This Christmas I’m visiting my parents. I worry one of them shows hoarding-style behaviour

One of my parents shows hoarding-style behaviour. Is there anything I can do to help and support them?

This Christmas, I’m heading back to my parents’ house. I am close to them and love them very much. I have just found out from one of my parents that the other has bought another freezer. My parents have several freezers in their house already, all filled to the point you can’t really open them easily. It is a small terrace house, and it’s just my parents living there.

My parent keeps a lot of other stuff too, and has filled the house with little knick knacks and furniture. It gives them pleasure to go shopping for things (they get things cheaply too), but there’s not really any space in the house for anything any more. Both parents are elderly, and although they’re healthy for now, I don’t know how they can continue living in this situation.

I don’t really know what I can do about this, if anything, as I’ve never really talked about it with the parent who’s doing it. Whenever I have tried, they just airily dismiss it. I don’t want to hurt or upset them by bringing up the issue or digging deeper, and I also find it quite painful to think about. I’ve spoken to my other parent (just along the lines of what I’ve said here) but never really to anyone else.

I just feel at a bit of a loss. Practically, I want to do something to help and support my parent, but I don’t know how.

Eleanor says: It’s important for me to note that I am not a therapist and anything I write cannot take the place of professional help. Only a professional would be able to place where your parent’s behaviours sit on the spectrum of complicated relationships to physical things. It is a pretty wide spectrum, from serious risk to health and hygiene, to cases where there’s not necessarily an upsetting amount of stuff, but there is something troubling about how upsetting it seems to throw anything out.

It can be very difficult to get people to find that professional help, however. It can be very hard to ask people to confront their relationship to things.

I think it’s very moving that your question was how to help and support, rather than how to remove the stuff. A lot of onlookers to compulsive relationships with objects can make the (well-meant) mistake of thinking step one is to get rid of things. But one of the most consistent pieces of advice available to loved ones is don’t just throw out the stuff. Someone who doesn’t have an ordinary relationship to things won’t have an ordinary relationship to having them thrown away. Think of whatever possession you treasure most – a teddy, a photograph, a gift from someone now gone, and think how you’d react to someone throwing it away “for your own good”. Not well.

Instead, it might help to keep in mind the real thing you want to help your parent get away from: it isn’t just the stuff, but whatever causes the need to acquire and keep. There can be a lot of fear wrapped up with this need – a fear of deprivation (especially since you mention food; it’s common for people who grew up in unrest to stockpile food); a fear that they’ll forget something important unless they have the objects; or just a fear of time slipping away, which this behaviour helps soothe.

Whatever causes that is what professional support would focus on. It’s natural, when helping a loved through a compulsion, to focus on the behaviour, since that’s what we see and what distresses us. But if the deep need stays intact, the other person can wind up feeling just as in need of comfort as they always were; but now also hyper-observed, and without release.

If you can gently push your parent towards professional help, I would. However, I recognise that would take time and, depending on where you live, money, as well as a radical act of persuasion. So perhaps you could also try to make these things speakable instead of upsetting first. Gently ask, in the guise of genuinely wanting to know more: “How come you like to have so much food on hand?” or “How come you like buying these little guys so much?” It might make you feel closer, and helpful, to just hear the answer.

Finally, you might try to take care of yourself, as well. You say you find it upsetting to think about. It is sad to watch parents behave in ways we don’t understand. You might try to find an online group for yourself, where you can compare experiences in more detail with others in the same position, or seek your own professional guidance from a therapist.

The fact that you ask how you can love and support suggests you’re on a good path. Only a professional will be able to give you answers. In the meantime, perhaps one of the most helpful things we can do is recognise when we don’t already have them.

This letter has been edited for length and privacy.