Hoarders Do Not Deserve The Help Of Someone As Sweet As Dorothy Breininger
When we meet a hoarder on Hoarders, we're probably not seeing her on her best day. She's been suffering with an untreated mental illness for a matter of years, if not decades. She's allowing a bunch of strangers -- several of them with cameras -- to enter her disaster of a home only because she's at a crisis point where she risks losing it, or her kids, to the local authorities. It's a stressful situation, to be sure. But that is no excuse for being mean to Dorothy Breininger.
Professional organizer Dorothy Breininger is in the recurring cast of professionals Hoarders uses to help its profilees with the cleanup of their homes. She is also one of the cheeriest people I have ever seen. If you're going to go into a line of work that involves wading (often literally) into some of the most shocking kinds of filth human beings are capable of and somehow imposing order on it, then it's probably quite helpful to boast an unflappably sunny disposition to go with your can-do attitude. And truly, all that Hoarders's hoarders have to do to stay on Dorothy's good side (and mine) is demonstrate that they're trying. That's not to say they have to agree to throw out every item of worthless garbage that passes through their hands: if they could do that, they wouldn't be on Hoarders. But if they seem to bring a halfway willing spirit to the cleanup, Dorothy will be patient and sweet. So that's why it's all the more upsetting when Dorothy dares -- gently, always gently -- to push a hoarder to let go of something, and the hoarder responds by lashing out.
If you don't watch Hoarders...well, first of all, congratulations, you're better than me. Fine. But here's an idea of what Dorothy has to deal with. In last night's episode, Millie had been challenged by her seventeen-year-old daughter, Chelsea, to clean up her hoarded home. Millie has been a hoarder for Chelsea's whole life -- Chelsea says that jumping over piles of stuff in the house is one of her earliest memories -- and the state of the house has been so bad that when Chelsea was younger, CPS removed her from Millie's care. Since then, Chelsea has left Millie's home, because of Millie's hoarding, on and off for the past six years; now she says that if Millie cannot clean up the house and keep it clean, Chelsea will no longer have a relationship with her.
For any reasonable person, this would be a powerful motivation to attack the mess aggressively. But Millie is not reasonable. Before cleanup even begins, she denies to therapist Michael Tompkins that she is a "fully blown hoarder," pointing out the lack of dead animals and actual garbage in her hoard; to her mind, it's just clutter (a lot of it). She gets through the entire first day of the cleanup without a single item being removed from the property, according to Dorothy. And when Millie's sister Jo Lynn tattles on her by bringing a small rock over to Dorothy and Dr. Tompkins and explaining (slash tattling) that Millie wants to save it, Millie digs her heels in, even when it's pointed out that she's taking kind of a weird stand when her daughter's love is on the other side of the scales. Frustrated, Jo Lynn hurls the stone to the edge of the property, and Millie kicks her out of the cleanup, yelling, "I HAD A PLAN FOR THAT ROCK." Was the plan to destroy your family? Because if so, your plan went off without a hitch!
Despite having to deal with this sort of garbage -- inanimate and human -- Dorothy rarely loses her cool. Even a hoarder's open abuse pushes her to respond with something other than her trademark sweetness, the worst she ever does is get frustrated and raise her voice a little. And for someone who has never missed an episode of Hoarders (hi) and has seen Dorothy put up with a lot of shit, much of it literal, her determined equanimity is kind of miraculous. Most of us could never do what Dorothy does for a troubled loved one; Dorothy does it for strangers, who more often than not are hostile and intractable. Whatever Hoarders pays Dorothy, it isn't enough. In fact, Dorothy is the kind of person that even an irreligious person may feel deserves actual canonization.