07/17/2015 In Podcast Episodes
Raised by Hoarders w/Michelle F
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Episode Transcript:
*PLEASE EXCUSE MY CANADIAN SPELLING*
[00:04:13]
PAUL: I'm here with ... she's going to call herself Michelle F. You had sent me an e-mail saying that you haven't heard an episode yet with a hoarder and you come from a family of hoarders and you yourself used to struggle with a bit but not so much now.
MICHELLE: It's different when I was little, I definitely had issues with emotional attachment to things. When I was really little I would give things a deeper attachment than maybe normal people would? I had a plastic horse that a neighbour from a long time ago had given me and that neighbour had moved away so I associated this little five cent horse with that neighbour and I was bringing it with me to all these places, I was bringing it with me to the movie theatre and I lost it for almost three days just over this plastic horse and –
PAUL: You lost it because you lost the horse?
MICHELLE: Yeah, and I was having my dad call up the movie theatre and having them check where it could be and where is it. I think I might of had my dad call them for two days. I was maybe like seven - eight? I was sad for the plastic horse. I had this thing where things had the capability of feeling like a person. My stuffed animals were more than just things to me. Especially because I associated it with that lady. And it was just a five cent horse! After having that episode it made me realize that was so insane. That I acted that way .
PAUL: But you were also a child.
MICHELLE: Yeah, but ... –
PAUL: That’s such a normal kid thing to do. I think it becomes a problem when you’re a teenager and an adult and there’s that attachment. I mean, that’s just my opinion.
MICHELLE: Well the thing was, I would see my dad and I would see myself and things have attachments to the them. My aunt died and we’ve been going through her things. The thing is, she died two years ago and her house has been empty for two years and it’s just filled with things that haven’t been touched because –
PAUL: Empty from people but –
MICHELLE: Not from things! There’s more to that but basically I was helping my dad the other day and there was a china set that belonged to my great grandma. But my dad had always told me that this lady was not a good person; that she was selfish and very self involved and caused my dad a lot of stress growing up. I asked him “why do you want to keep this then?”
PAUL: Right
MICHELLE: and he’s like “well, it was your great grandma’s” and I was like “it’s not even good china, it’s not even worth that much.” All it was, was that she was a terrible person. She didn’t mean anything you know? And he’s like “it’s still your great grandma.”
PAUL: It’s not like a superstitious thing is it?
MICHELLE: ...
PAUL: Do they feel like they’re bad people if they get rid of it? Do they feel like – we had guest on and his son. The father was a holocaust survivor, his son whom I play hockey with would tell us stories about his dad and what he’s like in day to day life and one of the things his dad does is he keeps everything. He keeps the tops of plastic drinking bottles, he keeps ... because he thinks he’s going to need ... that is understandable. I mean, I can see the link between living through the holocaust, and feeling the need to have that but I wonder when someone is a hoarder where does it come from? Is it genetic?
MICHELLE: I feel like in my family it is. I feel like it is a combination of nature and nurture. Like at it’s worst. Because what happened with hoarding from going to my grandfather to my father, and to me, I’m an only child so I didn’t have anyone to bounce this off of. Twelve and under I spent as much time alone at my grandparent’s house as I did at my own house. Maybe even more so. I was at my grandparent’s house more growing up. My parents would drop me off there before school. I would have to get up really early and be there an hour before my school started and I would be there sometimes until really late in the evening. And during the summer I would be there all the time, basically babysat as they went to work. And it wasn’t until thirteen I was able to convince to at least be able to be home alone. So I was basically alone a lot and I started having more attachments to stuff animals. Things like that.
[00:10:13]
PAUL: Did you have friends when you were at school?
MICHELLE: I was not very good at making friends. I’ve always had an easier time making friends with guys. Girls have always been more difficult to understand. Still to this day, I have a lot of issues with certain types of girls.
PAUL: Like which kinds?
MICHELLE: Mostly the ones that –
PAUL: How old are you?
MICHELLE: I’m 27.
PAUL: Okay.
MICHELLE: Mostly ones that enjoy normal things like shopping or celebrity stuff.
PAUL: So like stereotypical girly girls you had trouble with?
MICHELLE: I have trouble with... It’s funny because my dad always had an easier time with girls, he was really happy that I was a girl and not a guy. My dad has issues dealing with my grandfather. I don’t come from a family of guys that are macho. Like at all. I come from a family of guys that are nerd, maybe flamboyant-ish?
PAUL: What was that last thing?
MICHELLE: Flamboyant-ish? My grandfather was an engineer.
PAUL: Ah, do you mean like in terms of their sexuality?
MICHELLE: In terms of how my dad can be really social like a woman can be.
PAUL: Gregarious and chatty?
MICHELLE: Yeah, very chatty.
PAUL: Okay.
MICHELLE: And my grandpa was very much not. My dad was very coddled by his mom. My grandma is very close to my dad and she loved me growing up. But my grandfather was very scary. He scared me a lot. My dad had the same scary tendencies as well.
PAUL: In what way were they scary?
MICHELLE: When they got mad. They would just lose it. They had to be right and they had to win and everyone else had to be put in their place. Especially when I would come to my dad and tell him that he did something and it made me feel a certain way, he turned it around and he was victim and how dare I come to him and say things that made him feel bad.
