Written by Jan Carpenter, Director of Turning Over a New Leaf
As an advanced social worker, with 20 years of social work experience, I have seen a rather lot of hoarding situations. I am also a certified coach, Havening Techniques and NLP practitioner and more recently I have decided to apply these skills for the benefit of hoarding.
Hoarding is characterised by the excessive collection of things and difficulty with discarding things. There are varying levels of hoarding but as it escalates to severe levels it negative impacts on family and friends and often results in becoming socially isolated. Hoarding Disorder (HD) is a disorder in its own right and it is estimated that it affects 2-5% of the population, that is around 1.2-3m people nationally. 5% of hoarders at any one time develop a level of severity that requires professional intervention (83,750-167,500 nationally). Many hoarders tend to be isolated from the community and/or disengaged from services as the hoarding worsens over time it can become severe and costly if left unaddressed. Nationally, 1/3 of fire fatalities involve people who hoard.
Social Workers measure the extent of peoples hoarding by using the clutter rating index. In my social work role I have worked with individuals and families who live amongst a clutter rating of 9/9 in all or some rooms, that's almost floor to ceiling, and 7-8 in other rooms. Anything from level 7 up is considered severe, requiring immediate action, as it is considered a risk to themselves and their neighbours, due to health and safety, and specifically fire risks. This is particularly so if people live in densely populated housing, which understandably causes more anxiety to the authorities since Grenfell. The Care act 2014 put hoarding on the legislative map, since self neglect is now considered a Safeguarding concern.
I’m often curious how people get used to living amongst items that are 6 feet tall and fill a whole room and, in extreme cases, most rooms in the property. The issue may have evolved to limited or zero access to basic working facilities, like a toilet, bath or kitchen. There may be little space to move around the property with narrow walkways to get through the clutter or in worst and rare cases burrows through the clutter that have developed over the years to the point of forging a place to sleep inside those burrows. There are some that are obsessive collectors of prize possessions, for example, 2000 books, floor to ceiling in a one bedroom flat. Then there are others who collect other people’s junk from the streets, ‘one person’s junk is another person's treasure’ as they say and you can see why. If I’m poor and I’ve little to nothing I might find it exciting to find an old laptop in a bin and make it work again and then repeat.
Indeed, if it wasn’t for a garden project last year I’d be concerned about the amount of pallet wood my wife kept bringing in from our local streets, treasures that she would find on her lunchtime lockdown walks. The project paused for a while so the wood stopped coming in and we have since realised we have more than we need, so I’ve started letting-go of what was previously treasure to us.
This is distinctly different from a previous client who literally had their property bursting at its seems with wood, to the extent it was difficult to get in and out of the front door or to find the bedroom and kitchen facilities. Other types of hoarding involves people bringing in rubbish of no value at all into the property. Day after day bringing in other people’s rubbish until the property is full and then keep on doing it.
One would be forgiven for thinking this sounds very odd but for such people this behaviour is normal everyday life that’s been happening for many years. To them this may be considered manageable and unthinkable that anything should move or be dismantled or decluttered. Indeed it makes them feel safe. There is often a major disconnect between them and other people's views. Between the client and the authorities' view. Our challenge is to find ways to connect in order to help resolve, for win win outcomes.
I have since started working with Clouds End CIC in Birmingham. This Community Interest Company specializes in providing therapeutic de-hoarding services; they practice a person centred approach and work on decluttering together WITH the person. Most other services are just clearance companies, that is they undertake the de-clutter with little to no conversation and mostly throw their stuff out. This is a ‘done for’ approach that often feels like a ‘done to’ approach. For some they may be ready for such but for many others it can be heart wrenching. Birmingham council has given Clouds End CIC permission to use the budget in an innovative way. This is something the company enjoys the most because it's where they started.
I spoke with Heather Matouzo, Founder of Clouds End CIC, who offered the following information:
Cloudsend CIC was formed in 2009 and was the first social enterprise to work with people with hoarding behaviours in the UK. It’s aim is to find compassionate and cost effective person centred programmes that help everyone involved in a hoarding case, primarily through education, as understanding the reasons for the behaviours is key to working with the person.
