Gloria Valoris

I started working with people who hoard fifty years ago, as a teenager helping people “who just needed to get organized” when clearly, the problem was much greater than that. Since then, I have helped hundreds of people with serious problems with acquiring and keeping far more than they could ever use.

In 1986 I started the first San Francisco taskforce on hoarding. There was no research on hoarding at that time, not even an agreed-upon term for what to call this phenomenon. With no body of literature or research to guide us, some of our conclusions were wrong (no, hoarding is not usually the result of deprivation) but our essential understanding that hoarding needs a multi-disciplinary approach and that clearing out alone would never solve the problem were correct.

My degrees in Psychology and Counseling and extensive experience with various tension-reduction modalities helped me to understand what was happening with people who hoard. Teaching the Overcome Hoarding and Transform Your Life workshops for City College of San Francisco for five years gave further insight. My workbook for the course became Overcome Hoarding and Transform Your Life: How to Choose Life and Hope Instead of Things which incorporates all the material from the classes and the many insights received from my clients and students.