Online Support Groups -- Hoarding

There are great self-help resources on the Internet. The online Hoarding support group I belong to is a great example.

When I heard about this support group, I was intrigued.

I took the Rating Scale that I found on the Compulsive Hoarding Website. I scored high enough to meet the criteria, and that's considering how my wife tends to throw out lots of stuff fairly regularly.

So I sent an e-mail request for more information in August of 2006. I got an invitation to apply to the OC Foundation's flagship online self-help group, Hoarding-Cluttering at the end of February. (There is a limit of 103 active members, so I had to wait for a spot to open.) My application was accepted and approved on March 2, 2007, nearly one year ago.

Some of the items I was hoarding at the time included:

• Broken or unneeded appliances, as well as their manuals and the boxes they came in.
• Paper documents, particularly anything with financial or personal information.
• My daughter's writings and drawings. The clothes, toys & books that she's out-grown.
• Magazines.
• Outdated books that I have no use for.
• E-mail.
• AOL CDs, even though I've no intention of joining.
• Plastic bottles, such as 1 gallon jugs for water and cat litter.
• Hazardous waste, such as motor oil, paint thinner, fluorescent bulbs, non-alkaline batteries. (I do bring them to the annual collection if they start to accumulate too much.)

What kind of progress have I made in a year? Well,

• I still don't like to throw out broken appliances. But if my wife does, I no longer pull them out of the trash. I do get rid of the boxes, now.
• I've decided to discard paid invoices that are more than a year old. Due to privacy concerns, I burn these along with the junk mail offers for credit and mortgage refinancing.
• I now scan or take pictures of our daughter's artwork, and even some of her toys. I can then let go of the actual items a lot more easily. Still, my wife is the one that has to discard or donate the items. But I'm eager to get rid of certain old clothes -- the closets are full of the stuff!
• I canceled most magazine subscriptions. I bring to work or recycle the ones I still get, even if I don't think I've read them fully.
• I donated a few books and CDs to the library. I had more CDs slated to go, but my wife exhibited a rare bout of role reversal and removed them from the discard pile. She claimed that our daughter would use the CDs for dancing.
• As for e-mail, I decided it wasn't worth wasting time over. Disk capacity is cheap and plentiful. It's not a problem for me if I have 831 unread messages (957 total) in my Inbox. I do have auto-archiving set.
• I haven't been getting AOL CDs lately. I've used them all for coasters, except two that I hung next to the house to deter a woodpecker from knocking holes in our home's siding.
• I gave many plastic bottles to someone who was designing and making his own robot costume.
• I collect a lot less hazardous waste. I now use all water-based paint, even primer, so I don't need paint thinner. I no longer change my cars' oil by myself. So the occasional watch battery and flourescent light don't take up much room.

So I feel good about the progress I made. But I do have major challenges ahead in the basement, the garage, and both the home office and work office.