Is hoarding a Mormon thing? I come from a line of hoarders and constantly battle clutter at home, but I married a never mo who is also a packrat. What gives?

Outside of Mormonism, compulsive hoarding is usually a stress response and a coping mechanism for loss. (It occurs a lot within veterans and their families, or when a family member has died) Within Mormonism, the end is always nigh, which makes you want to be always prepared for any possibility, and is then exacerbated by the fact that a tenth of what you could have is taken, making you further feel the need to store up what you can, just in case. It's not unique to Mormonism by any means, but within Mormonism, it is made worse due to "logical" necessity for the time to come.

I don't know the answer to your question.

I will say that the women are taught in RS to be hoarders. Save anything and everything that may have a use. Hoard food and clothing. Look for bargains, even if you need them at the time or not. Save things like toilet paper rolls, they may have a craft use in the future. Save every little thing your kids have for the day you may get around to doing a scrap book. Save things you aren't using to give to your kids someday. Sounds like hoarding 101 to me.

Yes, this type of thinking can definitely lead to out-of-control clutter and hoarding.

After having watched several seasons of Hoarding: Buried Alive and Confessions: Animal Hoarding, I am an expert on hoarding. :-)

There was one family that seemed Mormon to me, and I've been meaning to ask if anybody else here has seen it and what they thought. It was a family in Arizona with 5 kids. The dad moved out because he couldn't stand to be in the house with the mom's clutter and she freaked out anytime he tried to clean it up. But he didn't divorce her. They kind of gave off a Mormon vibe, and then near the end the mom said a prayer that started with "Dear Heavenly Father" and ended with "in Jesus Christ's name, Amen."

Anyway, I don't think it's specifically a Mormon problem, but I wonder if there's a slightly higher rate of it in Mormons, just because of the related issues of anxiety disorders and depression that so many of the hoarders on the shows present with.

But I can't watch the animal hoarding episodes or show.

Angers up the blood.

Yep me too. I don't watch anything with crying puppies in it because that sound upsets my dog. She's so sweet, she wants to rescue the crying puppies but she can't smell them or find them, so she starts crying herself.

So yeah, I avoid animal rescue shows and animal hoarding shows. Nevermind the white hot livid rage I feel when I see animals being abused and neglected.

Mormon Hoarding Story: (With regard to hoarding craft supplies)

I've told this before, but it still makes me laugh.

TBM parentals come to Florida for a visit. I drive them down to the National Forest near the shore to hike around the swampy woods for a bit. We find a parking space near a trailhead and start wandering around a little. My stepmonster spots all these enormous pine cones we have down here from these long needle pines that are all freaking over the place. You cannot swing a cat without hitting a long needle pine in this part of the world.

Immediately, her eyes light up because she can think of ten billion crafts she can do with the pine cones. She rummages around in the trunk, comes up with a couple of plastic bags and sends my dad and I out into the wilderness to gather pine cones for her. We walk away out of hearing range and start muttering quietly to each other.

I said, "Dad, you do realize, don't you, that we're going to spend all this time picking these stupid things up, you're going to drive them 1,000 miles home, and she will never do anything with the pine cones, right?"

Dad says, "Yep. I'm aware of that." We continue picking up pine cones, knowing it's pointless.

I pipe up again, "Hey Dad, I bet if you sell the house and move, you will move these pine cones to the new place and she still won't ever use them."

Dad grumbles, "You're probably right about that. Shut up and keep picking up pine cones." :>) LOL

Flash forward about 5-10 years and the did sell the house and were moving. Dad calls me from his cellphone mid-move, "I'm driving the last load to the new house! We're almost done!"

"That's great dad, but let me ask you a question. Were the pine cones still there and did you move them?"

"Shut up, kid. [quietly] Yes, I moved the damn pine cones."

I rolled on the floor laughing. I guarantee you, one of us will be throwing those pine cones out after she dies. Last time I was up there visiting, they were having a garage sale. It was amazing how much kitchy crap she had (that nobody wanted, even for cheap, although I took a rug off her hands). I didn't think their house could fit all that stuff. So I do think the hoarding is encouraged by the food storage and obsession with crafts. She's also raised by Depression era parents and used to make me wash aluminum foil and ziploc baggies for re-use. Ever try to flatten out a piece of used aluminum foil to wash it? It's nonsense, that's what that is.

God. Maybe if he grew a pair he'd stop enabling her. He's part if the problem.

Living with a hoarder isn't as easy as all that. Show a little compassion.

