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On Hoarding · Pastor John Piper's answers

0:03
Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Ask Pastor John podcast. Here we
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Speaker 1: talk every so often about wartime living, and we talk
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Speaker 1: about minimalism too, but those are not the same thing.
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Speaker 1: The Christian life is not simply about decluttering our closets
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Speaker 1: and living a simpler life. No, we aim at wartime simplicity,
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Speaker 1: which is a more specific goal, a material simplicity in
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Speaker 1: this world that is on mission, not simply happy with
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Speaker 1: being more organized. You can see how Pastor John distinguishes
0:34
Speaker 1: the two between wartime simplicity and minimalism in the APJA
0:38
Speaker 1: book on pages ninety eight to one oh one. Today
0:42
Speaker 1: we look at a new angle on the topic and
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Speaker 1: an email from a woman who listens to the podcast
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Speaker 1: from China. Here's the email from our friend, Dear Pastor John,
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Speaker 1: Hello to you from Hong Kong, and thank you for
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Speaker 1: this podcast. My question is that my unbelieving husband has
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Speaker 1: the habit of hoarding. He keeps boxes newspapers from years
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Speaker 1: backackaging all the things that average people may regard as
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Speaker 1: garbage once their expected usage is over All that accumulates
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Speaker 1: in our home. I try to throw away some things,
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Speaker 1: but it caused disharmony in our relationship. I feel like
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Speaker 1: I live in a rubbish dump. How do I deal
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Speaker 1: with the problem biblically?
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Speaker 2: Well, let me admit right away I am not an
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Speaker 2: expert in either understanding hoarding or counseling hoarders. So you
1:32
Speaker 2: might say, well, why are you even trying to answer
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Speaker 2: this question? And I'm trying to answer it because it's
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Speaker 2: so hard. I mean, I feel like as a pastor,
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Speaker 2: I can't ignore things that I haven't I just have
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Speaker 2: not given a lot of thought to. But frankly, I
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Speaker 2: have seen enough of this in the last forty years
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Speaker 2: that I've thought about it some. So don't take this
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Speaker 2: as a final word. Just take it as maybe there's
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Speaker 2: something here that would help me, and if there's not,
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Speaker 2: you haven't wasted too much time. Okay, So let me
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Speaker 2: try at least to share the kinds of things that
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Speaker 2: I have thought over the years, and then calling them
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Speaker 2: together here to show what you can do if you
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Speaker 2: have a friend or a relative or married to someone
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Speaker 2: who lives in the chaos of hoarding. And the reason
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Speaker 2: I say chaos is that we almost never speak of
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Speaker 2: a person as a hoarder who saves everything but keeps
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Speaker 2: it in perfect order on shelves in the attic in closets.
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Speaker 2: We don't call that person a hoarder. That the house
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Speaker 2: is neat, it's orderly, it is life is functional. The
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Speaker 2: hoarder is a person who has gotten out of proportion
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Speaker 2: to his ability to manage what he's saving, and disorder
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Speaker 2: and encroachment is making life almost unlivable. I view hoarded
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Speaker 2: as on a continuum with degrees of messiness. And we're
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Speaker 2: all messy a little bit, some a lot, some a
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Speaker 2: little bit, And I think there's a continuum here. So
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Speaker 2: what are the factors that move people along this continuum
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Speaker 2: to full blown, almost incapacitating, depressing hoarding. The first thing
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Speaker 2: I would say is that many people grow up in
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Speaker 2: homes where they do not see or hear anyone modeling
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Speaker 2: or expressing the value of orderliness or neatness, or cleanliness
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Speaker 2: or beauty. They may enter adult life with no built
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Speaker 2: in instinct toward keeping a room or a home orderly
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Speaker 2: or neat or beautiful. It's just not their natural impulse.
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Speaker 2: It wasn't built into them, either genetically or the way
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Speaker 2: their parents raise. The second, this lack of any natural
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Speaker 2: impulse toward orderliness may go hand in hand with a
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Speaker 2: kind of attention deficit. As much as we may over
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Speaker 2: diagnose our children with attention deficit disorder, attention deficit, whether
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Speaker 2: you call it a disorder or not, is a real thing.
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Speaker 2: If you were to ask somebody why they don't put
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Speaker 2: this or that away, just leave it there, one honest
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Speaker 2: answer they might give to you is it doesn't register.
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Speaker 2: I don't even see it. Now, those folks leave a
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Speaker 2: trail of things that belong in a drawer or on
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Speaker 2: a shelf, or in a cabinet or in a closet,
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Speaker 2: but they don't put them there for the two reasons
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Speaker 2: we've seen, one partly because there's no natural impulse towards orderliness,
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Speaker 2: and partly because it just doesn't grab their attention. They
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Speaker 2: don't see it. It is as if they are blind
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Speaker 2: to it. Third, there is the complicating factor of procrastination.
