SHOPAHOLICS

She’d go shopping on her lunch hour and again after work. Weekends, she’d literally shop all day long. But Connie, a 48-year-old, unmarried Anaheim apartment complex manager, knew her shopping had gotten out of hand when she had trouble holding down a job. “I was totally out of control,” she said. “I wouldn’t go to work; I’d go shopping, and I would do this until I was exhausted. “The worst day I can remember, I stood in the middle of the mall after shopping all day, and I was crying because my feet hurt so bad. It was like I couldn’t get out of there. I had to shop some more. I didn’t leave until the mall closed and the guards asked me to leave.” And still she would return to shop, feeling panicky if she didn’t and falling into a trancelike state as she mingled among the clothing racks and display counters and bought things she often didn’t even need. “I can remember going out and spending $500 for clothes,” she said. “That was a lot of money for me. I’m not a rich person, but I can remember spending $500 and coming back with stuff I couldn’t use. I’d give a lot of stuff away; a lot of stuff got put in boxes. “It was just insane.” Connie is a compulsive shopper, one of an estimated 15 million Americans who are driven to buy. And, experts say, their buying is frequently extravagant, inappropriate and disruptive to their lives. For various reasons, compulsive shoppers are invariably women. But unlike the tongue-in-cheek bumper stickers proclaiming the committed shopper’s national anthem, “Shop ‘til you drop,” compulsive shopping is no joking matter. As Carolyn Wesson, author of “Women Who Shop Too Much: Overcoming the Urge to Splurge,” said: “Excessive shopping is a process addiction--a far cry from the traditional, simplistic view of it being something that all women do, like having babies. “It is a way of compensating for missing elements and shortcomings in a woman’s life. All of which give rise to feelings of deprivation and the urge to acquire possessions, even useless ones.” In Connie’s case, it wasn’t until she had amassed a debt of $18,000 in bad checks and overextended credit cards that she finally sought help. “A lot of people giggle when they think of being a compulsive shopper. But it’s very painful, especially when you try to stop,” said Connie, who is now a member of the self-help group Debtors Anonymous. (Like other compulsive shoppers in this story, she asked that her real name not be used.) It’s usually not until they are deeply in debt that compulsive shoppers seek the help of therapists such as Tustin psychologist Amy Stark.

People finally come to her office “not because they’re shopping and recognize it’s a problem, but because they’ve gotten into such horrendous debt that they’re in over their heads and they can’t solve it,” Stark said.

And even when they do seek help, overcoming the compulsion to shop is no easy matter.

Lana, a 30-year-old Mission Viejo mother, remembers leaving her initial sessions with Stark and telling herself that she was going to drive straight home instead of stopping at a mall.

“All of a sudden my healthy train of thought would be invaded by wanting to buy something,” she said. “I’d fight with the steering wheel and say to myself, ‘Go straight! Don’t turn! Don’t go to the store!’ ”

Half the time, she said, she would get off at the next off-ramp and turn back to the mall.

As with compulsive gambling or eating, therapists say compulsive shoppers have an underlying problem that is driving them to shop.

Santa Ana psychologist Barbara Kreedman said compulsive shopping is often a way to feel loved when people felt deprived of love in childhood. It may also be a symptom of feeling powerless in a marriage or a matter of low self-esteem.

Compulsive shopping, Kreedman said, is just one avenue of expressing those unconscious, unresolved issues.

“In other words, our system is not a closed system,” she said. “If we continue to repress, it’s going to come out in one form or another--anxiety, depression, eating disorders, drinking, shopping--or else our system would burst. We have to discharge that energy.”

Women typically have more time than men to shop, Kreedman said, and it has traditionally been their role to buy for the family. Men, she added, usually choose more “grandiose” ways of expressing inner conflicts: buying cars, boats or the latest electronic gadgets.

Compulsive shopping is not a new phenomenon.

In her book, Wesson cites Mary Todd Lincoln who, for example, ordered 84 pairs of gloves just before moving into the White House and, once there, charged extensively to add to her wardrobe. A century later, Jacqueline Kennedy would order hundreds of pairs of gloves from designer Oleg Cassini in a single year.

Then there is former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos, whose huge walk-in palace closet was filled with, among other things, more than 1,000 gowns and mink stoles, more than 2,600 pairs of shoes, hundreds of imported leather purses, 300 imported 18-carat gold Italian necklaces and five shelves of unused Gucci handbags with the price tags still attached.

Few people can afford such extravagance. But because of increased affluence, leisure time and loose credit policies, Wesson said, the number of compulsive shoppers is larger than ever today.

Not all excessive shopping, however, is a sign of an underlying emotional problem.

Wesson, a Los Gatos licensed marriage, family and child therapist whose book grew out of her own experiences as a “shopaholic,” delineates three categories of shoppers:

* The recreational shopper’s buying doesn’t fill any particular deep-seated psychological need. Like avid sports fans, these shoppers simply enjoy the experience of shopping.

