Pack Rats Unite : Compulsive Savers Learn to Let Go, One Day at a Time

There are people like you and me, who save World War II-era National Geographics and the go-go boots we wore to our first Beatles concert. And then there are pack rats. Hard-core. Compulsive.

The people who hoard, say, 40 years’ worth of egg cartons. Or meat trays from the supermarket (“In case surprise dinner guests stop by and I need extra plates”). Or Popsicle sticks (“Never know when you might need a finger splint”).

These self-proclaimed “messies” fill up so many rooms with junk that they have to add on to their homes. Their marriages have crumbled under the weight of old newspapers; they’ve become victims of their own belongings.

They are everywhere, but 25 or 30 of them from all over Southern California are cleaning up their lives, meeting weekly at The Center, a Garden Grove bookstore, in what is thought to be the first-ever pack rat support group.

Launched by the daughter of a chronic saver, the 18-month-old group’s meetings begin each Tuesday night like the Alcoholics Anonymous program after which they are modeled: “I’m Jane D. and I’m a pack rat.”

Members of the group, who have varying forms of the problem, include:

* A minister whose compulsive saving reached such proportions that the junk in her car toppled onto the gas pedal, making it unsafe to drive. Newspapers filled so much of her house she began stuffing them in kitchen cabinets and the refrigerator.

* A free-lance writer who works out of her home in Orange, who has trouble throwing away newspapers, magazines, books and articles. Problem areas include her bedroom, study and hallway table, which regularly pile up with mail she never seems to get through.

* A computer processor who has more than 1,000 videotapes and only loses one if he needs to record over it in a pinch. He is a “computer pack rat,” who said he stored so much data at work that an electronic warning announced he was “a disc hog.”

Most of them have a wicked sense of humor about an affliction that has created anxiety and pain for them.

“When our dining room table got so piled with stuff that we couldn’t see the top of it,” a woman revealed at a recent meeting, “my husband and I decided we obviously needed a bigger dining room table.”

While annals have been written about far more obscure ailments, the pack rat phenomenon has earned barely a glance in psychiatric circles.

This, some experts say, is because having a messy attic or garage or junk room seems downright normal. Every family seems to have a pack rat who, at worst, may be viewed as a harmless eccentric.

Extreme cases exist, of course: the bizarre New York twins who died after their intricate web of booby-traps backfired and buried them in trash; the San Francisco woman whose house was so riddled with junk it slid off its foundation; the Cal State Long Beach professor whose Huntington Harbour home was closed by code enforcement officials, who allegedly found staggering levels of rubbish.

And there are some famous pack rats. Andy Warhol was a compulsive saver. Ruth Graham, wife of the Rev. Billy Graham, wrote a book called “Confessions of a Pack Rat.” Other pack rats include authors Ray Bradbury and William Saroyan.

But little has been learned about pack rats until recently because their problem is usually a private one, a secret that does not hurt anyone but the sufferer.

Support group members say they recognize, even as they are stuffing irreparable broken jewelry and dishes into closets, that their behavior is irrational. They say they get no joy from keeping worthless objects, but they suffer tremendous anxiety and loss when they discard them. And it is not clear why.

Jonnae C. Ostrom, a clinical social worker who founded Pack Rats Anonymous, and Lynda Warren, a psychologist and full-time professor at Cal State San Bernardino, conducted what is thought to be the first large-scale study of pack rats.

In a Psychology Today magazine article the team wrote a year ago, they tried to establish what research had been conducted about pack rats, what interest existed in a subject that had touched them personally.

It appeared, Ostrom said, that no one had examined the phenomenon. A spokesman for the 850,000-circulation magazine concurred.

The results of their study among 500 Cal State San Bernardino graduate students, which will be shared Feb. 3 at a daylong UC Irvine seminar called “Pack Rats: The Compulsive Saving Syndrome,” revealed the following:

* Roughly 10% of the population suffers from compulsive saving, with men and women suffering equally.

* No economic, racial or intellectual segment of society suffers more or less. The behavior transcends age groups, and has been seen in children as young as 2 and 3, who hoard toys, shells, coins and other possessions.

* A substantial number of pack rats are also compulsive spenders and overeaters, who also show one or two dyslexic traits (there are as many as 30), like a poor sense of direction and concentration. Many are also perfectionists and procrastinators who will continually postpone cleanups if they cannot do them spic-and-span.

