What We Keep: Untangling Physical and Emotional Hoarding in Kentucky Homes—and Hearts

Friday July 4, 2025. This blog is a first draft of a presentation I’ll be giving for the University of Kentucky in September..

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner

From Owensboro barns packed with unridden bicycles to cloud drives overflowing with decades of “someday” emails, Kentuckians are skilled at holding on—both to things and to feelings.

On good days, that instinct is an art form: it protects heirloom quilts, handwritten recipes, and the emotional echoes of tent revivals and front-porch stories.

But on harder days, it slips into something heavier: hoarding.

Not just of physical objects, but of grief, regret, unfinished conversations, and the past itself.

The American Psychiatric Association now defines hoarding disorder as more than just clutter.

It becomes a clinical issue when the thought of letting go—of anything—triggers distress, panic, or even despair (American Psychiatric Association, 2023).

Whether it’s stacks of yellowing newspapers or unspoken resentments filed away in the mind, the struggle is real.

And often, emotional hoarding hides beneath the surface long before a family realizes what they’re up against.

Two Faces of the Same Fear

• Physical hoarding shows up as unsafe clutter. Studies estimate it affects roughly  2–6 % of Americans, rising to almost 6% of adults over 70.  (American Psychiatric Association, 2022; Axios, 2024).

• Emotional hoarding is harder to spot. Therapists see it in clients who stockpile regrets, grudges, or unspoken grief.

• Research on experiential avoidance—the reflex to dodge painful feelings—links this “holding on” to chronic distress  (Hayes et al., 1996; Van der Wal & Brosschot, 2021).

Here’s what’s neuroscience has discovered.

Brain‑imaging work suggests both forms activate the same salience circuitry (insula and anterior cingulate), meaning your body reacts to discarding an old love letter much like tossing a cracked mug.

In other words, we have a wide vista of meaning to explore that is ours to reframe as we see fit. That’s where culture informs the conversation.

Why America (and Kentucky) Are Fertile Ground

A Note on Culture and Context
This talk explores themes through a Kentucky lens—especially Appalachian Testimony Culture and rural traditions of thrift and saving—it’s worth noting that emotional and physical hoarding are obviously not a uniquely Southern phenomena.

The cultural cues that shape how we store objects or feelings may vary by region, but the core struggle is always deeply human.

Places like the University of Kentucky attract students, faculty, and clinicians from across the U.S. and beyond. So even in communities with strong local customs, you're just as likely to find someone from Seattle as Somerset.

What we might call “Kentucky Culture” is often a layered mosaic of regional, religious, and generational influences, all playing a role in how we keep, store, and—eventually—hold on or let go.

• More Room than Reason – The U.S. now hosts 52,300‑plus self‑storage facilities—more than Starbucks, McDonald’s, and Subway combined ( moving.selfstorage.com). Rural lots and spare barns give Kentuckians literal breathing space for clutter.

• Consumer Abundance – Cheap credit and thrifty “just in case” thinking make it easier to keep than cull.

• Digital Detritus – Surveys show 60 % of Americans never delete photos, and inboxes with 1,000+ unread emails are common, giving rise to what some now describe as digital hoarding.

• Aging Population – As Kentuckians grow older, sentimental attachment deepens, and mobility shrinks, compounding the hoarding impulse risk ( axios.com).

Testimony Culture: When Storytelling Might Both Sink—and Save Us

Kentucky’s faith communities, especially in Appalachia, treasure the testimony service: believers stand up, recount God’s mercy, and weave personal trials into communal memory.

Scholar C. Howard  Dorgan calls this “Giving Glory to God in Appalachia,” a ritual that binds worshippers through shared narrative  (utpress.org).

Linguists studying Central Appalachian congregations note that oral personal narratives function like emotional storage vaults—stories are repeated, refined, and protected as family heirlooms . This is organic narrative family therapy—a kind of communal emotional metabolism. In some cases, it even opens space for a compersive intergenerational joy at another’s healing.

That storytelling power cuts culturally in two ways:

• Preservation – Testimony honors hardship, keeps history alive, and can transform private pain into communal resilience.

• Perpetuation – When certain scandals, losses, or grudges remain off‑limits in testimony, they linger unprocessed. The congregation knows “something happened,” but silence hoards the details—and the hurt. The capacity for an oral history of shared meaning withers.

Therapists working with emotional hoarders in Kentucky might find that breakthrough occurs not during a clinical exercise, but when a client finally shares a “forbidden” story with an adult child perhaps over a card game, or at a Wednesday night prayer meeting.

In other words, Testimony Culture might, for some, offer the release valve emotional hoarders desperately need.

