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Emotional Health and Hoarding Disorder
Understanding your emotional wellbeing for those with hoarding behaviour
Looking at how emotional health affects hoarding disorder in support of Emotional Health Day on Friday 24th February.
Investing time into understanding and aligning your emotional wellbeing can have a really positive effect when dealing with life’s everyday ups and downs. It can be especially useful for those who suffer with Hoarding Disorder or Hoarding behaviour. By managing the relationship we have with ourselves, it can greatly benefit how individuals deal with the processes involved in learning to manage hoarding behaviour.
Self Acceptance
Generalised Meaning –
An individual’s acceptance of all of their attributes, positive or negative.
Individuals who display and struggle with Hoarding Behaviour very often struggle with this. Self acceptance means being very vulnerable and open about parts of yourself that you want to keep hidden, facing fears and uncomfy feelings. This is then added to by the fact that your family, friends & wider society will usually have their own a set of expectations and opinions that you naturally feel pressured to live up too. And if you don’t, or display behaviour that is not deem’d run of the mill, it can cause you to feel even more isolated and wanting to hide away.
A main point to always keep in mind is that self acceptance does not come easy to anyone, it is not just isolated to those who display hoarding behaviour. Pretty much everybody who walks this earth has struggles with their own sense of self, even the most confident of individuals will have a stash of insecurities they struggle to accept is a part of them.
You should feel proud of yourself if you do feel uneasy or triggered by parts of yourself or behaviour, this means you are already becoming self aware to the fact you may need to make a few changes or seek professional support. It is important to note that feeling like you need to make a change is natural and not a negative, you will outgrow many versions of yourself and your environment through a lifetime. And just because you think you need support with something does not mean you have failed or what you are doing is wrong. It is just where you are at right now, everybody needs a helping hand sometimes. You should never be ashamed, try to adjust your thinking to how strong you are by owning up to parts of yourself that you could so easily keep hidden but are choosing to face instead.
It is about releasing the judgement you have against yourself in regard to your behaviours, they do not define who you are. And not letting anybody else’s views or opinions impact the journey of self acceptance. It can be hard, especially if you are working with various agencies or have family members pressuring you but please work at your own pace. Communicate how you feel to those around you, this journey is personal to you so everybody involved should try to respect your boundaries.
Self Esteem
Generalised meaning
Confidence in one’s own worth or abilities; self-respect
It is very common in a lot of individuals who display hoarding behaviour to have low self esteem. The main contributors to this are societies judgement and lack of understanding & misdiagnosis from professionals.
As mentioned above around self acceptance, it is a massive step to accept you need support and to seek it out. If you are then provided with the incorrect information from a professional service that you put your trust and vulnerability into it can have a drastic impact, you are likely believe everything they say is true.
Sadly but reassuringly, a lot of these professionals usually just have not had the correct training around Hoarding Disorder. For example, a lot of our referrals come from services such as social services, the fire service, NHS services, housing support. These professionals are experts in their own fields but as Hoarding Disorder and Behaviour is still very misinterpreted within society, it is not usually a priority for professionals to have understanding on the topic as part of the their base job specifications. This is why Hoarding Awareness Week exists, it is to bring awareness to the subject of Hoarding Disorder within public service sector & wider society so we can correctly educate professionals on how to support those in need.
It is important to keep pushing for the correct support for your needs and not to be disheartened by someone else’s viewpoint, even if they are a service industry. You need to focus on learning and understanding how you work and from this what works for you in terms of handling hoarding behaviour.
‘Normal’ does not exist, and even if it did, it would be very boring to fit a textbook definition of something. Try to embrace these unique aspects that make you, you.
How caring you are to have accumulated a stock pile of your loved ones favourite things, how interesting you are to have collected every single bit of merchandise from your favourite comic book series, how loved you were to have inherited a house full of items from a late loved one.
Individuals with hoarding disorder are so quick to judge themselves for what they do, forgetting that usually strong emotions and valid reasoning has lead them to where they are. By no means are we glamourising the struggles that come with these behaviours but it is good to acknowledge that not all of it manifests from a part of you that you should be ashamed off.