PAUL: So basically he was doing things that were done to him.
MICHELLE: I don’t know if my grandpa... It was very different because my dad was much more in tune with feeling, my grandpa was not. For him basically women take care of the kids, I come home and I go work on train models, I go build something. My grandfather can take a car apart and put it back together. He’s that kind of person. He has about 100 bicycles that he’s never rid, or rather rode.
PAUL: Done(?) rid
MICHELLE: Done rid?
PAUL: Done got ridded, done got rode
MICHELLE: Ha-ha yeah.
PAUL:
it occurs to me that while your grandfather couldn’t deal with his feelings both your grandfather and your father couldn’t deal with other people’s feelings. That’s what they shared in common.
MICHELLE: Yeah.
PAUL: They didn’t want to know what you were feeling. It sounds like they were afraid of feeling shame or responsibility or something. There’s a book that I talk about on this podcast that I read that really helped me understand my shame. It’s called Healing the Shame that Binds, by John Bradshaw. It talks about how if parents’ haven’t dealt with their shame ... boy my things [microphone?] is really loud ... their shame, there’s a good chance they will pass it on to their children. Is shame an emotion that you ... I apologize for this [recording] volume for going all over the place ... is shame something that you feel like you ... god I hate this piece of hardware.
MICHELLE: Aw
PAUL: Well that’s a little better. It [the hardware] goes from like zero to ten and there is no in between. You can’t hear it. It’s very frustrating. Now I lost my train of thought ... Oh shame! If people don’t process their own shame their coping mechanisms become, I will put my shame on other people. I will make them out to be the enemy. I will make them out to be wrong. To feel shame, almost so reminds them of that awful feeling in childhood where you’re experiencing pain but there’s nobody there to know that this is a normal part of life. That it is equated with failure. He talks about the difference between healthy shame and toxic shame. You know, I don’t think we would evolve as a society if we didn’t feel a certain amount of shame. So where does it become toxic? So I asked you is shame something that you struggle with?
MICHELLE: I don’t know if I have shame but I definitely have feelings of never feeling worthy or never feeling good enough. I definitely have feelings of wanting so much of myself and wanting to do better than my parents. And then sometimes when I feel like I’m not accomplishing that I’m very hard on myself.
PAUL: [accomplishing] Financially, emotionally or both?
MICHELLE: Both.
PAUL: Both.
MICHELLE: Yeah.
PAUL: Do you mean socially as well?
MICHELLE: I honestly, don’t think so. I would like it if I could be more social, especially in big groups of people. I’m much better as a one on one type person. That’s my comfort zone.
PAUL: I think a lot of people feel that way. You know, when I’m at parties, when there’s a lot of people I don’t know, I can’t wait to leave. Even if I’m not having to talk to them, there’s just an energy there that drains me.
[00:17:04]
MICHELLE: Yeah. When I was younger I did have a girlfriend that I was close with but it was very chaotic and it ended on bad terms. Basically, that was the last time since I’ve had a really close female friend. I actually have a friend now that’s a pen pal in the UK and we have a great connection.
PAUL: How did you find her?
MICHELLE: I want to do art and cartooning and she wants to do video game art so we found each other through the internet.
PAUL: I love when the internet connects people like that. It’s so great.
MICHELLE: It’s been amazing.
PAUL: It’s so good for the creation of things. Like when you think about the odds of the band like The Beatles would come about, four guys with the perfect harmonies would be born in the same town and would all know each other. That’s a once in a lifetime thing, now that there’s the internet the chances of really, really great art happening is so much better now. It’s so demographic.
MICHELLE: Yeah
PAUL: Let’s go back to the hoarding thing for a minute, describe, room by room, the house that you grew up in. Walk me through. Literally walk me – no I guess not literally. We’d have to get up and go drive there. God that word is overused these days. So talk me through it.
MICHELLE: So the house I lived in was a really good sized house. It’s kind of an odd shaped house. I do love the house. I only have one neighbour and the other side is just a forest so you could look outside and just see trees and stuff.
PAUL: Were you raised in Southern California?
MICHELLE: Yeah! I lived in Ventura County. It’s just lovely. So we have a family room, a good sized kitchen, it’s big enough for an island. We have an entry hall, a dining room, a living room, and then there are four bedrooms in the back.
PAUL: So your parents had some money?
MICHELLE: Yeah. That’s part of the thing that was so frustrating growing was feeling like we did have enough money but then nothing ever went to anything substantial. My mother would spend. Both my parents would hide expenses from each other so that they wouldn’t have to face each other.
PAUL: So money was a cause of tension.
MICHELLE: It [money] was a tension. My mother basically had credit cards billed to her work. So my dad would never find them. He never knew about them [the bills] for years.
PAUL: Was she in debt?
MICHELLE: Yes. She once told me that a little bit of dept is okay. The problem was if I wanted something or I thought “wouldn’t it be nice to do something nice” or ... everything was cheap. My dad was very picky about what we could order off the menu every time we went out. If we went out.
PAUL: Was it a matter of, we don’t have the money or he just didn’t want to spend it on that.
MICHELLE: Just didn’t want to spend it on that. It always felt like we were one step from being broke.
PAUL: That’s how it was presented or that’s how it felt to you?