They also may have moved the golf clubs that he hasn't used in twenty years (or similar.)

Nice way to blame the innocent.
It is absolutely NOT anyone else's responsibility to change or "fix" a person with an addiction or a mental illness.
You can offer help, but it is completely up that individual to DECIDE and to CHOOSE to change and to get help.

My TBM sister-in-law is a hoarder! And when my MIL and FIL passed away, my SIL and her husband and 4 kids had to move out and get a place of their own. They're renting a 1000 sq ft home, and had to get a storage unit to hold all their stuff. Not only that, but she inherited all my MIL's geneology stuff and had nowhere to put it, so my husband agreed to store it in our 2 car garage, where we park our 2 cars so there's not a lot of room in there. It's 6 huge moving boxes of papers and crap! I want it out, but it looks like we'll be storing it for a while... (I honestly don't get geneology; waste of time in my opinion. But I didn't grow up Mormon.)

Nothing in the LDS teachings,or in my experience had anything to do with the mental illnesses associated with hoarding, often an OCD diagnosis goes along with it. Never saw a hoarder's home. Or knew of one. The first time I saw the actual hoarding problem (living in filth, animal feces, trash, rotting walls, etc. was on TV).

I knew dozens of LDS folks in several states over the years, spending time in many of their homes. Not one was a hoarder, or even a "pack-rat"!

I grew up with a Depression Era family and, yes we saved items for reuse. We were the original recyclers: tin cans, string, aluminum foil, boxes, etc. We had a way to reuse them. Living areas were kept clear. Furniture was kept in good shape as long as possible.

Cases of hoarding aren't always filth. Remember that these shows show extreme, tv-worthy cases.

I looked up the requirements to get on that show to see if my Dad qualified. The mess had to take over almost the entire house and there had to be rooms that were no longer accessible. For Dad it's only taken over about 25% of his house and he still has paths through those areas so he didn't qualify.

Now that he's too feeble to haul things home the problem has stabilized.

Dad can't pass up anything that's free. He can't give anything away or let it go for less than he paid. He believes everything appreciates in value, he wants more than he paid for it. He doesn't grasp that it's USED.

The concept that moving it, and storing it comes at a price escapes him. When I visit I mentally come up with the plan to clean house for after he dies. I'm thinking three full size dumpsters the first week.

The first thing to go is the room full of freeze dried food storage from the 1960's. (He made ward members haul it through 4 moves -eyeroll-. They moved one ton of coal each time too. At my mother's instruction I spent a summer day hauling that coal one small wheel barrow at a time. I "hid" it under the tams that covered a bermed hillside in the back yard. Mom told him that in an emergency he can go find it.)

Yes, yes it does. Not a single mormon family home I ever visited didn't have piles and stacks of carefully sorted and organized "saved things" creeping out of every corner or closet.

I imagine if this is what feels normal it won't look like hoarding... If you are thinking of the worst case scenarios on the tv show. That's the whole point. That's where hoarding can wind up, like those worst cases. But usually hoarders manage to contain it or stay on top of the accumulation by rotating their stashed stuff.
Doesn't make it not hoarding, lol!

In a way, Mormonism encourages hoarding with the idea of having a year's supply as well as having things for future crafting purposes.

Now, my TBM ex-husband and my former MIL were the type of hoarders you see on those shows, as both of them already had that tendency, but the hoarding got out of control when my ex-husband's dad died of cancer. While that loss had something to do with it, the fact that they were Mormons also contributed to the hoarding since they had the extra supplies, and tons of things that could potentially be used for crafts.

I don't think hoarding has a religion. I know people who hoard who are non-religious. I've known people who hoard who are very religious. I don't think being a Mormon has anything to do with it.

P.S. I refuse to watch t.v. shows that feature human misery for entertainment.

They are CLEARLY more fucked up than I am.

I agree. We watched a few episodes of Hoarders, and got our giggles out. The kids also watched and thought it was interesting/funny, but there was one episode that a woman was crying over the loss of a rotting pumpkin she had saved because it was so perfect. It showed her rifling through the molding, rotted pumpkin remains to save the seeds so she could someday grow another perfect pumpkin.

As funny as that sounds, my heart was broken, and I turned it off for good. It was then I realized that some production company is making money off of someone else's severe mental illness, and that made me sick. Exploiting these people for a few bucks. Dispicable.

I'm not an expert, but I know something about hoarding - I've encountered this issue enough to have had to learn something about it.

