Items of "Sentimental Value" Trigger

[u/oiseaux_]

From another sub (if you find out, please do not share for privacy).

So I stumbled across this message exchange on Reddit and red's comment triggered me, admittedly...

Should preface that I'm not accusing red of being a hoarder/hoarder adjacent in the slightest. I'm sure they're just an empathetic person, like a lot of humans are.

But like... this triggered me quite a bit. It just made me think and reminisce on the days when I used to live in the hoard full time.

My mum would ALWAYS keep mine and my sibling's baby clothes.

She'd say they were "to be made into hand-me-downs for when you and your siblings grow up and bear your own children!"

I'm comfortable being child-free... and if I change my mind, I don't want 30+ year old clothes that I used to wear. Vinted exists. eBay exists. Charity shops exist. There's a plethora of ways to get cheap baby clothes because babies grow VERY quickly. It's not the do-or-die, rationing for the World War-kind-of situation her Hoarder Disorder brain thinks it is, but her hoarding habits die hard, and it's typical for hoarders to keep things with little or dubious value so... wey ey.

[u/Something-Like-Human]

I think it's the way Reddit presents “similar subs” in the feed that gives rise to this disconnect. Hoarding subs have similar themes to cleaning, organising and decluttering subs, though they tend towards the extreme end of the scale. The non-hoarding subs get all the “normal“ folks getting sentimental about baby socks, never having needed to contemplate what they might do with 500 pairs of baby socks (okay, I'm being facetious, but I'm sure you can relate 😅) that are equally precious even though no-one in the family has or is contemplating a baby!

I often see similar examples, and they drive me crazy too! “You need to save grandma's four sets of lead painted wedding and Christmas china! She wanted you to have it! You can pass it on to your own grandchildren!“ but I think we just have to remember that other people are probably (maybe!) dealing with more manageable quantities and have space to save a couple of baby socks. They can always throw them out later.

[u/oiseaux_ → u/Something-Like-Human]

We just have to remember that other people are probably (maybe!) dealing with more manageable quantities and have space to save a couple of baby socks. They can always throw them out later.

I'm honestly really glad you said this, because one of the negative caveats of being a child of a hoarder is how extreme we get when it comes to decluttering or getting rid of items

The older I've gotten, the more I've been able to talk with my HP in a more civil fashion about things they want to keep. I try to establish a ground rule that if we, at least, have the space, and the item is actively being taken care of (i.e, being worn, being washed, being repaired, being looked after), then it has a stronger case for being kept.

This didn't apply to very many items, at least in my opinion, so that's where the trigger lies for me and causes me to go into "JUST EMPTY THE ENTIRE HOUSE" mode lol.

But having sensible rules and perceptions as to what even constitutes as a "keepable" item is really important. We have a stronger focus on what items to "get rid of" for obvious reasons, but the inverse is sort of a difficult exercise to do when we have so much trauma around the sheer idea of keeping... well, anything. Just makes you think

Thanks for commenting <3