HOARDERS! I don’t know why but we’ve capped up that word on practically all our socials, I think because the word says it all. No explanation needed. Except, we’re going to explain a little bit…

So, first of all, if you haven’t listened to the episode, you can do so here.

Now, Michelle was the one that wanted to take a look at hoarders as a concept, mainly because of a small but significant experience that stayed with her from childhood. Also because her sister is obsessed with the TV show Hoarders, plus it’s a show they both watched together, late at night, with a G&T after her kids had gone to bed on Michelle’s trips back to Australia… Good times So the concept was close to her heart…  But seriously, hoarding is such a complex issue with so many layers that we decided to take a little delve into the psychology of it before finding bizarre cases that mystified us.  

What’s really interesting to us is that we saw that hoarding can occur in very specific ways, like Michelle’s story about Terry the cat hoarder or Shanna the Poop hoarder, or general hoarding of pretty much all and everything, like Geordie’s story about the Honeycheck sisters who just had a house full of, well, junk. Then there’s tiny instances of hoarding, like Michelle’s previous clothes hoarding (or was it just lots of clothes and lots of space to keep them? Or attachment issues? Who knows!) or the case of the jar full of mysterious mossy water that ended up in Geordie’s yard (listen to get the full picture), which means you can have small hoarding tendencies without being a hoarder… See! Told you the issue was complex!

Of course, we’re not psychologists and it’s all just thoughts and theories, but we give it a red hot go at looking into different angles and giving it our own Eavesdroppin’ spin. Apologies have to go out to listeners, though who may find the animal hoarding story upsetting… It’s grim. Really grim. And we’re not laughing at the liquefied cat so much as being so at the edge of understanding the why of it all that our reaction was a laugh or cry moment. So let’s be clear that we love animals. It was just a beyond- comprehension thing!!!

Thanks to all the listeners who sent us comments about the episode and links and comments – we’d never even thought about Mia Farrow and Angelina Jolie as children hoarders but it’s a great point! Also to another listener who sent in a great story they’d read about what triggers hoarding – so fascinating. 

I’m sure we’ll do another hoarders story in the future so if you have any ideas or cases you’d like us to cover, let us know! Until then… Keep eavesdroppin’!

xxx