One thing that makes hoarding so difficult to treat is that it is a response to anxiety. The hoarder is soothed by the accumulation of stuff, and there's no way to overdose on collecting, so they keep collecting things. This is one reason why the well-meaning "cleanout" by friends and neighbors doesn't solve anything - the hoarder still has this response to anxiety.

Increase the anxiety, and you may well increase the hoarding behavior if the person has not learned another method of handling the anxiety.

Some religions trap people in a web of anxiety-producing stimuli. Hoarders will "relieve" this the way they always have.

Anxiety will not create a hoarding problem by itself, but it will make one worse.

My favorite part of the shows is when they start getting treatment for their anxiety disorder or depression. I love to see them start to feel better and become more functional as a result.

There was a different hoarding show I watched a few times that had more of an emphasis on bringing in big trucks to haul everything away and they didn't bother so much with the mental health treatment. I stopped watching it. I don't think that approach is helpful at all and it was painful to see.

I think I mentioned my Utah relatives that were down a while back and snagged a bunch of stuff from my father's estate; while not exactly hoarding it seemed a little odd that the only snagged stuff was 1830's-50's "pioneer" era--even though there were NO Mormons in the family during that time, it's a heavy history time for TSCC, so it seems like non-LDS antiques are being appropriated for LDS use....

It sucks when somone wont let you get rid of unnecessary/ useless stuff. I read a Buddhist book once that really clarified the need for emotional detachment to stuff. So one day when my life was in bad shape, not by my, but parents doing. Their house was foreclosed on, but Dad had moved out and states away, Mom was in jail, etc.... So I had to find a place to live (no "friends" in the church helped by the way) The point is I was PERFECTLY OKAY with letting go of all the unnecessary possessions which I could not do anything with anyway. BUT my Home Teacher (at the time) sweet guy--- however --- I did NOT ask for his help, but he put all the rest of my Mom's belonging, furniture into a Storage Unit. I didn't want this help, but somehow did not possess the critical thinking skills or maybe was under excessive stress, but I couldn't flat out refuse at the time. The Hoarders show is very fascinating & it helps remind me I'm doing something important keep my house CLEAN for Me and my Family....

Not too long ago, I was telling my TBM mom that our house may be very shabby (very old house, always trying to fix it), but at least we aren't hoarders. She agreed whole heartedly.

Meanwhile, I have a TBM aunt who likes to pretend she's rich, & she's a secret hoarder. She has a huge 3 car garage, & that's where she stashes everything.

My TBM in-laws have a serious problem with hoarding.

I think the Mormon focus on food storage and being frugal can exacerbate or even instigate hoarding.

You wouldn't think my TBM inlaws are hoarders just by walking in their house. Living room, kitchen, and family room are fine. But all the bedrooms, a bathroom, and multiple sheds are filled with junk. MIL loves crafts, so a lot of it is her crafting stuff. She's also obsessed with garage sales, and buys a lot of things "just in case she needs them". And they never, ever throw things away or get rid of them.

It makes me nervous because I'm starting to see some of these tendencies in DH, where he thinks we have to hold onto something on the off chance we'll use it. Not sure if it's a Mormon thing, but definitely part of "being prepared".

My mom was a mild-to moderate hoarder who became a serious hoarder in the last few years of her life. She was always trying to give us stuff, from food, to knick-knacks, and for a long time my brother and I wouldn't take any of her junk. Then we realized it was a way to reduce her hoard, so we took everything she offered us. When it came time to move her out of her hoard, she cried over a bag of chocolate chips that was full of worms, and said, "You're taking away all my food!" There were at least 10 years worth of telephone books in her house.

I don't think it's a Mormon thing. I do believe monkey see monkey do. You carry down things you learn from the parents.
Part of it could be not having needs met as a kid or learning if you don't push your way through the crowd you might not get a piece of that cake. If a kid grows up in a large family having to share a room and receives handmidown clothes and missing getting enough candy when the piñata breaks, that could have something to do with it.

My late Mormon MIL was a hoarder. Actually, my late convert TBM FIL was, too.

Don't know if Mormonism played into it...I think, as inactive as she became, MIL was psycho without the TSCC in her life. FIL was just lazy, I think, and too busy with work and church activities to clean up. It only really manifested in both of them when they divorced.

DW was BIC and I'd call her the "Anti-Hoarder." I could see how the preparedness stuff in Mormonism could feed a tendency that was already there, but I can't see that it's a Mormon thing.