I collect bags (sacs) because I am worried I might need one and be out of them. I can't throw them away. Sacs are so symbolic, I am horrified when someone throws an empty bag out and I sometimes rescue them to avoid the anxiety.
I have had a small insight recently about hoarding (over half of the people who complete the questionnaire give the strongest response to the statement:
"At least one room in my home (including a shed or garage) is completely full of stuff."
I have been observing an extreme hoarder for five years now. He goes out every day, puts things into bags or boxes, carries them home and NEVER looks at them again. His whole house is full of bags and boxes of stuff. It's the containers that matter, not the stuff inside.
Now I am beginning to find a slight connection with identical twinning, but it's not that clear and I have been mystified as I think: if hoarding is to do with being a womb twin survivor, then what if the bags are the amniotic sacs? What if the identical twin developed in a separate sac? That happens in about a third of twin pregnancies that make it to birth, but we don't know how many lost twins are created in that configuration. If this is the hoarding scenario and if this is how you were in the womb, then we truly do have a bag that was once half of you - you would be bonded for life to that bag!
Is this the hoarding scenario?
I am working with someone who is learning how to teach others to overcome hoarding. If we can find the true reason why people do this, then we can help them to heal. That would be wonderful! So if you are a hoarder, please make contact, as we need all the stories we can get!
It's very hard for me to throw anything away. My family is always at me to get rid of the "junk". At one time, the whole back yard, side yard was full of junk, stuff I had found in the trash bins or just laying around.My house was also a junk pile. At one time, my house was always spotless. I was the perfect housewife and one day I saw something in a store trash bin, I stopped and took it out and home with me. It was really neat, a medium sized case that had a dial lock and it worked! Nothing wrong with any of it. I thought, you could really find some neat stuff that way.I started going out every night and going through trash bins behind stores. I met up with people doing the same thing and I liked them. I didn't realize how lonely I had been for twenty years of marriage, until then. I soon started bringing stuff home that was real junk, had no usefulness at all, but I wouldn't get rid of it. My family and my husband was beside themselves at all this junk and my behavior.I always chalked it up as being really poor growing up and needing all this stuff to feel better and more secure. I have stopped going out only because it about ruined my marriage and my family structure. I still have the yen to go out and get more stuff but I don't. I still have a messy yard and house because I kept a lot of the junk. I did get rid of quite a bit of junk and it was extremely hard to do. I don't know if this qualifies me as a hoarder or not, but I look around my room and it looks like a overstuffed museum. It's my sanctuary.
ReplyDeleteThanks for that, I wonder if you are able to connect this to the sense of lonliness that most womb twin survivors feel? Are you a womb twin survivor? I really want to try and make a link between being a womb twin survivor and hoarding behaviour, bbut I have yet to find it.......
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