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Speaker 2: A person opens a package, takes out the content, leaves
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Speaker 2: the packaging on the chair or on the counter. I'll
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Speaker 2: deal with that later, fully intend to. They don't. So
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Speaker 2: now you have three factors at work. The absence of
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Speaker 2: a bent toward orderliness, a deficit of attention as though
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Speaker 2: things just don't even get noticed, they don't register, And
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Speaker 2: you have procrastination that intends to do the right thing
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Speaker 2: and put something away and never gets back to it. Now,
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Speaker 2: the effect of those three factors is a room or
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Speaker 2: a house of increasing disorder or messiness or chaos. And
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Speaker 2: the fourth complicating factor has to do with why it's
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Speaker 2: so hard to tackle this mess and clean it up
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Speaker 2: once it's accumulated. Namely, many people's minds simply do not
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Speaker 2: function in a way that makes planning for cleaning and
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Speaker 2: ordering natural. It doesn't come naturally to formulate a goal, Okay,
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Speaker 2: this is going to be cleaned up in three weeks.
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Speaker 2: Conceive of steps to get to that goal. Okay, I'm
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Speaker 2: gonna have my friend and I were going to work
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Speaker 2: on it one hour a day every morning, plan for
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Speaker 2: those times. Okay, they'll do it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
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Speaker 2: That way of thinking seems so natural to some people,
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Speaker 2: just to me, and it's quite unnatural to others. They
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Speaker 2: just don't think that way. If you talk to them
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Speaker 2: about that kind of planning, they might say something like,
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Speaker 2: I just do things I do. I don't live my
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Speaker 2: life that way. I don't even think that way. It's
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Speaker 2: a strain on my mind. Hear you talk about it
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Speaker 2: that way. In other words, they're not walking through their
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Speaker 2: lives formulating goals, identifying steps to reach those goals, planning
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Speaker 2: how to take those steps. They just don't approach life
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Speaker 2: that way, and therefore what seems like a simple cleanup
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Speaker 2: project to some, to them seems absolutely daunting. Which means
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Speaker 2: now that if all those factors come together, absence of
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Speaker 2: any natural bent towards orderliness, a deficit of attention, a
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Speaker 2: bent towards procrastination, of the absence of any natural inclination
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Speaker 2: to form a plan in handling the growing chaos, the
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Speaker 2: effect is discouragement, hopelessness, paralysis, isolation, nobody's going to come
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Speaker 2: to their house right and sometimes depression, which brings now
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Speaker 2: to the final complicating factor, this tendency toward hoarding. So,
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Speaker 2: on top of an ever increasing chaos of things that
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Speaker 2: never get put away, you have this added impulse to
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Speaker 2: collect things and rarely throw them away. I don't think
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Speaker 2: hoarding is a separate and distinct tendency from all those
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Speaker 2: other things that I've just mentioned. I think they're all
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Speaker 2: interwoven in greater or lesser degrees. As I've tried to
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Speaker 2: understand this impulse of hoarding, that gets added into the mix.
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Speaker 2: It seems to me there are two general ways to
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Speaker 2: describe what's feeding this impulse. One is a deep distorted
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Speaker 2: association in a person's mind between having and being. Now
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Speaker 2: that may sound a little philosophical, but it's not. It's not.
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Speaker 2: Everybody can understand this. Let me try to explain. To
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Speaker 2: have stuff is to be okay. I'm okay, I've got
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Speaker 2: my stuff I have, and so I am okay. And
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Speaker 2: the reason I say it's distorted is because all of
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Speaker 2: us experience some measure of good feeling that comes from
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Speaker 2: just having. Right, this is not weird. We all do this.
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Speaker 2: We collect coins or baseball cards, or butterflies, or antiques
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Speaker 2: or books. There's a satisfying sense of well being that
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Speaker 2: comes from just having a thing, having a collection.
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Speaker 1: What is that?
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Speaker 2: Well there? It is, It's just it's universal. Most people
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Speaker 2: experience having as part of their will being. But with
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Speaker 2: the hoarder, this has been distorted so that the person's
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Speaker 2: sense of significance and well being is preserved not by
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Speaker 2: an isolated, healthy collection, but by a life dominated by collection.