MICHELLE: That’s how it felt to me. ‘We’re not doing well, we’re never doing well, but if we work together with our finances we’d be fine.’ But it always felt like if my mom would go out she would spend so much money on closes and makeup. And it was always high end stuff. It wasn’t until I got older, cause I was never really a make-up person but I wanted to creams. I have phases. There are so much alternatives that were like dollars, and the same thing. And know that and knowing what my mom would spend ... the thing was with my mom whatever it was she spent on herself, she would spend it on me as well. Also, I had this idea that ‘well if you spend so much money on you’ than I could guilt trip them into getting me things. Because they went and spent so much on themselves. I didn’t ask for a lot but when I did ask for something, I kind of expected it.
PAUL: Did she pressure you to be girly-er?
MICHELLE: Oh when I was younger. Yeah. Yeah. We had fights. My mom wanted me to be a little girl and I wanted nothing more ... every time we went shopping I wanted to buy boy clothes, I thought they were cooler.
PAUL: Do you still feel that way?
MICHELLE: Yeah. Ha-ha.
PAUL: You’re dressed boyish I guess?
MICHELLE: I love cartoons and I feel like, they only market cartoons to boys, you know transformers and stuff. And you end up getting that stuff because it’s all you can get. And –
PAUL: My wife is very much like you. Jeans and t-shirts.
MICHELLE: I mean sometimes you have phases where you want to be girly. I have some girly clothes, but I never feel comfortable enough to wear it.
PAUL: So describe the house.
MICHELLE: Oh I’m sorry. The house is split almost. The front end of the house was almost always semi-ish clean. Kind of. The back of the house was always the mess. There was a long hallway and you would always have to step over things. And growing up, everything seemed to tower over me when I was little. Or when I was older, it became the same height as me. You could never walk through the entire house with the lights out because you would trip on things for sure. My dad had an office in the backroom and it was always covered in stuff. He had paper work, CDs ... and you could never get from the door to the computer witho breaking a CD case underneath your foot.
PAUL: And stuff was piled three-four feet high?
MICHELLE: Yeah. Uh, pretty much. It was like a slope that would go against the wall.
PAUL: And what percentage of the floor was covered?
MICHELLE: In my dad’s office it was probably the worst. It was probably like 99% of the floor. It was pretty much covered up in like a thin layer of stuff.
PAUL: Did he use all these things or was it just shit he was just afraid to throw away?
MICHELLE: Um ... a lot of it was he was just afraid to throw anything. He especially had fears of throwing things away when I was younger --
[00:24:27]
PAUL: What was, to you, some of the most ridiculous things that your family held on to? Where you were like ‘why?’ The one that always kills me is old newspapers.
MICHELLE: Oh that’s my grandfather. My grandfather is the newspapers. My dad isn’t so much the newspapers.
PAUL: I can see clippings of newspapers! But entire newspapers? I was always like ‘what?’
MICHELLE: Yeah. That was my grandpa. My dad... So the most ridiculous thing I think was the moment that I was like ‘this is really bad.’ This was me starting to figure out, in high school, this was maybe a deeper seated thing. We have a loft in the garage and I was trying to clear out a space in the loft and get rid of this old furniture that was just sitting there, that wasn’t doing anything. And my dad opened a drawer in this dresser and he found like a cardboard box that was covered in red tin foil. And he says to me ‘this [the cardboard box] was a package that your great grandfather opened on Christmas when he was like eight years old’ or something. It wasn’t the gift. He was somehow able to keep a cardboard box from like 1911 or whatever it was. And I was like ‘wow,’ you need to throw that away. And he would do –
PAUL: It sounds like your dad, he didn’t get what he wanted emotionally, he put the emotions into the things that represented what he should have gotten. Was tradition a big thing for your dad?
MICHELLE: Oh, yes. Tradition is huge to my dad.
PAUL: Yeah, because it sounds like the traditions are where he can feel love.
MICHELLE: My dad would freak out about little things. Like he would make big deals about little things that he found offensive. One of the things ... My mom’s side of the family, they’re different. They’re more normal, I would say, than my dad’s side. They would write on Christmas cards instead of writing ‘love’ they would write ‘love’ and my dad found it offensive and he had a talk with them. He told me “I talked to them and I set them straight, because when you love someone you say love.” You know. And that was worth fighting for.
PAUL: And yet is was so difficult for him to express love in a way that wasn’t attached to tradition.
MICHELLE: Well attached to things. Things were love.
PAUL: Did he ever tell you he loved you?
MICHELLE: Yeah. I’m very lucky in that both my parents say they love me and they are proud of me. I have that from them. And I love my parents. I want to make clear that my younger life and my life now are very separate. They are almost like two different people.
PAUL: How so?
MICHELLE: I have a wonderful relationship with both my parents now. I am so thankful because when I was younger I had a lot of anger and a lot of rage towards my parents.
PAUL: About?
MICHELLE: Not being heard.
PAUL: Do you feel like they’ve changed or you’ve come to accept who they are? Or both?
MICHELLE: It’s a little bit of both.
PAUL: What have they come to accept about you?
MICHELLE: They don’t judge me. My mom doesn’t try and change me. Especially the way she did when I was little. And my dad ... They’re just more accepting. They never really had an ideal way for me to be successful? It’s more about the little intricacies like my mom maybe wanted me a little more girly. I think my mom, she’s fine with me now. But definitely when I was younger.
