Just 12 Steps Away
Six men and two women trickle into Room M-16 of Temple Beth Hillel in North Hollywood, taking their seats around a table.
It is the group’s regular weekly meeting. One woman has made this journey every week for seven years. A few will report triumphs in their struggle. Others setbacks. None will be judged by their peers. It is, they say, a “disease.” Recovery, and salvation, come one step at a time, with support and understanding. Tonight’s group leader, a slightly disheveled man with curly locks and yellow-tinged glasses, begins:
“Hi. I’m Mike. I’m a clutterer.”
“Hi, Mike,” everyone responds in unison.
“My whole life is clutter,” Mike admits. For a long time, he says, he suffered alone with his problem. But today, he says, he has begun to create “clutter-free zones” in his home. Mike concedes that this week he had a “clutter slip”--putting junk on a table previously declared clutterless. After four minutes, each member’s allotted time to talk, the timer beeps. Everyone claps.
A woman with a black velour dress--she looks wealthy enough to hire a company to organize her home--says her clutter makes her feel sorry for her housecleaner. “The poor thing doesn’t know what to do,” the woman says, adding that she knows clutter is a “progressive disease” and wants to nip things now.
Rachel, a large woman in a red sweatshirt, says a move to a smaller house left her with 30 unpacked boxes. Rachel folds her hands in prayer. “I’m going bananas. I don’t know how to let go of some things,” she says. Everyone claps.
“It’s now time to share your commitments!” Mike says. There, before fellow clutterers, each makes a vow. One, clasping a copy of “The Clutterer’s Last Stand,” says she will clean off a night stand. Rachel promises to discard three catalogs.
“Ya!” screams 55-year-old Sally, thrusting her hands in the air in jubilation.
Everyone stands in a circle. Joining hands, they end in prayer. Patterned after the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, where attendees appeal to a higher power to control their drinking, Clutterers Anonymous members “admit we are powerless over our clutter.”
Americans, it seems, are pushing the frontiers of self-help.
Want to get together weekly to talk about menopause? Join the Red Hot Mamas. Seducing married men? Mistresses Anonymous. Withdrawing from overzealous religious involvement? Fundamentalists Anonymous. Mad at your mom for circumcising you as a newborn? Your group: The National Organization of Restoring Men.
There’s Caffeine Anonymous, Procrastinators Anonymous, Prostitutes Anonymous, and an L.A. native, Fear of Success Anonymous. Trophy wives tired of being called gold diggers seek out WOOM, Wives of Older Men.
Self-help’s specialization has come as more and more Americans march to the 12 steps. A 1999 report about Americans at midlife found nearly one in five had attended a self-help group; more than 7% had done so in the past year.
In all, 800 kinds of groups--10 times the number in 1980--hold 500,000 meetings nationwide per year. About 650 have meetings in Los Angeles County. Sex Addicts Anonymous, one of half a dozen groups sexaholics can choose from, holds 50 weekly meetings in Los Angeles County alone.
A third of self-helpers go to groups that combat substance abuse. Others seek support for grief, chronic illnesses, bad habits. Groups cover everything from messiness to fear of success to more obscure problems.
Like not being able to urinate in public restrooms.
Four of the afflicted met one recent Saturday morning at the Topanga Plaza Mall.
Gathered in the sun-dappled food court, members of a self-described group of “pee phobics” load up on liquids. Soon, every bladder is bursting. Quickly, members pair off. One member has already scouted out each mall bathroom and written a report describing the virtues and pitfalls of each. (The favorite: Sears--small, low volume, welcoming. The worst: the food court’s--busy, no privacy, the Mt. Everest of bathrooms.)
Members scatter to various bathrooms to “practice.” For the next four hours, the pairs, determined to overcome the phobia, make several pilgrimages.
They lament the damage caused by their phobia, often induced by a toilet training trauma or restroom jokes as children: lost jobs, canceled trips with friends, ruined relationships.
“Here, I talk to people who understand me” says Robb. Shrinks, he says, cost $90 an hour and are often lousy. “This group taught me that I am not alone. That’s killer wonderful.”
University of Maryland associate professor of social work Steven Soifer, a urophobic and group founder, says 7% of Americans have the problem to some degree. “People say: Why can’t you stand up and pee like a man? There is no empathy.”
Eliminating the Comb-Over
The impetus for a group is often one aggrieved person. John Capps, bald since high school, got angry when he didn’t get a sales job because he is folically impaired.
“We are,” Capps says, “a nation obsessed with hair.”
He founded the Bald-Headed Men of America in Morehead City, N.C. Each September, up to 300 bald men meet for the annual convention. They promote bald acceptance. Their goal: to eradicate all comb-overs in the United States.
Mark O’Keefe of San Diego wanted a group where someone could say “the first time I got whipped”--and everyone would understand. Where people with a leather fetish could feel support. The bank worker, crowned Mr. Leather San Diego in 1997, set up a subsidiary group of Alcoholics Anonymous for nondrinkers who love sadomasochism.
“I saw a need for it in myself,” says the 34-year-old. “And I thought others might need it.” The group, attended by up to 50, elevated his self-esteem. It helped him accept his love of whips, spankings and dressing up as a priest. “It’s an empowering group,” says O’Keefe.