Resilience & Managing Strong Emotions
Generalised Meaning
The capacity toย withstandย or to recover quickly from difficulties
One of the biggest strengths those who suffer from hoarding behaviour display is resilience. Usually hoarding behaviour has manifested from traumatic or uncomfortable events throughout life, this proves already that you have got the inner emotional skills to overcome what life can throw at you. Therefore, getting a handle on hoarding behaviour is just another aspect of life that can be processed through. Going through the journey of seeking support and working alongside professionals is then more proof of how resilient you are. You are not letting this area of your life control you any longer by taking the appropriate steps to find yourself again.
Resilience and managing strong emotions are classified as two separate areas of emotional health but we believe they come hand in hand. Usually the strategist we put in place to be resilient against whatever we are battling are in turn helping us to manage the strong emotions that come alongside.
Managing your emotions
Below is a few different strategies to help manage your emotions in order to have a better balance in life overall.
- Gratefulness – It is great to reflect on the positives in your life on a daily basis. Even on the days just getting out of bed takes all day, you can still be thankful you had that bed to lay in, you had a kettle to make a cup of tea & running water to take a shower. It is great grounding exercise on the days life feels heavy. It is also just as useful to reflect on the good days too, to acknowledge just how lovely being alive is.
- Mindfulness – This can be more challenging, as life can have us running from pilar to post with all its requests, but to mentally try to be in the moment as often as you can is a great tool to implement. Even if it is just when you are brushing your teeth in the morning, to really feel every bristle against your teeth & gums, the minty freshness of the toothpaste on your tongue and the ache in fingers from the rigorous movement. Setting aside certain moments in your daily routine to switch off from the external and internal noise is really useful for balancing your inner thoughts.
- Zoom out on life – It is very easy to get wound up into a tiny ball over situations, to the point it feels like the world is ending. At moments like this it is really important to zoom out on life, take a step back from the situation. Try and see it from the point of view of a friend, how would you advice someone you care about to cope in this situation if you were not so emotionally invested in the outcome. A lot of the time our emotions will mask the logical part of our brain and make it hard to rationalise, being able to pull yourself out of that spiral and to view the situation from a wider angle lens is a really useful coping strategy for getting a hand in times our emotions feel very overwhelming.
- Learning how you display emotions – This is not an easy thing to do, it does involve really digging down deep into yourself. It means becoming more self aware in the present moment during a stressful or triggering situation to be able to make note of how it manifests from start to end. Then from here you can work on understanding what buttons were pressed to get to that point and which emotions came along with it. For example, if we go back to the first point on self acceptance, a lot of people struggle with allowing themselves to feel certain emotions due to rejecting parts of themselves or their behaviour. These individuals will then tend to spike to anger as a first response to every situation that happens, even if the situation has actually made them feel sadness, anger feels more comfortable to sit in. This has then added another emotional reaction to a situation that is already bringing up strong emotions, overloading the brain further. As stated, this is easier said than done adapting your thinking to recognise when this happens. But if you can slowly learn to sit in every emotion, rather than avoid them, overtime you will be able to stop adding to an already overflowing pot of emotions.
- Avoid ‘Pre-action’ – As humans we naturally like to prepare for the future and protect ourselves from things that may hurt us, but the key word here is ‘May‘. Not a lot is proven fact in terms of the future, sadly life does not come with a crystal ball. Usually that first date or job interview will never embody the actual stress we torture ourselves with leading up to it. This does link into mindfulness, try to focus on the present moment and the future will sort itself. This again is not easy, especially for those who suffer from anxiety, but it can be where the mindfulness tip really helps overtime. Even if its just to get lost for a few minutes each day, you can gradually start to build on this and ground tourself when you feel ‘pre-action’ kicking in.
- Modita- this is a favourite within our support groups. Modita means finding joy or pleasure from seeing other people do well. Learning to look outside of our own four walls to acknowledge our friends, family or even strangers wins can do wonders for your own emotional wellbeing. Displaying kindness and love to others is guaranteed to bring it back to you in some form.
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The above information, although tailored towards those with hoarding behaviour, is still very generalised. If you feel triggered by any of the statements or feel that you require one on one support, please contact help@cloudsend.org.uk or find more information on our services here.