PAUL: Sounds like she was trying to protect you from maybe feeling ostracized. She just wanted you to fit in.
MICHELLE: I think her pushing pushed me further. I think that’s what happened.
PAUL: Seems like it so often does.
MICHELLE: So growing up, the biggest problem areas in the house, just want to finish that off, was definitely the garage. The garage is weird in the sense that it’s a three car garage. But it’s high enough. If the entrance was high enough, you could probably stick an RV in there. There was enough room for this loft. So basically, it was this garage that had like a second floor to it and that was where the majority of the Christmas stuff and other things were kept. Both my dad and my grandma would go all out with Christmas decorations. Like my grandma would get three trees. She got turning trees that would turn on themselves. She would get almost Disneyland type animatronic deer, sleigh and horses.
PAUL: Would she buy new ones every year?
MICHELLE: Oh she loved ... yeah, for sure.
PAUL: So what’s the difference between someone who gets into ... like my wife, she loves Christmas, she loves buying stuff for it[Christmas] but it doesn’t ever feel like it’s a problem. What begins, in your mind, to make it unhealthy?
MICHELLE: Well, my grandma, well, they love “Department 56”
PAUL: I love it too.
MICHELLE: Department 56 was very vogue. We would go and buy all the really expensive ones, we knew the collectors –
PAUL: Snow villages, yeah.
MICHELLE: And she built ... basically she had a green room. Understand that my grandparents’ house was bigger than the house I grew up in. She had room, it was basically lay-outs built out all year round for Department 56. She had other places around the house that had little scenes. For Department 56. She even had a boxed piano, and she had a whole lay-out for Department 56 on the boxed piano. Like it was just part of the house. There was a Christmas tree that was up year round?
PAUL: Did they dust all this stuff?
MICHELLE: When I wrote to you and said “my parent’s house is like the ‘Adams Family’ or ‘Munsters(?)?’ Yeah it was dusty. It was that dusty. In that Victorian, Art-Nouveau.
PAUL: Where there are incredible fucking crevises galore.
MICHELLE: So I’m a little kid and I have to be there all the time and I can’t touch anything. Basically. Basically my grandfather he didn’t know how to deal with me I guess, and so, when I came over I had to decide whether I was going to spend the day upstairs or downstairs and I was not allowed to go between floors. And if I did, if he caught me, because I did once, and I was just yelled at and scolded.
PAUL: Why?
MICHELLE: Because they didn’t want to have to watch me and they wanted to trust that I would stay in one place.
PAUL: They were afraid that you were going to break some of their precious things?
MICHELLE: I think some of it was part of if it. Not my grandma but my grandpa probably.
PAUL: Yeah.
MICHELLE: I think it was just they didn’t want to have to go looking for me. So I was either in the one room that was upstairs or I was somewhere downstairs.
[00:31:57]
PAUL: Was there any kind of trauma or big traumatic event in your family’s history? Or was all this kind of under the surface generation to generation?
MICHELLE: I think it’s just this thing of dealing with my grandfather’s inability ... he loves things more than he loves people. For me, my thing is anger or when people get angry or when people yell at each other or if I’m in a situation where I don’t even know someone and they’re yelling at their kid and they’re getting short tempered with them, I internalize it and I shut down. I shut down with anger.
PAUL: Even if it’s not directed at you. It’s a trigger.
MICHELLE: It’s a trigger. Yeah. I don’t like being in trouble. I don’t like other people being in trouble.
PAUL: Are you getting emotional right now?
MICHELLE: A bit. Yeah. Because for me, anger was ... I would get angry at you but really I’m angry at someone else and I end up taking it out on you. So it was never fair. I think my dad and my aunt had that too with my grandpa. It was never fair. It was not in proportion.
PAUL: I wasn’t trying to shame you about getting emotional. It was just that your eyes looked red and I couldn’t tell. Personally, I love when my guests get emotional. It’s like ... I love it. But I was like ‘are her eyes just red or am I bringing up stuff?’ What’s that bringing up when you think about that? Is it reminding you of this just scarred little kid that didn’t have anybody?
MICHELLE: Yeah --
PAUL: Or didn’t feel like she had anybody?
MICHELLE: Yeah I think it was kind of difficult because I was an only child and I didn’t have someone to talk to that also knew what was going on. My mom was kind of absent a lot of the time. She basically buried herself in work so she didn’t have to be home in the mess. Yeah.
PAUL: Was she a contributor to the mess? Or did it get on her nerves or did she not say anything about it?
MICHELLE: I think my mom was in denial for a very long time. She had her own mess. But I think we all had our own mess.
PAUL: Her mess was in her soul. I couldn’t resist.
MICHELLE: No, it was just if you would take inventory of what belonged to whom, it was mostly my dad.
PAUL: What else do you want to talk about?
MICHELLE: I’ll talk about another instance where my dad wanted to be a good dad. He tried to do things. It’s just when I was getting older, I had a block towards him. I couldn’t trust that anything he did was ... he would always try and do things what he thought were the things that I would like because what he thought was the best way for me to like something or love something –
PAUL: So it didn’t feel loving, it felt controlling.