O’Keefe describes one member who came to his first meeting afraid of the S-M tendencies stirring within. On his second anniversary, the man wore a leather vest, chaps and codpiece. Nothing else. “He had nipple rings. He was aglow!” O’Keefe says. “People have a want to be needed,” he says. “To be the best they can be.”
Peter Kropotkin, a 19th century Russian zoologist, was the first to propound self-help. He thought collective aid, not Darwinian survival of the fittest, best served people. In the United States, Alcoholics Anonymous, founded in 1935, became the model for self-help groups. Consummate do-it-yourselfers, Americans most eagerly embraced self-help, more than aficionados in Germany, Israel and Japan. Citing Alexis de Tocqueville, Edward J. Madara, director of the American Self-Help Clearinghouse, says: “It’s in our genes to come together.”
“Self-help groups provide the nurturing that community used to provide. A connectedness. A sense of intimacy. Friends. People who worry when you don’t show up next week,” says Ruth Hollman, executive director of the Self-Help and Recovery Exchange (SHARE!), a West Los Angeles center where 3,000 people flock monthly to 55 types of meetings.
Groups Called Powerful Medicine
Self-help attendees--twice as likely to be women as men--say they are fed up with the open-endedness of therapy, are dissatisfied by impersonal health care, or have simply discovered that self-help groups are good places to find a date.
Researchers, for their part, say support groups are powerful medicine: They reduce stress, change habits, even extend life. Citing studies saying they also cut health care costs, one Los Angeles-based health maintenance organization has begun requiring self-help group attendance as part of some patients’ treatments.
Members say that because groups insist on anonymity, they feel they can talk honestly and openly. Everyone in the session has the same problem, so members know they are among those who truly understand their plight. For a nominal donation, they gain information and hope by seeing someone who has clocked time in the group and is conquering similar demons. It’s like looking in a mirror, says Hollman. By seeing the problem in others, you identify the same issues, and their solutions, in yourself.
The people of New Jersey appear most smitten by self-help. There, the state-funded American Self-Help Clearinghouse helps groups get started around the country. In March, New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman set aside a “self-help support week” for her state’s citizens.
Supporters say no group is too obscure if it helps improve people’s lives. Some critics, however, voice concerns that problems once seen as the normal tribulations of life have been elevated to “diseases,” trivializing true suffering.
“When you think of human suffering, the first people who come to mind aren’t clutterers,” says Wendy Kaminer, author of “I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional.”
At SHARE!, self-help “groupaholics” spend entire days flitting from one group to the next, hitting half a dozen in a week. Hollman once went to 17 weekly sessions herself. Kaminer and others worry that as self-help groups become the main focus of communal life, more people gather in forums where they define themselves by their wounds, as victims entitled to redress.
Says Kaminer: “Everyone has a crown of thorns.”
Making Amends for Messiness
The trendsetter among three groups that work to combat clutter: Messies Anonymous, founded in 1980 by Sandra Felton, author of “Messy No More,” “Meditations for Messies” and the upcoming “When You Live With a Messy.” Slobs Anonymous, Felton felt, sounded too nasty.
Following AA’s 12 steps, group members make amends to anyone they believe has been harmed by their messiness. “We don’t throw up our hands and say: We are victims of a clutter gene,” says Felton, who began the group in Miami. “We want to be responsible and deal with our problem.”
A second group began in 1989, this time on the West Coast. A Simi Valley woman went on vacation and asked a neighbor to remove newspapers tossed onto her driveway. The neighbor took one look in the woman’s living room window and called police, sure that burglars had ransacked the place. The mess, it seems, was the home’s normal state. The homeowner realized she needed help. Clutterers Anonymous was born.
Soon the group, which in the past three years has doubled its meetings to 10 in Los Angeles County alone, had spawned its own decluttering language: codependent clutterer (you collect stuff, then give it away to feel needed), thing-sick (you drown in stuff you never use), freeaholic (you can’t resist free, unneeded stuff), and clutter-high (the rush you get wondering if you will find an important paper before a deadline).
Members, who say clutter is caused by a fear of going without, or extreme sentimentality, leading them to accumulate stuff, say they are powerless over their messiness “disease.” Their mission: “to carry the message of recovery to clutterers who still suffer.”
In 1990 came the debut of the Packrat Support Group in San Diego. Avonelle “Grandma Gorgeous” Slagle, a 62-year-old retired bank worker, knew her husband, John “Red” Slagle, could not resist a yard sale or swap meet. For a while, the meetings were helping. Then, Red started hoarding groceries. He is most vulnerable Monday mornings, when meat goes on sale at Vons supermarket. He hauls home several roasts at a time, which Avonelle gives to friends, her pastor, anyone who needs meat.
“My cupboards are full, honey!” Avonelle says. “I got stuff you wouldn’t believe.” The most useful tip Avonelle has learned from her Packrat group: Put everything you own out on the front lawn. Bring inside only what you need. Get rid of the rest.
Clutterers Anonymous devotee Sally, who has attended meetings in Simi Valley and North Hollywood for seven years, calls her “clutter buddy” Samantha every week. They make clutter pledges to one another, calling after each clutter-busting vow is fulfilled. The group, Sally says, boosted her self-esteem to the point that she asked for an extra trash can from the city.
“I came in hopeless. This is paradise,” Sally says of her group. “Sometimes, you feel you are from another planet. Then, you arrive on the same planet with your own species. It fits.”
Sally’s goal: She wants to empty her garage and drive her car into it before she dies.