* In the middle are what Wesson calls shopaholics. “They’ll use shopping to kind of camouflage feelings or as a way of indirectly communicating,” she said. “A woman who is angry at her husband may go out and do a ‘revenge raid,’ or someone who’s depressed may go shopping, but she only does this occasionally. They have other ways of coping with problems and unhappy feelings.”

* Addicted or compulsive shoppers use buying as their primary way of avoiding deep-seated emotional or relationship problems.

One woman Wesson worked with in therapy had accumulated $25,000 in charge card debts, “mostly without her husband knowing about it.”

“A lot of these women,” Wesson noted, “get PO boxes for the bills.”

Although many compulsive shoppers buy clothes, Wesson knows one woman who is a “crafts junkie.”

For Lucille, a 47-year-old Laguna Beach office administrator, it was books. The divorced mother of two grown children and a member of Debtors Anonymous would visit bookstores three or four times a week, buying up to 10 books per visit.

She didn’t have any space to keep them and had to stack them in boxes in her garage, but that didn’t stop her from buying more books. Neither did a lack of time to read them.

“I had to do it,” she said. “I could go to the library, but no: I have to possess that book.”

Compulsive shoppers often spend a major portion of their day shopping. Wesson described a woman in her book who lives on an island off the East Coast where there aren’t many stores. So she would spend six hours a day shopping in hotel gift shops and catalogues.

While shopping, Wesson said, compulsive shoppers almost always feel a high--followed by a low of regret, depression, guilt. “And despite the negative fallout, they can’t stop,” she said. “They’d like to stop, but they can’t. The problem is out of their control.”

They are simply buying to buy. “The process becomes addictive, not the items,” Wesson said.

The first step in treating a compulsive shopper, Wesson said, is for the person to acknowledge the problem. “That’s pretty obvious, but it’s a big step.”

She recommends going to therapy or joining Debtors Anonymous, which, like Alcoholics Anonymous, offers a 12-step program to overcome compulsive shopping and spending.

“Through those processes, they need to begin working on those areas of their life that are troubling them,” she said. “And they need to develop alternative pleasures and interests. They need to find new ways to relax, because a lot of what underlies the problem is a lot of anxieties, a lot of tension.”

Stark said that when a compulsive shopper first comes to see her, she has them lay their cards on the table:

“I want to know how many thousands of dollars worth of bills are we talking about? Bring in the bills. I want to see them because part of it is, let’s deal with the embarrassment. I want to see your monthly statements, and I want to see them every month.”

Stark, in fact, asks clients to bring all their credit cards to her office. Then she has them cut them up. When one woman cut up all her cards, Stark recalled, “she cried.”

She also has them work with a financial adviser who will “monitor their money until they get this in check.”

Then, she said, “we want to take a look at what’s not working: Is it that your parents are bugging you? Is your marriage not working? You’ve got to confront the issues and work them through. And then you can do the behavioral modification stuff for stopping that behavior.”

To begin with, Stark said, “I think you have to make sure your credit lines everywhere are gone.”

The problem, she said, is that even if the customer cuts up her credit cards, department stores will continue to extend credit.

It’s also helpful, she said, to go shopping with a friend or a support group member--”someone who can say, ‘We’re here for one thing only.’ And as you go through, you can talk about your anxiety.”

One of the behavior modification techniques Kreedman recommends for clients is that they talk to themselves when they’re in a store to remind themselves of what they’re doing: “I know I’ve done this before. When I’ve done this before, this is what this means, and therefore I know I really don’t need those pair of shoes. It’s more an indication that I’m feeling unloved.”

Wesson emphasized that the compulsive shopper needn’t give up shopping altogether: “We can’t, first of all. We always have to buy, but it has to be balanced.”

In designing a program to pay off debts, she said, it is also important to budget money for recreation or pleasure.

“Most people who are figuring out a budget put all their ‘musts’ first: Food and rent and the last thing on the list are things that are pleasure, and that’s why budgets are so impossible to keep to,” she said.

Her book, she said, “is not about quitting shopping as much as it is about leading more balanced lives, in which shopping is still a part of life but in balance with all the other pleasures of life, and how to do that.”

Because most people “don’t have 60 or 70 bucks an hour” to go to a therapist, Wesson recommends Debtors Anonymous as an effective way to deal with the addiction.

Connie of Anaheim began attending regular Debtors Anonymous meetings two years ago. “Things started improving right away because I had support and I didn’t feel so alone,” she said.

It took about a year before she got her shopping under control.

“In order to stop, I had to look at my life,” she said.

At the bottom of her compulsive shopping was “extreme low self-esteem.”

“I never had children because I thought I was so bad,” she said. “I thought I didn’t deserve children. . . . There were just all kinds of things, and I felt everything was my fault.”

Connie said she is still dealing with her $18,000 debt. “My credit is terrible, but I’m making payments now,” she said.

She admits, however, that she still occasionally gets the urge to splurge.

“Once in a while I catch myself: ‘Oh, I’m being a little panicky today.’ But now I know I can go to a (D.A.) meeting, or go to the gym and work out. I have other things I do today.

“It’s great because I’m learning to be my best friend, to take care of myself.”