MICHELLE: It felt controlling because I would react a certain way. One of the things he would always do was he would always try and buy me gifts whether or not ... he would give me gifts that felt like he didn’t even know me. They were always kind of ...
PAUL: That’s ... go ahead
MICHELLE: ...
PAUL: I so relate. That’s one of the things that helped me finally realized that I wasn’t being seen by one of my parents. I looked at the history of gifts and I was like, year after year, if this person knew me ... not only do I not have an interest in it, I don’t like it and I’ve said ‘this is not something I’m interested in.’ ‘Thank you, but.’ It just felt like control.
MICHELLE: Yeah for sure. It got to the point where when I was older I just didn’t ask for things for Christmas because I was always disappointed and I was just sick of being disappointed every time. One year my dad just ... I forgot what it was that I wanted but basically, the whole Christmas was just a bunch of “Bug’s Life” gifts.
PAUL: What’s that?
[00:37:01]
MICHELLE: Bug’s Life, like the toys from the Pixar movie? They[the toys] were a little bit on the younger side for me. I still love toys. That’s something my dad and I kind of like. It’s just something that I never said anything about this, I never mentioned it anywhere it was just ... I had all these weird toys. And then my mom would get me a Jewel CD. And I was like ‘who’s Jewel? I don’t even know who this is’ and she was like ‘ask the girls in you class because they know who she is.’ And I was like ‘I ... (laughs).’ So they tried. It’s just that it made me sad. It felt like they didn’t get it I guess.
PAUL: And then you feel like a terrible person because you’re –
MICHELLE: Not grateful.
PAUL: Yeah not grateful. But really, it’s not about the gift, it’s not about the money. It’s about them seeing you.
MICHELLE: Yeah.
PAUL: My wife would always say it’s not how much money you spend, I just want to know that you’re thinking about me.
MICHELLE: Yeah. Or what would you like instead of what I think you want. Or what I would like you to like.
PAUL: Or what I think is good for you.
MICHELLE: Right.
PAUL: That’s almost like the anti-gift. What I think is good for you.
MICHELLE: Yeah, but there was an incident ... so my dad would do a lot of garage sales. That was a past time of his, the garage sale.
PAUL: Selling or buying?
MICHELLE: Buying!
PAUL: I bet that made him feel alive huh?
MICHELLE: That was thing. Especially growing up, because he used to play tennis and we would go garage sale hunting together. It got to the point where he started sneaking stuff home. My mom and I would tell him ‘you can’t do this.’ He would still do it and my mom would catch him. But my mom would sneak ... it’s like no one would listen to each other.
PAUL: It’s like two alcoholics sneaking drinks.
MICHELLE: Yeah. One time I had seen at Staples or Office Depot like ... there are small drafting tables kind of ... they’re little. They’re not encompassing(?) but they are maybe a 100 dollars or something like that. And I thought, that’s all that drafting tables were. I didn’t know that there was a whole world of drafting tables. I asked my dad for mom, because I wanted one for drawing because I would draw on the floor a lot and it was hurting me. I come home one day, I actually had a friend over when this happened and this was a terrible day. My dad had found a drafting table, and it was a real professional architecture drafting table that’s huge and wood. It’s like taller than your hip. And I didn’t have any room in my room for this thing. It took over. I couldn’t get to my closet, I couldn’t get to any of the books in my book shelf. It basically took up a lot of room and this isn’t going to fit. I can’t have this in my room. And he exploded on me. He told me that ‘I[Michelle] wasn’t grateful’ and ‘I’m a little brat’ and he’s like ‘I got this for you should appreciate it,’ ‘you asked for this.’ ‘This is huge! This isn’t going to fit in here.’ He basically just let it out on me and my friend was there too so she witnessed this whole thing. I would cry, and we go outside, and she calms me down. I come back in and my dad has decided to start doing taxes on the drafting table in my room. He got out all the taxes and started doing them in my room.
PAUL: Like if I’m not going to use it, I’m going to use it.
MICHELLE: I guess. But it’s bizarre! It was the most bizarre thing he’s ever done. He leaves the room at one point and I start grabbing the taxes and getting them together and I take them out the room because this is not where you do taxes. This is my room. This is bizarre. This happened when I was probably in middle school. He got so mad at me for doing that because I messed up the order that all these papers were in. I didn’t know. All I knew was that you were in my room doing something you shouldn’t be doing. I don’t know. It’s a memory that was very painful at the time. Later, my boyfriend, who’s now my husband ... my dad joked about it with him, like it was no big deal. Like I got unreasonably upset about this and my husband was like ‘What? This is so weird why were you doing taxes?’
[00:42:14]
PAUL: I mean it sounds like your dad, because of his hoarding, lacks a sense of spatial –
MICHELLE: Boundaries?
PAUL: Spatial boundaries ... a sense of moderation. I mean, I know the hoarding is a lack of moderation like all addictions are. But, buying the gigantic thing and not being able to see that ‘oh this is not going to be functional at all. This is going to be an impediment to her life in her room. I mean it sounds like it came from this really sweet place, where he was like, ‘I want to get my daughter the best drafting table and he was probably, in his warped mind, thought you were going to be overjoyed. He was probably so disappointed, that, is what I imagine is where his hurt came from. But then you were hurt because, ‘dad, can’t you’...
MICHELLE: ‘see I can’t live in my room?’