Pack rats are otherwise articulate and rational people, and a disproportionate number of them are teachers, writers and creative people.

“We are great rationalizers,” said the 50-year-old writer from Orange, who asked that her name be withheld.

Members of the support group said they joined because their messy homes and cars had deeply affected their lives and relationships.

“Why do you think we’re all divorced?” joked Carol Spencer, a Garden Grove nurse.

The survey also showed that pack rats have difficulty in letting go--of emotions as well as possessions. Many pack rats have characteristics of adult children of alcoholics. And a majority of the pack rat support group members say they have attended Al-Anon (a support group for those involved with alcoholics) or similar meetings.

“The one problem we had with the survey,” Ostrom said with a smile, “was getting some of the savers to let go of it and give it back to us.”

Every member of the budding pack rat support group will tell you they usually had a good reason to start saving a certain item. Like collecting newspapers to recycle for the local Cub Scout troop. Saving clothes for Goodwill Industries. Stocking plastic butter tubs for leftovers.

But after a while, people like Spencer realize they carry so much junk around in their purses they’ve had the shoulder straps replaced three or four times a year.

Eve, a minister and drug and alcohol rehabilitation counselor at a Los Angeles County hospital, noticed one day there was barely room anymore to sleep on her bed. Others told how they had no clean clothes because the washing machine was barricaded with piles.

Ostrom and Warren disagree on what predicates pack rat behavior. Ostrom believes that there is an inborn tendency toward compulsiveness that runs in families.

“It may be genetic,” she said, “although it’s just like a child of an alcoholic who does not drink.” This means the compulsiveness driving the behavior is inherited, but not necessarily the behavior itself.

Warren, on the other hand, believes its origins are environmental, that children learn the behavior from pack rat parents.

While not every child of a pack rat will become one, Ostrom and Warren’s research showed a higher percentage of pack rat offspring do become “clutterhorses.”

The story of how Ostrom and Warren became involved four years ago in the study of pack rats is a personal one. They got to talking about Ostrom’s mother. In her later years, she worked for Warren as a baby-sitter. Ostrom had grown up with her mother’s compulsive saving. But when the mother began cluttering up Warren’s house, the younger women sat down to figure a gentle remedy.

Still, it was only after Ostrom’s mother retired at 83 and later became less able to care for herself that her two-bedroom Riverside home “got really bad,” Ostrom said. Only when she tried to clean it up did she realize the extent of the mess.

The two-car garage had belongings 5 1/2 feet deep and wall to wall. The storage shed was the same and not weatherproof. Years of rain followed by sun bake left the contents “one congealed mass of stuff,” Ostrom said. “I couldn’t even tell what it was. It was just a big blob. I had to use a pick and shovel to get it out.”

Ostrom cut a deal with her mother: Everything would be placed in storage and then sifted through slowly, allowing her to keep, for instance, the most prized of her possessions.

And so the cleanup began. The “treasures” were staggering: nearly 300 coffee mugs on the kitchen counter; 50 cardboard boxes of fabric remnants, 20 feet of newspapers in the living room, double that amount of magazines.

It took 450 hours of work over 3 1/2 years but it was done.

Long regarded as a private problem, compulsive saving has become a public concern.

Code enforcement, health and fire officials from all over Southern California consult with Ostrom. For instance, when officials in the San Gabriel Valley closed an elderly woman’s trashed house, the trauma triggered a deadly stroke.

“It was extremely intrusive and degrading to the woman,” Ostrom recalled. “After that, cities got interested in public relations and how they could intervene and fix the problem sensitively.”

Pack rats can change their ways, but the challenge rivals that of a compulsive eater trying to lose weight--neither can completely avoid the source of the problem. You can’t stop eating and you can’t stop receiving mail or buying clothes.

For the pack rat, chipping away at the clutter in small stabs helps get them started. Otherwise, they become overwhelmed by the enormity of the task.

Each week, at the end of the two-hour pack rat support group meeting, members share their success stories. And successes are measured in small triumphs.

Carol has purchased a very small purse to avoid continually repairing the straps. Eve has cleaned a living room bookcase and table that her relatives thought was new; she never leaves the office without her desk cleared. The free-lance writer has cleaned a shelf above her desk.

“One day at a time,” said an Anaheim housewife. “We have to remember this could take us five or six years.”