Growing up, Avis Cardella loved to shop. “I was very into fashion magazines and liked to go shopping with my mom as a teenager,” Cardella, now 60, says. “Fashion was something that was important to me, and shopping was something I truly enjoyed.” She later parlayed her love of fashion into a career as a model, then a stylist, and later a fashion writer and editor.
When Cardella was in her late twenties and working in fashion media in New York City, her mother passed away very suddenly. “I started using shopping as a coping mechanism to avoid my grief,” she says. “Part of it was that shopping was something I used to do with my mom, and it reminded me of her. But ultimately it became this crutch in my life, and a way to avoid confronting my emotions.”
According to Terrence Shulman, a certified counselor and founder of the Shulman Center for Compulsive Theft, Spending, and Hoarding in Franklin, Michigan, shopping often “becomes compulsive when it becomes a way to deal with stress, or loss, and it can become very hard to control.”
First a Rush, Then a Crash
In her book Spent: Memoirs of a Shopping Addict, Cardella explains that between ages 28 and 42, she went shopping (and bought something) nearly every day. “I liked to buy clothing, accessories, skin-care stuff, and makeup,” she says. “Working in fashion was the perfect foil, because I used my career as an excuse.” This was in the 1990s and early 2000s, when the idea that there was such a thing as “too much” shopping wasn’t really taken seriously, especially among people in the fashion world, Cardella says. She was also living with her then-fiance, “who made quite a bit of money,” in a relatively large apartment in Manhattan, so she could afford to buy and house her purchases.
“The thing was, I wasn’t enjoying any of them at all,” Cardella says. Slowly, she began to realize that something was wrong. “One day I was in Barney’s, buying a whole bunch of expensive underwear. It was almost an out-of-body experience, a physical high that I felt when I was buying all of it. And then as soon as I walked out of the shop, I crashed and I wanted to throw it all away,” she explains.
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This feeling of getting a rush while purchasing something and then feeling bad soon after is common among compulsive shoppers, says Carrie Rattle, an accredited financial counselor who lives in the New York City area and runs the program Stopping Overshopping. The program was created by the late April Benson, PhD, a psychologist who specialized in treating compulsive buying disorders. “Both normal shoppers and overshoppers can enjoy shopping in the moment, but overshoppers feel an aftershock either shortly or soon after their shopping,” Rattle says.
For years, Cardella went on buying things for the immediate high, then feeling overwhelmed by feelings of guilt and disgust soon afterwards. “I didn’t know how to address the problem, and if I ever mentioned it to someone, it wasn’t taken seriously.”
Eventually, a Reckoning
Although the people around Cardella may not have recognized her shopping habits as problematic, the concept of shopping addiction has been around since the early 1900s. People often use “shopping addiction” interchangeably with the terms “compulsive shopping,” “compulsive buying,” “overshopping,” and “uncontrolled buying.”
In her early forties, her shopping addiction — and the intense, unacknowledged grief over her mother’s death that the addiction was masking —caught up with her. “I started to screw up other things in my life,” Cardella says. “I left my relationship and the luxurious lifestyle that it brought me, and I was working as a freelance writer. And because of my shopping, I racked up significant credit card debt.” She was getting frequent phone calls from credit card companies to whom she owed huge sums of money at very high interest rates, and she didn’t know what to do.
This is fairly common, according to Shulman, who says that when compulsive shopping spirals out of control, it can create a huge strain on relationships, as well as serious money problems, and sometimes legal problems related to debt.
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“I eventually made the connection that my shopping addiction stemmed from me not dealing with my grief about my mother,” Cardella says. “But before I could address that, the first thing I had to do was work on getting out of credit card debt.” She found a credit counseling agency that offered a very structured program.Essentially, she handed over her debt to them, and in exchange had to pay them a fixed amount of money every month. “If you failed to give them that amount of money, you got kicked out of the program, so that was my incentive to keep going,” she says. Thanks to the program, she paid off her debt within a couple of years.
Overcoming Debt and Grief
Debt repayment and financial education are two important pieces in overcoming shopping addiction, Rattle says. But it’s also crucial to address whatever led to these behaviors in the first place.
“What was more challenging than getting out of debt was the emotional aspect of my shopping addiction,” she says. “There’s no easy way out, you have to confront yourself.” Cardella didn’t go to therapy at the time, because she says she couldn’t find therapists who were treating shopping addiction as a serious issue. “I tried to do my own therapy,” she says. “I went back and analyzed my familial relationships, my father and two brothers, and how we all dealt with my mother’s tragic death. I realized that coping with that was the way to move forward, and it was.”
Although many mental health care providers today do recognize and treat compulsive buying as a behavioral problem, it’s not included as a diagnosable disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). In a 2021 statement, the American Psychological Association (APA) said it’s still unclear how to classify shopping addiction, so there is no standard treatment. The APA also noted that shopping addiction often happens alongside other mental health problems, like anxiety, impulsive behavior, and substance abuse, and that the approach of therapy should be to address both the specific compulsive behaviors, and the underlying issues that may be contributing to them. Rattle says that working with a mental health professional who can offer behavioral therapy is helpful, and that psychiatric medication might be a part of someone’s treatment if there are co-occurring mental health disorders like depression, anxiety, orbipolar disorder.
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Soon after healing from her shopping addiction, Cardella moved to London, married a man she had known in the past, and started living what felt like an entirely different life, free from the compulsion to shop. Now, she lives outside of Paris and works as a writer and novelist. “I’m still someone who’s attracted to certain things, but I don’t feel the need to shop all the time,” she says. “I actually enjoy shopping again. I dealt with the feelings of emptiness that shopping used to mask, and I don’t need to have things to build a sense of self.”
