have a gambling problem, and I'd think, "It's OK to gamble my paycheck because I'm going to win it back." They'll say, "These six are my cats, and I love them. Those other cats aren't my cats."

OK, well, this interview has started off a little more morbid than I planned. So who pays you? I'm guessing not the hoarder.

It's usually a family member or social services. Rarely does a hoarder contact us. Maybe one of out of 50. And one way they're able to pay for our services is to sell a lot of what they've hoarded. Many of our customers are compulsive shoppers, and they'll have $50,000 worth of crap in the house. One of our clients had 200 grand in jewelry from QVC. We don't do any of the selling, incidentally. We work deals so the people can sell their stuff, and they have to pay us upfront.

What are your fees?

They can range from $1,000 for one day to $20,000 or $25,000. It all depends how much feces is there, or simply how much stuff. And about half of our business is senior relocation, but you end up using the exact same skill set.

I read that you started your business with the idea of relocating senior citizens. You're still doing that?

Yeah, in this case, seniors haven't been hoarding, just saving -- saving everything -- but they're just doing what their parents taught them during the Depression. So you end up using the same skills, but they have a different mindset. And we're very mindful of the personal mental statement, because really it's all about the same thing: control. A hoarder keeps everything as a way of keeping control, and senior citizens are often afraid of losing control of their life.

I'll bet you find some pretty amazing things with the senior relocation jobs.

It's fascinating. We had one client, a 90-year-old woman who was living in her mother's house, which she had lived in her whole life. Her mother ran a brothel during the Civil War, and we were finding bags of Civil War material, including diaries. We submitted all of it to a local museum. With every family, you find something amazing or extremely personal. We found trolley tokens at one house, even though there hadn't been a trolley in the city for 60 years. And another house, we found 45s, and this 18-year-old kid said, "Wow, they look like records." He had never seen any. We're moving people from, say, a 5,000-square foot home to a 300-foot square apartment and trying to help them focus on the future and realize that their life isn't over.

Presumably, people were hoarding a century ago. Why is hoarding so popular now?

It's always been there. I mean, everyone has a crazy aunt who did it. It's really like alcoholism, only it's a new alcoholism. It's now OK to say, "My aunt is a hoarder." Before all this publicity, people just thought it was weird, but now we're understanding that it's a disease. In 10 years, people will be very nonchalant and accepting of it, but right now, there's still a negative association. We're seeing the last of the kids of the Depression hitting old age and dying, so we're just now getting into these houses that people haven't been in for years. Then you have that next generation of baby boomers, who have money to buy things and are receiving everything from their parents. And a lot of the baby boomers don't want this stuff, but they feel guilty, so they take it. We're seeing the effects of the last 50 years of consumerism.

And as the rest of the world becomes more Americanized, we'll have more consumerism, so the hoarding won't go away. The shows will go away, of course, because something else will come along, but the problem will still be there. That's the challenge with mental disorders being entertainment. There's quick awareness, which is great, but the problem is making sure that the family members get help. And if you don't do therapy along with the clean-up, almost 100 percent of the time, the hoarder will just fill up their house again. That's why we won't even agree to clean out somebody's home unless they agree to therapy, and sometimes we make them start therapy before we clean their house. It's a waste of their money otherwise.

Seriously? Because I'm sure many hoarders don't agree to therapy.

Oh, we end up walking away from a lot of jobs. But if you have a buddy who is an alcoholic, and all you do is throw his beer away, he's going to go out to the store and buy more. If they won't go to therapy, we say, 'OK, thanks for your time -- good luck.' Because the house will fill back up, the family will be angry that they've invested $15,000 or $20,000, and they'll be calling us in two years to come back. And I tell people, we only clean the house once. I'd rather come only after a person feels he or she has hit rock bottom.

I have to say, that sounds like a very ethical way to run your business. I mean, you're losing out on some money, by structuring it so you don't have repeat customers.

We could make a lot more in the short term if we didn't make them sign a paper that they'll go into therapy, but doing business unethically never works out. I think we're going to an old school market where people realize the easy way out no longer works. I mean look what happened with everything on Wall Street.

So back to the dead cats and feces. Did you ever imagine you'd be doing this sort of thing, back when you were a kid?

I always knew I'd be an entrepreneur. I was selling candy on the school bus. I'd take my allowance and buy candy and sell it to the kids, like three packs of gum for a dollar. Since the gum only cost me 30 cents, I made 70 percent on my candy. I've never had profit margins like that since and probably never will. That was a great experience until the Blow Pop kid came aboard the bus and took away all of my customers. But I've always enjoyed making money. I did try real jobs. I was an analyst for the Federal Reserve right out of college. I had an economist's background and thought I wanted to be a banker, but I realized that wasn't for me. Later, I invented an all-natural cleaning product for flip-flops that I sold for four years. I had a wetsuit company before that, and I tried to sell pre-cut limes to Budweiser. I thought that was a moneymaker, but I couldn't even get in the door.

