Living a Perpetual Episode of “Twilight Zone”

Good writing!

SO powerful and loving 🙂

Kathy not only speaks this truth, she walks this truth and lovingly invites any and all to join her. What she does and what she shows you really changes lives. Thank you, Kathy!

Luv reading this..thank you..

This really spoke to me, Kathy. I am 63 and grew up with older parents in a 720 Sq foot house with my parents and older brother. My Mom was a very good housekeeper in that tiny space but she never taught me how to keep house. My husband and I now live in a 3000 sf house. I am not a hoarder but I have way too much clutter. I watch Hoarders a lot. I might be signing up for your course soon. Thank you.

I think you’re off the mark, here. Messy people might be messy because they didn’t learn how to clean. Hoarders hoard because of profound mental issues. Teaching a hoarder to clean will never make them better.

Hoarding is more, oh so much more, than just “inability to clean/do housework” It is a profound mental illness and a form of child abuse. I have compensated for being abused as a child of a narcissitic, sociopathic hoarder by getting a degree in Home Economics – Believe me, I KNOW how to keep house!

Dear Mama’ KNOWS how to “keep house”, but would much rather browbeat and manipulate me into doing it for her. Her stuff is of more value to her than her husband, children, and grandchildren. Even her pets might as well be stuffed toys because that is how she treats them.

I believe you mean well, but you seem to have little understanding of true hoarding behavior.

I understand you are trying to sell your services, but hoarding IS a mental illness. Dismissing it as merely being untaught about cleaning is like saying people with severe depression just need to learn how to chill out, or that people with austism just need to learn manners. Maybe it would be better to sell your services by focusing on people who are not mentally ill, but just need to learn organizational skills.

I would of loved to comment the article. I think that some people just don’t understand the difference between a hoarderer and OC.

I just read a blog that the daughter writes, and it shows a very different view of what their home was like than the Yahoo article had. The issues their mother had was not just being a mess/hoarding… The children were not able to close the bathroom door, there was no running water except for the bathtub, the house was in great disrepair and it effected the children greatly.

While I have helped people who were in this shape with children living at home, they wanted help and reached out to me, and they got the help that they needed. The people I am talking about hated how things were and would have at least put up a sheet on the door to do what they could have to take care of their children as best that they could given their inability to make the change without help. In this circumstance where the children were hurting so much, and obvious lack of concern is present, there is much more than being OC going on here.

But there are very good people living in very embarrassing and even unsafe environments, similar to this, and there are way more than we know of, because of the social stigma. Once you begin to get buried, with no hope for help, it get’s worse and worse.

I’ve just read some comments concerning the article that Katherine Rizzo Roberts “The Tidy Tutor” wrote. I am a student of Kathy’s, and thought perhaps you might like to hear a comment from a student’s perspective. I WAS the person in the article that Kathy made reference to. I KNOW her inside and out, because I was exactly like her. I lived like this most of my life. I know I am not a hoarder……many would think looking inside of my house though, (back before the TTU) and think that I was. They would have been wrong. We people who are right-brained, think, learn, digest, respond and react to life and situations differently than people who are not “right-brained”. We just don’t understand HOW to be functionally organized. Or how to clean. It baffles us. We can’t just pick up a book on “how to organize” and read and start doing it. It is totally confusing to right-brained people like us. Before I joined the Tidy Tutor, if you could have seen my house you would have thought I was a crazy person. I functioned perfectly normal outside my front doors. I was social, I knew people, I fit in, nobody would ever suspect that inside my house looked like a bomb went off. I had many professional people (doctors, therapists) tell me it was just the way I was. I was depressed. I just didn’t like housework. I was just going to have to accept the situation and try to live “like that” if I didn’t “get my act together”. No one EVER could tell me HOW to “get my act together” though. I was counseled for a long, long time for my depression. I have taken SO many combinations of medications. When I finally had had enough, I went trolling for help on the internet. I found a few of Kathy’s videos on YouTube, and BAM!! I got “it.” She got “me.” I, for the first time in my life had that “AHA” moment. I Was Not Crazy. I Was Not Stupid. I was right-brained and I just did not have a CLUE how to organize or even how to clean. People will read this, and think to themselves…..how could anyone NOT know how to clean. It’s so simple. Well, NO, NO, NO…it isn’t. Not to “us”. No one would willing live in a house garbage on the floor that you tripped when trying to enter a room. No one would “willing” live in a house with so much filth in the kitchen that you could never cook a meal and had to order take-out all the time. God forbid the take-out person should ever step foot inside the door. No one EVER got past my front door. EVER. Believe me when I tell you that if you met me, you would never suspect I lived like this. And, it wasn’t because I wanted to, it was because I did not have a CLUE as to how to manage a home, how to clean, where to begin…..how to pick up the first bit of trash. I know that hoarding is a disease. Hoarding is NOT our problem. We simply, and I not stress this enough, we are simple without the “skills” to know what to do to live a clutter-free, organized life. No one ever taught me. And, I know that a lot of people are in the same boat. I have been Kathy’s student for only a short time, and those pictures you see in the article…..those pictures that could have easily have put MY picture into….they don’t exist any more. I have almost got my whole house under control. I UNDERSTAND for the first time in my life how I think, and how to learn. Kathy does not tell us how to clean….we know how things are done. We just don’t know how to implement a schedule, how to organize ourselves enough so that we can actually DO something and KEEP it done. Kathy know the difference between a mental health diagnoses of Hoarder and people who are like “us”. She has helped me and SO many other people. I hope that anyone reading this comment, who has lived their lives like we do, like I did, will join us. Your life CAN change. You are NOT a failure. You just need someone who is also “Right-brained” and “gets us” to explain how to start.

There are those with an official diagnosis of “hoarder” which is definitely a mental disorder. There are many, many others who are afraid they might be hoarders because of the mess, feelings of being overwhelmed with the mess and their inability to get rid of the mess even if they do try to clean it up. Symptoms are very similar.

I read the article, “My Mom was a Hoarder.” I loved what the son said, ““She had a problem and just couldn’t overcome it.” I think that speaks volumes for the compassion he had for his mother. Hoarding used to be clumped under a diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Hoarding now stands alone as a separate mental disorder in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) used by the American Psychiatric Association. I suspect there will be more research on it now that it is its own mental disorder. There are many researchers who have had some success teaching family members/loved ones of the hoarder how to communicate with them and how to effectively help them. Most often hoarders begin their disease after suffering a tragedy in their lives, such as the death of a loved one.