On the outside, mine is much like any other middle-class family home. Inside, it’s a very different story.

Just going up the stairs in my jam-packed Cambridge house is like navigating an SAS assault course.

First, you need to maneuver around a towering stack of boxes. Then, squeeze past a disassembled bunk bed and mattress (which now reside on the stairs) before making your way through piles of books, clothes, and abandoned toys.

On the landing, there’s a scrapheap of furniture and storage tubs, crowned by an enormous pile of Lego.

That’s not all: one bedroom houses a sizeable rocking horse on top of a chest-of-drawers with a wall of old army trunks stacked in front.

My ‘wardrobe’ consists of around 400 dresses and 150 skirts, along with countless pairs of shoes. I have an extensive Vivienne Westwood collection, own 12 antique wedding dresses, and a pile of 50 unhung pictures by one door.

This enormous pile of clutter has been accumulating for a decade. It’s undeniable now: I am a hoarder. My habit is so deeply ingrained that it feels unmanageable, and it’s a source of overwhelming shame.

I can’t even imagine inviting a new friend over or hosting a drinks party. Even if I wanted to, it would be impossible: our once-cosy sitting room is inaccessible due to mountains of cardboard boxes that came back to us in February after 21 years in storage. That’s when we last moved house, only to fill an even larger space to the brim with more belongings.

As a successful magazine editor and writer, I have a professional image to maintain. I pay a lot of attention to how I dress, present myself, and prepare for public speaking engagements.

Yet this efficient composure is totally at odds with my private space. I’m mortified not to have a functioning domestic home.

It’s affecting my children: my 17-year-old son can’t invite friends over to play Fortnite because the TV is obscured by boxes full of books and china. He often talks longingly about ‘normal families’.

If I don’t act now, he and his older brother could find themselves clearing a house full of firetraps. Indeed, heaped possessions increase the risk of a serious fire or personal injury. In 2022 alone, the London Fire Brigade attended 1,036 hoarding-related fires.

This is one of my greatest fears: that my unwieldy chaos will utterly spike out of control and I’ll be found one day like Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, set alight by a candle in a room filled with debris. I want to grasp the thistle before its spikes destroy me – or drive my sons out of their own home.

I’ve tried in the past: I had one massive clear-out in 2012, after cramming my office to the point it was unusable. On tackling the bedlam, I found a letter from my dead mother and £300 in out-of-date banknotes tucked in the folds of my wedding dress and burst into tears.

I made a resolution never to spiral out of control again. Today, though, it’s even worse than it was.

So, mustering all my resolve, I decide to seek help from Kat Band of The Hummingbird Effect, who specialises in professional decluttering focusing on ‘chronic disorganisation and hoarding behaviours’. She’s also a co-director of Hoarding Disorders UK in the East of England, a community initiative offering support to people whose squirrelling has become problematic.

It took a lot of self-searching and stiff conversations with family before I admitted I was a hoarder. Before, I would have been more likely to say ‘very messy’. But mere mess can be swiftly sorted via professional cleaning agencies and the like. My problems are psychological. I’m not grubby – I just hang on to things for dear life. I feel fear and horror at the idea of some busybody chucking my precious keepsakes into a skip.

Thankfully, Kat, 43, makes it clear she’s no Marie Kondo, the famous decluttering influencer who banishes excess possessions and shows people how to precisely fold undies.

Before meeting, we agree it’s futile for me to even attempt to tidy. Instead, she wants to see things in their everyday state, and uncover the cause of my problem.

As soon as Kat enters our compact 1920s house (it has eight rooms in total) she immediately sees the challenge. The kitchen is the only place you can actually sit down.

I find myself being gently questioned. Have I always clung onto my belongings? Were there key moments when my stockpiling worsened?

As the middle child of five in a very cash-strapped household, I wore hand-me-downs, and yearned to choose my own clothes. I was always heavily invested in my possessions, collecting horse-related knickknacks as a child, clinging to fountain pens and watches long after they stopped working.

