The Psychometry of Hoarding

I'm asked about objects and psychometry (psychic ability to read information from an object about the person who handled it prior)- 

I am a psychometrist, so there is no one better to ask about it, I would guess. My skills in this realm are painfully acute. 

I grew up in a Civil War hospital and dug up relics around the estate, picking up information on all who had passed there, as I was a psychometrist and didn't realize this was a psychic talent. I thought this was something all people got from objects. I was in my 20s before I realized it is not part of standard senses, but an extra sense. 

I tend to see it this way - it is not so much an extra sense, as a sense that needs deciphering and focus. We are all getting the input. We just aren't all focused on it because it's much more subtle than visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and aural. Trying to describe it to others is kind of like trying to explain how smell Coppertone tanning lotion makes you think of your cousin, your childhood pet, and oil floating on a mud puddle. What made you make those connections? Impossible to explain that wiring. 

Like deja vu, the brain can make connections you were not aware you were laying down, even energies you have encountered before and recognize in some inner level when you run into it again. 

What organ handles the receiving and interpreting is not yet known, but I have suspicions it is all within the brain. It comes from tactile encounters with an object, a reading of an electromagetic/electrical nature that the brain then interprets. It might be in the past man utilized this more readily when he chose certain locations and certain rocks for their construction. 

One thing I do know is that rocks have energy up the wazoo but do not store knowledge of people handling them. Objects have energy, but the stronger aspect is the memories/emotions which easily drown the energy to most people who touch them. In fact, positive/negative and male/female energy is easily ready by even unpracticed people. 

Have you ever bought something in a store and explained it as, "it just called to me. I had to go back and buy it because it haunted me." Well, you might have been using more than just a visual sense of loving the look of the object, but that you knew in a very core sense that your energy and its energy were compatible.  

Why do lonely people hoard? Perhaps the very purpose is to gather energy from as many objects as possible to drown out their own simmering stew. It is not just a visual chaos but also a psychic one. It's feeling less alone by having all the energies encompassing you. It's not just your baggage glaring in your psyche, but everyone else's distracting you.

We all know that one friend who needs to be out partying and hanging with crowds and hates to be alone....

In fact, having less objects to a hoarder is threatening for the very reason that the hoarder losses the compacted and conflicting energies that share their environment and can no longer feel "company." Now, they simply feel their own bundled up nerves, thoughts, and energy and its center stage.

So, is a hoarder more psychic? No, actually less. They are so overwhelmed by their own feelings that unless they are overstimulated by other energies and emotions en mass, they feel very lonely in their own stew. 

Go into a museum some time and really note how you feel. It isn't just the visual displays. You are surrounded by many objects - like in antique stores, where your mind has trouble focusing on one thing, you feel strangely scattered, sometimes having moments of deja vu out of the blue, or feeling wistful or sad. Welcome to the distraction a hoarder appreciates! This constant current becomes a kind of "normal" for them. This is much the same as collectors who cannot stop - that is a form of hoarding. It is also a visual security that they are not alone, they are flanked by their "things." 

For a hoarder to truly recover a sense of self again amid the distraction of clutter, it would begin with some time away from home. Most hoarders are not eager to leave the nest, but a little time outdoors, far from objects is a good way to begin to spend time with the clutter in their own minds. It is a case of getting familiar with your own milieu. There is great discomfort focusing on oneself. It is never pleasant, but necessary to learn that it won't kill them. This is the same sort of aversion therapy that is used on phobics. One needs to learn they won't die or go crazy.

I had panic disorder in my late 20s. It was short-lived because I got proper skills that I use every single day and that changed my life 180 degrees, but at first in the heat of the panic, I did not want to be alone with my own thoughts. I wanted my husband (at the time) to stay home with me and the thought of being alone with my own internal turmoil was horrifying. Within months, I got skills that recovered me completely for the past 25 years and I went on to help over four dozen other people to recover, wrote articles, gave workshops and ran a self-help group for years. My book about this is 99 cents on Kindle - here. 

If you ask a hoarder what object can I throw out? They will not be able to part with even the most nasty and useless item. Why is that? It is a form of OCD in that the very thought of getting rid of an object that might have importance to the greater collective is horrifying. 

When I was a kid, I remember wanting to take a certain amount of steps per sidewalk square. A mild and typical form of OCD in the child state. I didn't know what would happen if I didn't do it, but I would go back and rewalk a square to get it right. 

Sometimes, we fill our scared or angry mind with busy work to keep from dealing with the real issues. It's the same reason that someone might drink or another person spends too much money. The problem is, if you don't learn how to handle the original issues you are escaping, you end up with a secondary issue - alcoholism, debt, OCD.... 

I used to live with someone who thought "if I like these items, I should have more, and more and more" and it became about quantity. 

Aggressive collectors can be that way - and it is a form of OCD. There is something in knowing that you possess objects, even if they have no true value or merit or even aesthetic significance. The key is quantity. This keeps ones focused on acquisition of the next in the collection, the feelings of elation as it is in your view in your home, but eventually it can end up being packed away in a closet in boxes, never taken out looked at, but just the result of a burst of desire to mask feelings with so many energies, they are more distracting. 

Imagine a person turning up the TV because the neighbor's stereo is loud. Soon, with volume loud enough, you don't focus on the neighbor's stereo, but your show instead. Hoarders put in so much object energy, they don't feel the energies in their own psyche - they are drowned out.

As an experiment, one could clear out one room in a hoarder's home. No objects in there. Maybe just their bed for sleeping. You can be pretty much guaranteed, they will not sleep in that bed in the cleared out room. This is, whether they acknowledge it or not, a sign of inability to be separated from the chaos.

To some of us who own our sensitivity and our internal dialogue and emotions, we dream of paring down our lives, being out in nature, or with only a few beloved objects and a clean, organized, spacious setting. But, for others, crowds and crowding make them feel strangely cushioned by the energy around them, whirling, crowding, pushing in, and drowning out the internal. 

Cognitive behavioral therapy is the ultimate cure for hoarding. But, having an understanding of the psychic implications is helpful. When a hoarder begins to relinquish the busy stuff, a simple dog or cat companion can help to give a satisfaction of another energy in the space and actual interaction with a living being instead of their psychic traces on items.