Vocabulary

As professional declutterers and organisers, our professional debriefs often focus on the physical nature of the disorder.

One of the most important things we do is to look at WHAT IS THERE. Inuits have many modifiers to describe snow. The accepted language for possessions and their disorder has been limited to one word: CLUTTER.

We needed more. We needed to use the English language differently to conjure up accurate and graphic images, both between ourselves as professionals and to others. We needed a vocabulary.

The Three Cs - clutter, clots and clogs
Density
Undigested
Goat's paths
Blocking
Rubbish
First pass
Pulling apart the clots
Bitza
Changing the geography

The Three Cs

Reading the literature and looking at photos, it is easy to imagine that hoarding is all about quantities rather than the qualities of the items. This led us to the Three Cs - clutter, clogs and clots.

We have started using these terms with our clients who like being able to identify the problem. Read more about clutter, clots and clogs.

Density

We are interested in how the clutter, clots and clogs fit into the home environment. Whether it is clutter, a clot or a clog, the important qualifier is density. How solid is it, if you like, how many individual items are there? Neat tall piles of paper are very solid and very dense. Heaps of unfolded clothes may present a larger volume but the density is lower and they are much easier to shift.

Undigested

The next question is how much does the owner know about what is there. The easiest example is: post. Unopened, it is totally undigested. Opened but not dealt with is partially digested.

Digesting something is an activity. It describes a process through. In a person, when digestion is blocked constipation ensues.

Goat's paths

The words clot and clog are ‘blocking’ words. Circulation is stopped. When clogs develop in a room, things can be built up so much that the room becomes impossible to enter.

Before it becomes completely impassable, the hoarder will start using 'goat paths' to make their way through. We are not the first to use this phrase and we have heard it being used by clients. A goat path becomes necessary when the surface of the floor is completely covered. The footing is dangerous and insecure. The goat path is a virtually unrecognisable trail with steps over the piles and heaps.

Blocking

Sometimes, even before whole floors are covered, doors will be intentionally blocked. These can be both internal doors and exits from the home. Those who manage to maintain pathways on bare floor and keep doorways clear are maintaining circulation which puts them in a qualitatively better position than those who have blocked exits and only have goat paths.

The person with clear doorways and bare floor paths may even have more stuff and the height of their piles may be greater than the person who doesn’t. When the entrance and exit doors are physically blocked, it is impossible to visit the home.

A question. Is the clutter keeping someone else out, or is it keeping the hoarder in?

Rubbish

In order to help any client, it is necessary to identify what they define as rubbish. Among compulsive hoarders much has been made of the difficulty they have with ‘value’. Does an item have an intrinsic, emotional, or functional value? The choices and decisions needed to assign value are very difficult, even for clients with very minor clutter problems.

Having said that, most clients can tell you what they consider to be out and out rubbish. Rather than trying to assign values to everything in a room, just looking for the things they describe as rubbish and throwing them away can reduce the volume considerably. Getting rid of what the client describes as rubbish first is an unthreatening first step. There will be other things in the space that have only held their value because they are being compared to the rubbish.

With the rubbish gone, the owner will begin to question the status of what’s left and more things will be redefined by them as rubbish.

First pass

One of the early stages in decluttering is the 'first pass', doing a basic very rough sort. This is a simple catagory-of-object sorting: paper with paper, clothes with clothes etc. There is no throwing away at this stage, no judgements required. Long term clients embrace this, finding it very easy and because there are no value judgements, quite relaxing. We have had a number of clients who have approached us wanting simple organisation. In the pre-phone calls, they will say that they don’t want to throw anything away. During the 'first pass', even these clients will see something and say; 'I don’t want that, throw it away'.

Pulling apart the clots

This group who expect not to throw anything away will often have bought mountains of storage solutions. They expect to have to store the undigested volume of things. When we finish, they are left with un-used containers.

We have tried to understand why the sorting stimulates the desire to throw things away. With clots and clogs, people stop seeing the individual things. Pulling the clots apart and sorting them into their components re-establishes the individuality.

Bitza

Paper, clothes, bags, and make-up are all easy categories to understand. Nowadays, homes are filled with things that have lots of bits and pieces, often unidentifiable bits of plastic. Bits of this, bits of that. Drawers become full of this. Our term is bitza. In the first pass, putting all the bitza into one place can start the process of reuniting.

Changing the geography

Everyone becomes used to the internal geography of a room. For a compulsive hoarder, this geography is an unchanging landscape. When we break down a clot into its component parts and move them around the room, it becomes possible to see them again. That is only one side of what is happening. The landscape and the structure of the room are also being changed.

Sometimes, the first deconstruction of the internal landscape has happened before people call us in. They have had to make a path so that an engineer can fix the boiler or an electrician can check the wiring. What they see and learn from doing their own reformation of the landscape can be the first part of the motivation to call us. Compulsive hoarders living in a completed clog, will exist without heat or hot water rather than moving anything to let engineers into their homes.