Hoarding Resources help

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San Jose Internet Guide  for Extreme Hoarding Behavior

How to Help A Hoarder

There are a lot of people who live in the San Jose South Bay area and abroad who have someone in their lives that they personally know and love who are hoarders. One question that everyone wants to know is how to help a hoarder? We believe in order to help a hoarder, you must first understand what a hoarder is? Hoarding is a dangerous and sometimes complex mental disorder that affects about 1.4 million individuals just in the United States alone.

When people suffer from a severe emotional attachment, trying to remove their belongings can feel like an unwinnable battle that’s both emotionally draining and impossible. Hoarding can best be described as a compulsion to collect and save things on a grand scale, and no matter the value of an item, it’s priceless to the hoarder. Hoarding can lead to unhealthy living conditions as well as an unsanitary environment for food preparations.

We’ve included some tips below on how to help a hoarder as well as getting them ready for our clean up services, and making them feel good about themselves during the process.

1. Help for Hoarders

It’s important to understand the severity of hoarding before you approach someone you love and start cleaning their house and removing their valuables. This can oftentimes produce fits of rage and anger within the hoarder, and you may find yourself getting kicked out of the house with no future invitations to come back. A hoarder will choose their valuables over you any day of the week.

Since hoarding is a mental disorder, hoarders oftentimes feel misunderstood and judged; therefore, in most cases, they will try to hide it from the ones they love the most and isolate themselves to extreme measures. The first step in trying to help a hoarder is to talk to them about it and convince them to make small steps. If you can intervene during the early stages of hoarding, the easier it will be; however, for people who are full-blown hoarders, the challenge can be extremely difficult.

Here are a few five tips for initially helping a hoarder:

• Tip #1: Talk to the hoarder in a casual manner over coffee or a meal and express your concerns.
• Tip #2: Try to convince them to clean one room and wait to get a response from them.
• Tip #3: Offer to help, but do not throw anything away without their permission.
• Tip #4: Encourage them by making statements about how nice it looks.
• Tip #5: Reward them by taking them out for a movie or dinner, but only if they keep the room clean.

Depending on the severity of the hoarder, the above tips may have no effect at all; therefore, the next step is to get some professional hoarding help for them.

2. Hoarding Help

The good news, there are many professional clinicians in the San Jose South Bay area that can help you with your hoarder. They utilize a few different techniques and methods for treating people with a hoarding disorder. Once they receive professional help and sometimes medication, they’ll become more willing to have a hoarding clean up service such as ours come over and remove the contents from their house, which is the ultimate goal in the end.

Motivational Interviewing (MI): is a treatment option that increases the hoarder’s motivation to make healthier decisions and positive changes in their behavior. It helps them to connect their goals and values with their behavior and teaches them how to change these behaviors, especially for items that hold no value or use.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): is a form of therapy that helps hoarders to recognize the way they behave and think. CBT also helps them to understand the thought process that’s associated with hoarding and that it’s problematic behavior. Cognitive restructuring is oftentimes required in order to get hoarders to change their beliefs and thoughts about the items they’re attached to. CBT can help hoarders with practicing discarding, sorting, and acquiring new items to replace the ones they lost.

Skills Training: is for people with a hoarding disorder, and it teaches them how to organize their items without creating massive piles of clutter. It helps them to solve common problems that are related to hoarding and to make good decisions about keeping certain items while removing items that contribute to clutter.

Medication: is required for some hoarders who have a chemical imbalance in their brain. It can help the hoarder to be more engaged in the treatment process, which also reduces their anxiety and improves their mood about getting help.

Once your hoarder has gotten help and is ready to remove the clutter, it’s time to call our professional services for a hoarding cleanup.

3. Hoarding Cleanup

When it comes to cleaning a hoarder’s house, the preferred solution for most people is to call a professional hoarding cleanup service because it’s not only a huge job, but it’s also dangerous. In most cases, a hoarder’s house will be infested with mice, rats, cockroaches, and other insects and animals. It’s also a breeding ground for bacteria and mold, which can have serious health implications without having the proper equipment, chemicals, protective clothing and respirators to safely remove the contents and do the job.

There are a lot of hidden dangers inside a hoarder’s house, and the mess can be overwhelming. It’s not uncommon to fill one or two large dumpsters with the contents of a hoarder’s house. The aftermath of removing the contents often reveals a host of other problems that require professional cleaning to make the home sanitary again, which is why we offer full-service cleaning solutions from the initial removal of contents to the cleaning and restoring of the hoarder’s home to a healthy living state and condition.

4. Approach With Compassion and Empathy

No matter the severity of the hoarder’s condition and home, the most important step for getting a hoarder to accept help for their disorder is to approach them with compassion and empathy. Once you gain their trust and convince them to clean out their house? You can take the final step by calling us at (408) 335-7729 or fill out the contact form on our website to schedule an appointment to clean and restore your hoarder’s house back to a healthy living environment. 

San Francisco hoarding  Clean Up is a Trauma Scene Waste Management Practitioner from the State of California Department of Public Health, is OSHA compliant and has a number of certifications.