Published on 12, July, 2020
I was wondering today if this is an autistic thing.
I've spent several decades collecting objects and the last decade+ trying to rid myself of the majority.
However, I have given up on the idea of ever being minimalist.
I notice that I remember where everything came from, even, when purchased, which shop in which town.
I try not to be sentimental about things, but sometimes I can't help it.
My mother, who I believe was autistic, was a hoarder in quite an extreme sense.
My autistic friend finds it very hard to part with belongings.
Everything has an association.
Are others like this and are there contributors here who are genuinely minimalistic and don't have an attachment to things?
Thank you for these replies.
There's some fascinating stuff contained within them.
Iain said:a compulsion towards hoarding and is one of the compulsions that can come with autism.
I didn't know that .
I hadn't realised that (I think you are saying) autistic people are more likely to be hoarders than others.
Any idea, anyone, why we may become more attached to objects than allistics do?
The root cause of the hoarding (well more like collecting without sensible limits) for autists seems routed in the attachment centre of our minds. We struggle to create social attachments but can make attachments to inanimate objects, especially if they have significance to us.
If you found a record made you feel happy during a sad time in life then you would probably develop an attachment to the physical record, maybe the record player and maybe other records of that era.
If you found a stuffed toy made you feel good when you had no friends as a child then you get a bit of that same buzz when you get another.
Etc
We, as autitst, seem to be wired a bit differently for the attachment mechanisms so this is what leads so many of us to struggle with limits on this - it is like taking away out attachments and connection with happiness.
Well, that is my understanding of it.
what are people defining as hoarding?
according to the NHS site :
"A hoarding disorder is where someone acquires an excessive number of items and stores them in a chaotic manner, usually resulting in unmanageable amounts of clutter. The items can be of little or no monetary value."
Value isn't just monetary and how chaotic is chaotic? For example all my things are here for a reason. I don't just keep old bottle tops and weird items I have no use for, although to other people (my partner who refers to it all as "his cr*p") they might not understand the meaning of the objects, the value to me or why I'd want to have some archaic technology everyone else has moved on from.