Unfortunately, this site does not have the answer to this, but we can offer advice from others who have tried:

•A letter to a mother, from her daughter

•Advice on How to Help, shared from a daughter of a father that hoards,  in the Messiness&Hoarding »Support Group.  Posted here with the permission of Sandra Felton, Founder of Messies Anonymous»

•Advice on how to communicate with a Hoarder, from a spouse, shared in the Mates of Messies» support group. Posted here with the permission of author.

 

»How to help someone you care about

 

How Can I Get My Hoarding Loved One Get Motivated To Want To Change?

 

Some ideas collected by childrenofhoarders.com from visitors/other.

 

Quote about Motivation and Discrepency
Dr. Randy Frost speaking during Face Your Hoarding Tendencies teleclass, March 8, 2007. Minutes 24:35 & 26:16 of recorded discussion:

"Regarding motivation, there are a couple of things that I think it’ s important for people to think about. And that is in order for change to happen in anyone’s life, two things have to happen.

One is the change has to be important. Now what I mean by important is that there has to be a discrepancy or a difference between the way the person is living now and the way they want to live. There’s got to be some discrepancy there.  

So the person’s unhappy with the way they are now. The idea is that if you haven’t reached your goal, but if you’re reasonably comfortable and there’s not much difference, then change is unlikely. There’s got to be a big enough discrepancy between where you’re at now and where you want to be in order for that change to be important.

But beyond that, the second thing we have to have is some confidence that change is possible. If there’s a discrepancy between the way I live now and the way I want to live but I don’t have any confidence that I can actually make a change, then what’s going to happen is I’m going to engage in some funny ways of thinking in order to reduce that discrepancy. I’m going to start telling myself, ;

“Well it’s not so bad the way it is now.”  Or,  I’m going to tell myself “that maybe I like it this way.” Or I’m going to tell myself “it’s not my problem, it’s someone else’s problem.  Because I have this discrepancy and I have to reduce it in order to feel comfortable. And I can’t reduce it by changing because I’m not confident that I can do it. So I use some mental trickery and that leads me to appear as though I don’t recognize that I have a problem.”