All these emotions, the clinging and longing, live on in the adult me and teeter out of control when stressed, or unhappy – and I then invariably buy something new.

My happiest purchases occur in charity shops or online sites like eBay, finding joy in enriching my Aladdin’s cave.

Friends and relatives also often give me unwanted furniture, clothes and curios. At university, other students would come to my room with offerings like detached car number plates, or 78rpm records.

Kat says here I can put ‘one simple rule in place that’s easy to enforce straight away’. She suggests wielding a firm ‘no’ henceforth when anyone tries to deposit unwanted goods with me.

My husband Angus, 72, is also quizzed because we both amass possessions, though I’m far worse. He has thousands of books, model planes and 30-year-old Shetland jumpers. Our parents were war generation, so the idea of keeping, mending and make-do was deeply instilled in us (I once found a pheasant in my in-laws’ freezer that had been there for 12 years).

Angus and I also both mourn parents’ premature deaths. His mother died when he was 13, my father died during my first term at university and Mum died just before my first son was born. All three had cancer. Then Angus’s elderly father died in a domestic accident.

It’s possible we’re partly trying to keep them close by hoarding the past. I’ve retained some ugly furniture from my parents’ country pub, like a heavy table part-fashioned from a beer keg. Angus has a huge wallchart showing his family’s Scottish lineage. There’s not a hope in hell our sons will want any of it.

We were also both profoundly affected when our older son, now 21, suffered severe anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), which often stopped him going to school or leaving the house (thankfully, he’s now doing well at university). OCD is closely related to hoarding and they can co-occur. Both conditions run in families.

During that time, Angus and I both used retail therapy as a coping mechanism. He’d splash out on books, I’d buy second-hand clothes. We walled ourselves in with purchases that soothed our worry.

Kat says past trauma is closely associated with hoarding, an outward sign of inner turmoil.

Yet hoarding was only identified as a stand-alone disorder in 2013 and there’s still little political will to tackle the issue. The latest figures indicate some 4 million people in the UK suffer from it – a vast number.

Talking to Kat, I begin to grasp that my belongings can feel like proxies for memories and lost parents. But she points out there’s a buzz from relinquishing items, if you feel they’re headed to the right home.

After her consultation, I slowly learn I can feel the same zing of pleasure from selling clothes online as I did from buying them.

This, though, is not a swift process. Kat believes clients should go at a pace that’s comfortable to build up their ‘decluttering muscle’.

Parting with possessions imbued with history is impossibly painful for people like me. But Kat helps me develop ways of giving them a meaningful farewell, such as taking beautiful photos for a curated memories album. Her approach is nothing like those professional clearers with skips. Emotional hoarders like me wouldn’t be able to cope with seeing our goods discarded and trashed.

Our first session lasts half a day and not much leaves the house. Instead, Kat helps Angus and me establish tactics for decluttering and addressing safety. He decided to start in the hall – the bunkbed went straight onto Freecycle – while I felt my wardrobe was more urgent.

Kat cleverly suggests I let less-favoured items go to better showcase true treasure.

‘You and Angus will always be maximalists and that’s fine,’ she says, ‘but you need to free space for things that delight you.’

She praises the one relatively ordered room in the house, our kitchen, for its artworks, hardbacks, plants and Angus’s display of herb jars. I start seeing the process like weeding our garden: I must stop the ivy and briars from overcoming the flowers.

It’s notable that my 17-year-old tidies, prunes and sorts his possessions in the house’s smallest room, fighting back against the anarchy. ‘It’s his coping mechanism,’ says Kat, and I feel slightly ashamed.

Once we reach my bedroom/office eyrie, Kat observes how emotional I am about possessions. Holding a book, scarf or ornament sees me get lost in a reverie of the moment it came into my possession. She deduces my hoarding is largely based on the reassuring power of memories: ‘You’re hoarding your timeline,’ she says, smiling.

She asks if I am a perfectionist, as that can stop people from making decisions in case they make the wrong one. This resonates: I find many simple choices hard, like picking a dish from a menu, or prioritising one social engagement above another.