PAUL: Yeah.
MICHELLE: It’s probably true. He was always excited to find, something. I think he really though ‘she asked for this, so I know she’s really going to like.’
PAUL: Was bigger always better for your dad?
MICHELLE: Oh yeah. That’s very true actually yeah. He always gets the biggest and the best. And my grandpa is the same way too. I kind of too inventory of all their issues and decided to do everything opposite of them, as much as I could. When I was little, after I realized that I was crying after a little plastic horse I was going to try and get rid of things purge things. And it was very difficult. I remember the first time I did it, it was very, very, hard.
PAUL: What do you remember thinking or feeling?
MICHELLE: That I’ll never see these stuffed animals again, this will be the last time I ever touch them, feel them, hug them... it’s gone, out of my life.
PAUL: You were sad?
MICHELLE: You have this very weird, very real, like feeling of your detachment to things. And you don’t even see it. You don’t ever see the thing forever, but once you do, you’re like, oh yeah, I remember that. And you can’t let go of it. And it’s very, very hard.
PAUL: Do you ever still feel that way about things? Or how long does it take for you to get over that feeling of loss when you have to get rid of something.
MICHELLE: It’s much easier now, but I still deal with it sometimes.
PAUL: What was the last thing that you remember getting rid of that gave you anxiety but you got rid of anyway and how long did it take and what were the thoughts and feelings that came up?
MICHELLE: I just had a ton of jackets that I had to get rid of that my husband made me get rid of. I love jackets and I just remember that they were jackets that I bought with my mom, so I have memories that I bought them with my mom or getting them from somebody or getting them from somebody. I think that is a thing a hoarder does too, is that not only do they remember the thing that they have but remember the moment they got it, the moment where they were. It just brings up everything.
PAUL: It’s almost like people that take pictures and document...
MICHELLE: That’s my dad.
PAUL: Every concert that they’re at and every...
MICHELLE: My dad would do that too and he would drive me nuts. Everything I did and he would try to sneak pictures of me and I would be so mad because I hate my picture being taken. And he still does it to this day where he’ll just do it because he wants to take the picture but he doesn’t care how it makes me feel.
PAUL: Sounds like there’s a fear that moments are going to disappear forever, that there’s almost an invisibility, that there’s an ephemeral quality of life that they can’t reconcile with that life changes and things evolve and they want to stay frozen in a way. I would imagine that your dad has great difficulty with change. He’s very habitual.
[00:46:56]
MICHELLE: Yes. My grandfather does too. One of the other things is that my grandfather is not doing very well, like right now. Like he’s in the stages of dying. The issue... I think my dad mentioned some stuff where he was going to move stuff... what he was going to do to one of the rooms in my grandfather’s house when he got... and my grandfather was like ‘you mean it’s not going to stay the same?’ Like he really –
PAUL: Like he wanted to control it after his death.
MICHELLE: My mom and I would joke that if he could, he would take everything to the grave and to the after life.
PAUL: Just a gigantic coffin.
MICHELLE: If he could he would.
PAUL: That’s one of the problems with addicts, and I include myself with in this group. The three qualities addicts share are: self-centered, emotionally immature, and super sensitive to criticism.
MICHELLE: Interesting.
PAUL: And the addict, and I would certainly include hoarders, and qualify that as an addiction in my opinion, addicts we think we know. There is an inherent arrogance to a lot of... even if they have a low self-esteem... often our arrogance is a failed attempt to compensate for our fear of not being enough, not fitting in. We have these rigid ideas of how everyone should act. When people don’t act the way we think they should act, we are terrified that our world is going to fall apart. And it sounds to me like that’s the way your dad was trying to parent you. Was this way if he knew... in his mind he was sure this is how I’m going to show her that I love her, he couldn’t see that he was trying to control you. You know.
MICHELLE: And that’s how he treated my mom too. They were both victims.
PAUL: Yeah, there’s like a... I think being a good parent and friend... they’re like an improvisational quality to it where you just don’t bring expectations to it and just try to be flexible. I think a lot of addicts that we’re such control freaks, that to be flexible is to not know what the outcome is going to be. And that’s terrifying to us. The unknown is scary, to most people, but to addicts, the unknown is terrifying. And that’s way a lot of don’t get help. We prefer the awful, familiar, to the promised better, because there’s this element of oh, I do not believe him.
MICHELLE: Yeah.
PAUL: I believe that good things happen to other people.
MICHELLE: And for me, I am glad that my mom is away from my dad and I am able to have a healthy relationship with my dad because there’s a space now between us. But if my dad was in a healthier place and my dad, was resolve a lot of his issues, I would totally be in favour of him and my mom being back together. It’s not as if I support the divorce out of being mean, or being spiteful or anything like that. It’s not true. It’s just that he’s not in a good place. One time he came over to me and he was basically telling me that he might have a shot of getting back together with my mom and he was basically telling me to stay away, to not interfere. I told him, “If you really want to get back together with mom, a good place to start would be to clean that house.” And he kept telling me, “That’s not it, that’s not it right now. I just need to take her on a date, I just need to remind her of the good that I can bring.” And I was like “you really, no one wants to live with that. If you really want to make an effort to get back with mom, you should really clean up the house and keep it clean.” And he did not believe me. He never really listened to me and that really hurt. My whole life I have tried to tell him “you have to clean up the house.” At one point I was younger... one of the problems of being a hoarder is that you’re never allowed to have friends over because they don’t want other people seeing their shame. But I always rebelled against it because I always felt, it’s not my fault that the house is a mess. I always get denied what other kids get to do because you don’t have your shit together. I always got punished for it. But my parents were never good at... what do you call it? Keeping, you know, their punishments?