It has developed Supportive Intervention(™) which is a framework to make this possible using strength based approaches and making the person involved a ‘part of the team’, the team being the multi agency group involved.
Clouds End has now put all its training online and this training is CPD accredited, also a first in England.
In 2019 Clouds End was given a long awaited grant to work with 100 people who hoard in Birmingham, developing innovative ways to help everyone. The project is called Chaos to Order. Despite present conditions the project , now into the first year is having very successful outcomes one of which is using mentoring for social work students which fits nicely within the BASW scheme.
There will be a conference at the end of the project to share all the findings. The heart of the findings will be the launch of The Hoarding Charter, which will give a voice to those who have hoarding issues and will make Birmingham the first ever Hoarding Aware city. This means that people with hoarding issues will be reassured that they will be seen, heard and understood – something we all need…
One of these innovative approaches is the use of Havening Techniques. As a Havening Techniques Practitioner and Trainer, I was invited to talk at their virtual hoarders forum about the benefits of Havening at their fortnightly forum hosted by Clouds End.
I explained that Havening is a psycho sensory technique that mimics powerful aspects of sleep while we’re awake to help people quickly let go of unhelpful emotions stemming from trauma. The principle is let-go of ‘inner emotional clutter’ to let go of ‘outer physical clutter’. It offers a gentle, yet effective and highly person centered way of empowering people from their trauma. Havening helps to clear emotional and mental clutter and reduce the sense of overwhelm when faced with having to stop the hoarding and, alongside a partnership approach as well, it helps to engage their motivation on the task of decluttering.
One of the benefits of Havening is that, once learnt, anyone can easily use it themselves in their own time, which increases the amount of therapy time and speed of recovery. It is similar yet different to EMDR, which the NHS recognises and uses as a formal therapeutic modality. People are finding it easier to use Havening on themselves than EMDR, which is more of a ‘done to’ therapy. There is now robust research that Havening is helping to reduce traumatic stress and thereby improve emotional and physical wellbeing, that was previously being curtailed due to excessive stress.
I have since been working with an initial 6 Clouds End clients. Two received direct 1:1 Havening sessions, with follow up telephone/text support, and four who have experienced a ‘Self-Havening’ workshop in which they were taught how to use Havening on themselves, for resilience building. So far the findings and outcomes are looking positive, which will be shared in an upcoming workshop Hoarding: Can Havening Really Help? Declutter the mind to clarify the vision.
For me one of my main interests in becoming a social worker was to empower people. That is to enable voice, choice and, failing all that, the control to exit an environment or problem-situation.
So often it’s not just the external environmental conditions that are chaining us to our recurring issues. It is the internal environment, that is past trauma and related anxiety chaining us to less than favourable recurring situations. Havening Techniques provides a brief, simple and effective tool to improve the internal conditions that make positive change more easily possible in our lives. Hence why I have added it to my repertoire of skills and solutions.
Join us on a Workshop
I will be delivering a workshop on the 30th September at 6pm. If you would like to join please so by clicking on the link below. This is the offered via Hays Recruitment for Social Workers:
In this workshop you will learn about:
• Using a case study based approach, you will understand why it’s so important to take a proactive, measured and multi-agency approach to addressing hoarding.
• You will make more informed decisions on how to address hoarding thanks to neuroscience research about Hoarding Disorder.
• You will experience Havening Techniques giving you insight into how and why it can be used with hoarders and for your own resilience building.
About the Trainers
Jan is an Advanced Adult Social Work Practitioner of 20 years to safeguarding team manager level, and the coordinator of Hays Social Work Training. Jan is also a Trauma Recovery and Resilience Coach and Havening Techniques® practitioner and trainer, with over a decade of expertise in helping individuals address lifestyle issues and make practical steps to improve their wellbeing.
Sue has over 20 years social work experience working with children and their families and specialized in child safeguarding. She works part time as a senior lecturer and teaches on the MSc in Social Work course at Royal Holloway.
Written by Jan Carpenter,
Director of Turn Over A New LEAF
08/09/21
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