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Speaker 2: It feels good, It feels significant to have more stuff,
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Speaker 2: even if it's old newspapers or tools, or wrapping paper
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Speaker 2: or buttons or scrap metal. Well, I've seen people collect
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Speaker 2: and fill their houses with the most bizarre things. The
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Speaker 2: other thing that feeds the hoarding impulse is the anxiety
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Speaker 2: caused by getting rid of stuff. Now, this is just
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Speaker 2: the flip side of the good feeling that one has
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Speaker 2: by gathering stuff, but experientially it's a different feeling. And
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Speaker 2: so they're two impulses, not just one. Once you have
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Speaker 2: comforted yourself with some acquisition, ah, I've got a lot
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Speaker 2: of stuff that feels good, I feel secure, I feel contented,
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Speaker 2: does good for me, and you surround yourself with this stuff,
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Speaker 2: then that sense of peace piece is jeopardized. There's an
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Speaker 2: anxiety that comes if you contemplate getting rid of any
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Speaker 2: one piece of the stuff. It might be the one
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Speaker 2: piece that you're going to need to complete your well being,
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Speaker 2: and a huge anxiety is created by I don't think
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Speaker 2: I can give that away, because if I give that,
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Speaker 2: then I might give all this away. And if I
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Speaker 2: give all this away, I have no idea how will
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Speaker 2: feel good anymore about my life. So what do you
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Speaker 2: do if you mis deal with a friend or a
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Speaker 2: roommate or a relative or close relative like a spouse.
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Speaker 2: Here's five suggestions. Very briefly. One, get beyond anger. The
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Speaker 2: Bible says that the anger man does not work the
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Speaker 2: righteousness of God. It is so easy to get frustrated
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Speaker 2: and angry, and you will discover that's not going to help.
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Speaker 2: That's not working righteousness for anybody. That we have to
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Speaker 2: find a way to subdue the anger that rises so
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Speaker 2: that we can talk and relate in a way that
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Speaker 2: doesn't come from anger. Number two, with as much patience
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Speaker 2: and kindness as you can, see how far your friend
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Speaker 2: or relatives will let you draw them into a conversation
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Speaker 2: about what you perceive as a problem. They may not.
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Speaker 2: They may they might admit it's a total problem. They
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Speaker 2: might not see any problem at all. Don't go first
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Speaker 2: to the problems that it creates. The chaos are like
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Speaker 2: killing you. It's gonna make a fire hazard, it's unhealthy.
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Speaker 2: Don't go there first. First, go to the kinds of
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Speaker 2: things that may help you understand them. How do you
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Speaker 2: get to be this way? What's driving them? And they
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Speaker 2: might be helped by your suggesting some of those five
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Speaker 2: things that I mentioned earlier. See if they recognize themselves
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Speaker 2: in any of those traits. Number three, See if they
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Speaker 2: are willing to think in terms of a both and
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Speaker 2: a kind of compromise with you, where both of you
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Speaker 2: can accomplish some of what you desire. I knew one family,
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Speaker 2: for example, that basically solved the problem more or less
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Speaker 2: by making one room in the house total chaos, and
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Speaker 2: nobody give a thought to it, nobody attempted to fix it.
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Speaker 2: If you're going to store something, throw it in there,
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Speaker 2: and if you open that, you'd say, what is this?
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Speaker 2: I remember doing that.
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Speaker 3: Well, it was far away from in the episode that
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Speaker 3: won't identify anybody, but I thought, this seems like a
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Speaker 3: normal house and that one room is absolute bizarre chaos?
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Speaker 1: What is that?
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Speaker 2: And it's a compromises what it is? They found a
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Speaker 2: way to live together? And I thought that, okay, that's
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Speaker 2: what it has to be. So that's number three. See
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Speaker 2: if you can get a both and a compromise of
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Speaker 2: some kind. That may not be it, but something like that.
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Speaker 2: Number four. If the problem seems severe enough to be
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Speaker 2: hindering friendships and hindering health, putting life at risk, you
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Speaker 2: might ask the person to see a counselor with you
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Speaker 2: and get more help than I can give, and I
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Speaker 2: don't mean that there are any magic bullets. I just
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Speaker 2: mean sometimes a third person listening carefully can help both
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Speaker 2: of you talk more clearly, more fairly to each other,
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Speaker 2: and so move you forward towards a solution. And finally,
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Speaker 2: God in Christ is ultimately the source of our well being,
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Speaker 2: not orderliness, and not messiness. So seek together to find
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Speaker 2: your deepest sense of identity and well being and happiness
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Speaker 2: in Him.
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Speaker 1: Very good. Thank you Bestor John. And for more on
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Speaker 1: minimalism and more specifically about wartime, a living which is
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Speaker 1: more than decluttering our closets and living a simpler life,
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Speaker 1: see the APJ book on pages ninety eight to one
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Speaker 1: oh one. Thank you Bestor John, and thanks for joining
14:58
Speaker 1: us today. Have a question to ask Pastor John. Find
15:01
Speaker 1: a link to email us and find our complete episode
15:04
Speaker 1: archive at askpastor John dot com. Every episode with audio
15:08
Speaker 1: and full transcripts available for you. Twenty four to seven.
15:12
Speaker 1: Pastor John is a thinker. This podcast appeals to thinkers.
15:16
Speaker 1: We really do stretch the mind here and that raises
15:18
Speaker 1: questions on the pitfalls of being a thinker. That's next,
15:23
Speaker 1: I'm Tony Ranky. I'll see how Monday