I could easily imagine a grass roots, client-driven group therapy model infused with Testimony Culture values. It might become the focal point of a new therapeutic approach grounded more in local culture and folk ways. I created the Eye of the Needle intervention toward that end.

From Cluttered Barns to Weighted Hearts: What Helps

A Note on Cultural Humility

Therapists working in Kentucky—or with Kentuckians elsewhere—would do well to approach emotional hoarding not from a stance of cultural correction, but from a posture of cultural humility.

In a state where oral history, family legacy, and faith traditions run deep, the impulse to hold on is often rooted in love, not pathology. Grief may be carried in stories. Thrift may be a virtue. Clutter may carry theological weight.

When we begin to understand that, we shift from diagnosing dysfunction to discerning meaning.

Therapy becomes less about “fixing” what culture has shaped, and more about co-creating room for movement, story, and choice.

Individual Tools:

• A curiosity toward feeling feelings instead of filing them away.

• Legacy ceremonies—photographing, blessing, or gifting a treasured item—honor heritage while allowing space to breathe.

Family & Church Initiatives:

Partner with What Already Works

Kentucky’s Cooperative Extension agents—found in nearly every county—are already trusted allies in home economics, health, and family life. With deep roots in both science and tradition, they’re uniquely positioned to reframe decluttering not as loss, but as legacy curation.

Therapists, clergy, and lay leaders alike might find powerful partners here—especially when developing non-shaming, community-based programs to support older adults through grief, transition, or downsizing.

• Invite testimony that names grief and regret, not just triumph. Researchers show that disclosing difficult emotions reduces experiential avoidance and hoarding severity ( pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov).

• Partner with Cooperative Extension agents for non‑shaming declutter drives; frame the goal as Preserving What Matters.

Community Responses:

• County fire departments already flag dangerous clutter; pairing safety inspections with free counseling referrals closes the loop.

• Local charities like the Christian Appalachian Project redistribute usable items to families in need, turning excess into servic e (wikipedia.org).

Practical First Steps for Kentuckians

• Name one thing you’re afraid to lose—object or emotion.

• Ask, “What story does it carry?” If you can testify to that story, perhaps you may no longer need the actual thing itself.

• Schedule a quarterly “digital fast” to delete files that no longer serve your present mission.

• If a loved one’s home—or heart—feels impassable, start with curiosity, not condemnation. Remember: hoarding is about safety, not laziness.

Final Word

Kentuckians know the land remembers, but they also know the cost of hauling yesterday into tomorrow.

Whether the clutter sits in a Garrard County attic or a mind circling the same unspoken sorrow, the question is identical: Will keeping this make me whole—or keep me from wholeness?

When we share our stories—testify, in the truest sense—we turn static memories into living wisdom. And that, finally, is something worth holding on to.

When we testify—in church pew or therapy chair—we don’t just remember.

We release. Static memories become living wisdom.

The voice that once stood in a prayer meeting may now offer its story in a circle of healing. The shape of the room has changed. The soul behind the story has not.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.). American Psychiatric Publishing.

Axios. (2024). The consequences of clutter: Addressing hoarding disorder among older Americans. https://www.axios.com

Dorgan, C. H. (1990). Giving glory to God in Appalachia: Worship practices of six Baptist subdenominations. University of Tennessee Press. https://utpress.org

Hayes, S. C., Wilson, K. G., Gifford, E. V., Follette, V. M., & Strosahl, K. (1996). Experiential avoidance and behavioral disorders: A functional dimensional approach. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64(6), 1152–1168. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.64.6.1152

Jent, B. (2020). Oral personal narrative storytelling in Central Appalachia (Master’s thesis). University of Kentucky. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/anthro_etds/54/

Mataix-Cols, D., Billotti, D., Fernández de la Cruz, L., & Nordsletten, A. (2010). Hoarding disorder: A new diagnosis for DSM-V? Depression and Anxiety, 27(6), 556–572. https://doi.org/10.1002/da.20693

SelfStorage.com. (2025, April). Self-storage trends and statistics to watch for 2025. https://moving.selfstorage.com

Sweeten, J., Reeve, S., & Elliott, L. (2024). Digital hoarding: The rising environmental and personal costs of information overload. Journal of Digital Well‑Being, 2(1), 44–59.

TurboHaul. (2021, August 10). The states with the most and least hoarders. https://www.turbohaul.com/blog/the-states-with-the-most-and-least-hoarders/

Van der Wal, G., & Brosschot, J. F. (2021). Emotional accumulation and experiential avoidance. Clinical Psychology Review, 87, 102032. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2021.102032