PAUL: They were never really good at follow through. It’s interesting because your dad would always defend that there was nothing wrong with this yet he wouldn’t want people coming over. Is it just because he thought other people would misinterpret it as being problematic? I mean how does... what would he say to you about why you can’t have friends over?
MICHELLE: They would just say the house is messy. The house is a mess.
PAUL: Did you ever say “well, then clean it up.”
MICHELLE: Probably when I got a little bit older but it was like... if I tried to be proactive and help him go through things, it was either he thought I broke something or he would say “I’ll get to that later, don’t touch that, I’ll do it.”
PAUL: It’s so hard to deal with an addict who is in denial. That’s way it can be its own sickness for people who are co-dependent and I urge them to go get help because, it can often be as sick, even though it’s a different type of sickness, trying to get that person to change. You wind up becoming manipulative, feeling self-righteous in your resentment. While you certainly have a reason to feel resentful, staying stuck in it, and not giving that person any consequences, allows you have this imaginary moral high ground where you can say, I’m right. I’m right. So it becomes this sick feeding cycle where nobody’s getting help and everybody’s being the victim.
MICHELLE: Yeah. It was just... I guess I felt a lot of the times, I would try and I guess be the parents for my parents. But none of us are listening to each other because they’re my parents but what reason do I have to listen? Like, I would always laugh when my dad would tell me to clean my room. I would be like ‘really?’ and then I would shut the door. And that’s something he would get mad at me at. He would get mad at me so much for having my door closed because I would spend hours with my door closed because I had nowhere else to go and I didn’t want to deal with them. And so --
PAUL: He probably wanted your love so badly.
[00:54:37]
MICHELLE: Yeah. But it was so... he was just so difficult. It was cause ... how do you ... I wanted a connection. I was so angry for so long and it hadn’t been until recently that I really started making progress with my dad and having a much closer relationship. It has been a freeing ... the last couple years I have been at the most peace I have ever been in my life. Growing up I was so angry. I didn’t even know I was angry.
PAUL: How did you get there?
MICHELLE: I think a lot of it was when my mom left my dad had to really look at himself a little bit more, like he actually had to admit he was a little wrong. But he goes back and forth on that.
PAUL: Is there anything else you want to touch on? Was there any work that you did to get to the place where you got a more peaceful relationship with your dad? Or was it just him coming around?
MICHELLE: I mean, it definitely helped that he was able to come around.
PAUL: Was there anything that he said to you or was it just his actions that kind of softened?
MICHELLE: It was his actions. It was basically, a lot of his attempt to control his anger. It was very helpful. I don’t think he believed he was that angry.
PAUL: Has he ever acknowledged that his outbursts had been inappropriate or frightening to you?
MICHELLE: Sort of. I think the closest was I would say things like ‘when I was little, you made me shut down because you would just yell at me.’ Cause he was -- when he was yelling, he was going to win. It was not a conversation, it was not a debate. ‘I was gonna win.’ I said to him ‘didn’t grandpa do that to you? And what did you do when grandpa did that?’ And he’s like ‘I guess I shut down.’ And...
PAUL: And how long ago did you say this to him?
MICHELLE: Oh it was probably four or five years ago?
PAUL: And what did he say after he hear himself ‘I shutdown?’
MICHELLE: I think ...
PAUL: Let’s go shopping
MICHELLE: [Laughs] I think he just -- it just seemed to click a little bit more but I think still has a wall of how much damage that really did. I think we kind of connected on that.
PAUL: You know what’s beautiful, is that you are able to not forget the past but not hold him ... not wait for all of that to be cleaned up to move forward with him today. I think that’s so important. One of the reasons that I don’t have contact with my mom is not because of what she did it’s because she doesn’t change. I’ve tried to express and I’ve tried to – that is the reason why I don’t have contact. It’s beautiful that you’re kind of open hearted about ...
MICHELLE: Well, it’s because I felt like being angry takes so much more energy than I have you know? But also it does help that he has made an effort for the things that were definitely my triggers. So that’s been helpful. He still has issues with the hoarding. He still goes to garage sales. The home shopping network is the hoarder channel. For sure. You can go over than and turn on the television; it’s on QVC. My dad wanted to show love through things and my grandpa wanted things to love I guess? And he kind of ignored everything that was going on around him.
PAUL: It’s interesting. Collecting. There’s this weird line between, where does passion become obsession. I’ve gone through phases of collecting things that were so clearly sick. It was just a way of distracting myself from feelings that were overwhelming. But it felt, it was like a high to me. Purchasing them, I was online looking, for them – and once I processed the pain that I was running from, it went away.
MICHELLE: I think that’s how my mom is. I think that’s what shopping is for her. Shopping is the way to reduce the pain of something.
PAUL: [shopping] Is a way to focus on something. It’s kind of an unhappy meditation.
MICHELLE: Yeah.