In my working life, by contrast, I am decisive and efficient.

One of the reasons I dread other people seeing my home is I fear they will lose faith in me as an editor, an occupation which necessitates organisation.

Kat nods when I say this: ‘A lot of people have misconceptions about hoarding. They think it means people are lazy, dirty and chaotic, but it often comes from a perfectionist space.’ As counterintuitive as this sounds, it makes sense to me. I’m terrified of ditching something of value.

It helps explain why my bedroom looks like a jumble sale after a riot. Frocks are on the floor, draped on chairs, bursting out of cupboards and hanging off the window handles, five to a hanger.

Kat rightly identifies that I’ve been getting a ‘dopamine hit’ in my brain’s reward centre every time I buy something, consoling my inner child, who never had new clothes. No matter that I’ll never wear any of my five 1980s taffeta ballgowns, or that to find a particular garment I have to scatter 50 others on the bed.

When she asks where I got a pair of genuine but battered Victorian boots, I go misty recalling buying them in an Oxford junk shop for £4 as a student. They represent authors I love, like the Brontes and George Eliot.

Kat says, in that case, my aim should be to display them properly in a box frame, affording them the status of true treasure.

She then alights on a neon slip dress I bought recently on Vinted: ‘What about this?’ I tell her it was a £9 mistake and she offers to take it and source a new recipient who will love it. I instantly feel less burdened.

Kat normally has three categories for items: keep, give away or repurpose, dispose or recycle. We swiftly deal with some of my least-loved togs (goodbye 1990s Jigsaw skirts), though she won’t try to make me ditch my Westwood.

As we repeat this simple exercise in desire and rejection, item by item, she draws a helpful analogy with my work: it might help to see myself as editing down my wardrobe.

Larger items, like a big dark-wood sideboard in the sitting room, can’t be dealt with until the boxes round it are gone. It was my mother’s, so I don’t want it to disappear with strangers. We strike a compromise where I aim to send it to friends with a big rectory crying out for decent furniture.

Kat helps me identify gloriously realistic decluttering goals. My new aim is to keep my belongings within my control, rather than feeling consumed by the burden of owning them.

When she leaves, I continue sifting, filling three boxes with clothes. Downstairs, Angus clears a large swathe of the hallway.

Even so, we reckon it will take months to get the house in proper, functional order. There’s endless paperwork and I still have our wedding photos to put into albums, a mere 30 years later.

Kat aims to give gentle cheerleading throughout and will make as many visits as we need. I also agree to send regular updates on our progress.

My enthusiasm is a far cry from the despair I felt earlier and I’m getting a buzz from seeing assets uncovered and worthless items dispatched. I may not be the next Mrs Hinch, but I will no longer be tragic Miss Havisham.

Kat’s tips to beat your hoarding habit

Ask why

Loss and trauma are frequently triggers for hoarding. Think about whether such behaviour gives you comfort, security, pleasure in acquisition, or a path to the past.

Once you pinpoint this, you can find replacement coping mechanisms.

Think safety

Try and recognise where your hoarding could cause slips, trips and hazards. Are stairs and walkways clear? Or perhaps exits are blocked. Large quantities of paper, books and magazines can create a significant fire risk.

One step at a time

A room filled with stuff can easily overwhelm you. Choose one small corner and deal with it. Ideally somewhere where it has an instant visual impact, like your hallway or kitchen table, which will encourage you to continue.

Have a decluttering station

Sort possessions on a small table, or a picnic blanket in the garden. You could also consider a friend’s or family member’s house.

Sort your treasure

Gather similar items together. Identify items you truly love and value, then set yourself the task of giving them room to breathe, so treasures can shine.

Seek help

Asking a friend or professional to assist you will bring clarity and support. Look online to find a local support group – the Hoarding UK website has a list of groups. 

Hoarding Disorders UK CIC has links to useful books, guides, resources and helpful podcasts. They also facilitate online support spaces for people or loved ones seeking help and can direct you to local face-to-face support groups.