So I wound up $100,000 in debt from all of my business ventures, but that was OK. I viewed the 10 years I spent on my businesses after college as grad school. A good MBA probably would have cost me that much, and I'm sure I learned more with my businesses. That's how you really learn cash flow, not by looking at a spreadsheet. And then Clutter Cleaners just came out of me trying to find a way to pay my rent. I know this is going to sound cheesy, but when I stopped trying to get rich and just started trying to help people, that's when I started getting rich.

Geoff Williams is a frequent contributor to AOL Small Business. He is also the co-author of the book Living Well with Bad Credit.

[MajestyJo]

Sent by my friend from Texas.


Though I am loathe to admit it, I am an online hoarder. I have more photos saved than I could ever look at in this lifetime. As for "boxes of stuff" and general clutter - I invoke the Kathryn Hepburn Amendment: "On that subject my lips are sealed" (with the appropriate speech pattern of course)..

Are You an Online Hoarder?


The TLC show “Hoarding: Buried Alive” delves into the lives of compulsive hoarders who are literally buried in squalor. Boxes of “stuff” -- ranging from paper to clothing items to pieces of garbage -- clutter the hoarders’ homes, making it physically impossible to even set foot in rooms covered from one end to the other with years of accumulated (and frequently unused) goods.

The hoarding phenomenon, interestingly enough, has now transferred to the digital world, where hoarders clutter their computers with an endless stream of downloads, old documents and folders. Referring to them as “digital packrats,” Wired magazine explains that “Infohoarding may be the first psychiatric dysfunction born of digital age.” The trend is so common that it has even garnered a definition in Wikipedia, which explains that “Digital hoarders find it just as difficult to press ‘delete’ as traditional hoarders find throwing items in the trash.”

Consequences of online hoarding
Remember that the ‘delete’ button is your friend. If you continuously save scores of files and photos, your hard drive would be ready to burst at the seams. This process can slow your system to a crawl and take up large amounts of space. To get back up to speed and de-clutter your hard drive, there are certain measures you can take.

What to keep, what to toss
Email: Clearing out your inbox is a good place to start. Delete all those emails that have been sitting in your inbox for months on end, to which you have already responded. If you are holding on to important email that you need to save, simply archive it and toss out the rest.

Documents and folders: Be sure to back up and save important documents and delete the remaining folders or documents you don’t need. You can store these on disks, or a good solution is to subscribe to a web storage service, which will allow you to keep your documents online without worrying about losing them. If there are several versions of the same document in your “documents” folder, save one version and erase the rest.

Web cache: Your cache saves your web browsing information (file downloads, sites you access, etc.). As we previously reported, clearing your cache every so often frees up a lot of space on your computer. If you're not sure how to do it, software like System Mechanic can clear your cache and help give your computer an overall tune-up at the same time.

Temporary files: These files (with the extension “.tmp”) are a waste of space and should be deleted. As FileInfo.com explains, “Many programs, such as those included with Microsoft office, will save a temporary version of a file every few minutes while the file is open.” This serves as a good backup plan, but once you’re done with the document, you can delete the temporary backups.

Downloads, Games, etc.: The moral of the story here is you can’t download and save everything. Wired reported the case of a 37-year-old Brooklyn man -- a typical “digital packrat” -- whose incessant hoarding habit revolves around downloading and saving infinite numbers of movies, music files, comics, and so on. This is only one case of many "Infohoarders" who engage in this type of behavior.

But be honest: How often do we use the programs and games we install or download? If it's rarely or never, these programs are taking up space on our computers and slowing them down.

For games, for example, simply uninstall those you rarely use. And if you insist on saving large numbers of music and photo files, you can best refer to a web storage service like SugarSync.com, which lets you access your music or movies from any Internet connection while helping clear space on your hard drive.

-- Tara Taghizadeh --

[MajestyJo]

It is a sickness. It is all a sickness. The computer addiction is just as valad as the house one is too. It all leads to a soul sickness.

Some is good, more is better. It becomes there reason for being. The games, chat rooms, and message boards take up their time and they have no time for living. It becomes their life and shuts everything out. I know. I have been there when I was obsessed with my web sites. I got so I resented when the phone rang and people called. All I could talk about were my sites, I was so obsessive, compulsive. I had to take the whole situation to my Higher Power and ask for healing.

I am grateful to a certain person for talking innuendos and being off putting that I left a chat room. It left me not wanting to be a part of such a vehicle of communication or I might have gotten involved in them too. That isn't who I am in today, it certainly isn't what I want to hear in a recovery chat room.

I had to put my thinking and computer into my Higher Power's Hands. I was totally obsessed with my sites.

Had an Aunt Violet who was a Hoarder. I inherited her Bible. She saved plastic bags amongst others things. Back in her day, there were Nylons and she had the bags that the nylons came in. The magazines and papers had almost gotten to an unhealthy stage and my aunt and uncle took days to clear her place. The sad thing was that there was very little value except to her. It was mostly things that you would look at and say, "Oh, better not throw that out, I might need it some day."