PAUL: Cause you feel alive. When I would look at guitars online or sports cards, you know I was collecting football and basketball cards for a while, and then vinyl LPs, and it was like I just had a cup of coffee looking at these things. The anticipation that I could one day have the perfect collection of them felt like I could almost one day be held. Like I would be in the arms of God.
MICHELLE: That would definitely be something that my family has. I think that made it harder to recognize the hoarding.
PAUL: Cause you’re like this is my hobby!
MICHELLE: Yeah and well it’s like everyone has collection right? And one of the things was when I was little – so my dad would collect comic books and police memorabilia and lots of stuff like that besides the antiques. Christmas stuff. When I was little, the big thing was Beanie Babies.
PAUL: Oh my God.
MICHELLE: My dad would move the earth and mountains to help me have a final collection of the mini Beanie Baby that I wanted. So he was in a way kind of feeding it to me because I became obsessed with all this stuff and having to have everything. And everyone remembers being a kid in that time was insane. How much people were spending and saving in trying to get these ...
PAUL: Your dad must of been in heaven because it was a way for him to connect with you and show his love.
MICHELLE: Yeah. And also he, this was also a thing, approved of that. He thought it was cute. So I was allowed and he would help me get it. But if he wasn’t into it, if it was something that I was into that he wasn’t into. Like I was into transformers. They weren’t cute to him. So I had to save up my money and buy them myself. And he had no interest. And that was one of the issues I had with him.
PAUL: He sounds very boyish.
MICHELLE: My dad?
PAUL: Yeah. Like kind of like a child like, like a child like quality.
MICHELLE: Oh! I would bet. Because my grandma coddled him forever.
PAUL: Yeah at least in you describing him I kind of get the feeling. That’s where I get a sense of the immaturity of the addict is like when we find something that we like, we are child like about it.
MICHELLE: Yea he would light up. He lights up when he gets a final collection or anything like that. Or finds a rare item that is hard to find and he got it for cheap. He just loves that.
PAUL: When I first started wood working in I went from buying one tool to within a year having a professional cabinet shop in my garage. I did it all myself. I learned about everything, I researched all the tools and put some of the machines together and put this huge amount of work. I was very passionate about it. I remember I was showing one of my friends it, and he said to somebody afterwards “he fucking crazy.” And I laugh because it was kind of true. It wasn’t just a hobby. It was like, it was bordering on a sickness. There was no sense of moderation.
MICHELLE: Oh.
PAUL: It went from zero to eight hours a day and reading magazines and being at dinner with my wife and thinking about getting back in the woodshop.
MICHELLE: Have you done anything like that before?
PAUL: Oh yeah, everything. Taking pictures. Taking pictures of dogs. Collecting sports cards, collecting guitars like we talked about. Yes. And like I said, “when I processed the pain, I was running from, the desire to collect things completely went away.” I couldn’t see that I was crazy. That was the point. I couldn’t see it was obsessive that it was unhealthy. Because I’m like “I’m making things!” You know? I’m making things around the house but I wasn’t being present in conversations with people, I was thinking about...
MICHELLE: See I probably would of helped you. I don’t know, to me it sounds like a good hobby. Maybe I don’t know moderation either.
PAUL: I think if I had maybe been 25% less consumed with it would of been awesome. It certainly didn’t hurt anybody but it was six, seven years of my life where I didn’t really listen to my wife, I didn’t really ...
MICHELLE: That’s an issue.
PAUL: Yeah. It was a distraction. I didn’t really process what I was feeling but I think some of us we have got to go through those stages where we run the wheels this shit until we go ‘what’s the fuckin’... what’s my deal?’
MICHELLE: Yeah. When I was younger, thirteen-twelve, I had a boyfriend. I did a lot of things my dad loved, I think I did to him. Like trying to spend as much time with him as possible to the point of being inappropriate.
PAUL: Like how so? Like being jealous?
MICHELLE: I was very jealous. Not really giving him any space. I mean this was middle school and I dated him for like ten months. And I was just obsessed. Like obsessed in love with him at thirteen. And everyone would just say why ‘are you guys still together?’ ‘Haven’t you guys broken up yet?’ Because you’re in middle school and people don’t ever stay together for months. We would kind of maybe imply that I would come over on the weekend, but I would just come over. Because I just couldn’t be in my house. And I didn’t know my obsession of love with him was kind of, looking back on it now, was definitely a running away from my house and my parents. And when he broke up with me I didn’t know what to do with myself and I felt like I was dying. I couldn’t cope to the point where I began cutting myself, and I ... I didn’t want to kill myself, I just wanted a different type of pain that wasn’t inside. It was kind of my way to see how long it took my parents to notice. And they didn’t really notice. We had a lady that would come and clean our house once a week, and she was the one, she was close with me and she noticed.
PAUL: That’s so sad that that’s who noticed
[01:07:28]
MICHELLE: Yeah. I was loving that boy the same way my dad loved me and my mom. When my mom left, my dad acted the same exact way I did ...
PAUL: Towards that boy
MICHELLE: When I broke up with that boy. It was the exact same sort of pain and everything. So I knew what my dad was going through. I had decided for myself what I was going through. I was going to do things differently after that because I didn’t want to be like my dad.
PAUL: Thank you for coming and talking about that.
MICHELLE: Yeah!
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