Toys in Pat Wong's basement are stacked against the wall.
The Ottawa woman has six storage lockers filled to the brim, a home packed with decades of stuff — and a cautionary tale to share.Pat Wong reached out to CBC News to share her experience with hoarding behaviour and warn others to seek help before they face a lifetime of things in their senior years.Pat Wong has six storage lockers filled to the brim, a home packed with decades of stuff — and a cautionary tale to share.
She has had to sell a second home that she could no longer live in and shuffled her belongings between her remaining property, the storage lockers and tents in her daughter's backyard."It's kept me from maybe enjoying experiences with people," she said after opening up her Carlington home to CBC. "It might have cost me my husband. My oldest daughter thinks that.
Toys lie piled against a wall in Pat Wong's basement. Some of the many children's items filling her home are gifts that were never given. "I feel like if they're not good for the purpose that they were probably intended, there might be some way that they could be used elsewhere," she said. "Waste not, want not. But you see, I'm wasting my money and my time."Wong says her home fell into decline years ago, and she hasn't welcomed visitors in a very long time. There wouldn't be much room for them to sit, anyway.
"I guess those are things that I might feel if somebody came in and helped me, might get tossed, because they're not necessarily in a logical place," she said.Elaine Birchall, a hoarding behaviour and intervention specialist in Ottawa and co-author of"Not every hoarding situation represents a disorder. It becomes a disorder when the person is functionally impaired ... then becomes a disability as well," she said. "It ruptures relationships, it breaks trust.
"Meaning is in the eye of the beholder," Birchall said. "You need to help people change their relationship to their things, not discard."
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