Anyone else live with a hoarder?

[WhenSheWasBadSheWasHopeful]

Dh is a lovely man and I am very lucky to have him but the hoarding is driving me crazy.

He has the ability to clutter a room within seconds. When we moved into this house the agreement was the loft room is his to use as he pleases (ie fill with useless shit).
He struggles to throw anything away, is a world class procrastinator and seems to see the value in every bit of tat and random item of paper work imaginable. Any hint that I may organise or heaven forbid throw something away is extremely stressful for him.

What really pisses me off is that if we have people round they must not be allowed upstairs incase they see his ever expanding messy hoard. Why is it ok for me and dd to put up with this but others can't be allowed to see it?

Grrr. Anyway we are making small amounts of progress tidying up and he is even ebaying some stuff.

Is anyone else in the same boat?

No, I was never given an ultimatum jeans and maybe it wouldn't have helped if I had been. You bring up an important point that sometimes we do things for each other like support each other through illness. I'm not advocating a compassionless society where anyone needy is chucked on the scrapheap.

Being ill with depression and anxiety obviously did affect my husband. He always was the one to run errands, he had to go alone to things he would have liked my company to, and he choose to go to things he wouldn't otherwise have, so that I didn't miss out because I didn't feel able to go alone.

I'm not saying that it is wrong to be compassionate, patient or love unconditionally. These are lovely qualities. But equally, if I had been making him so miserable that he was unable to enjoy life, if I had been controlling of him, or emotionally abusive I think he would have be right to leave me. The love and respect in our relationship is mutual. I recognised that I had a problem and sought and accepted help to recover. I respected his feelings when he was worried about me and I tried my hardest to go to things he felt were important. He didn't try to quick fix me - as my parents did by taking me to things I wasn't ready for which just made me more avoidant, he gave me the space to recover and knew he couldn't fix me, he could just support me emotionally while I 'fixed' myself and made it clear that if I never got 'better' he loved me anyway.

I hope that I was never toxic to my husband. I felt a burden at times, but I know that I was also giving and supportive of him so it wasn't all one-sided.

Whilst being compassionate is lovely, I think if someone else is making your life horrid, it doesn't really matter if they are ill or not, you can choose whether to live with it. Particuarly if they don't recognise or accept help for the problem.

We wouldn't make a person living with an alcoholic who was abusive, feel guilty for not staying with them to help them through their illness, would we? We accept that just because someone is alcoholic, doesn't give them a free pass to abuse the people round about them. We know that people can't 'fix' an alcoholic, that they have to want help themselves. We know that abusers choose who they are abusive to - generally spouse, children or other family rather than their boss say.

So, these hoarders who get irrationally angry about the suggestion that they should restrict their 'stuff' to certain areas of the home, to allow space for the other members to live in, would they express that anger to their boss, a GP, a policeman? No? What makes them think it is okay to treat their family like that? To make them tread (hopefully not literally) on eggshells?

There is a huge difference between saying to someone "Please don't move my things without asking my permission, it makes me feel anxious when I don't know where my stuff is." and shouting "Don't Touch MY Stuff!" and ranting and raving at them. Demanding that their stuff gets more respect than their family's space gets respected. If there is some compromise about certain rooms/spaces - some allowed to be filled, others not, then the reaction to either being breeched should be the same - but if one side would be scared to remove something from a hoarding room, whilst the hoarder would happily add stuff to the agreed non-hoarded spaces like kids bedrooms/kitchen etc then that seems like there is an imbalance of power, an unequal relationship. One person has respected the hoarder's need for things, while the hoarder has completely disregarded the feelings of the family member who needs space.

If the hoarding behaviour can't be contained and keeps breeching the boundaries of the other person, I don't think its unreasonable to suggest that the other person should point out the problem and ask the hoarder to get help to resolve it because they can't live that way.

I think the problem of it 'sort of sneaking up on you' is very real, and needs to be acknowledged.

I think a common response from 'outsiders' to the problem is 'I couldn't live like this' and 'how did you let it get like that in the first place' (hard not to read blame into that one, which doesn't help).

It does creep up on you. Over years. You don't (usually) move in with someone whose house is rammed to the rafters with heaps of junk. You'd be able to SEE that problem upfront.

Early hoarding tendencies can look like just being a bit messy, or being a collector. Or someone who is storing, temporarily, a few boxes that they got when their parents cleaned out an attic, or something left over from the last place they moved that was in the garage but they haven't quite found a home for it yet.

And you accomodate it to some degree. There's always a bit of give and take in cohabiting - 'I like things tidy, he doesn't see the mess, blah blah.' Then, like me, the resentment about having to tidy up after/for them kicks in, so you stop doing it, and it spreads unchecked. And if you are always being told someone will get round to doing something, or will tackle it when they are less busy, you have at some point to tell them you don't believe them. And you will make decisions for them it they won't do it themselves. You need to be tough to deal with that.

And you are dealing with people WHO DO NOT THINK THEY HAVE A PROBLEM. I think the only time my partner has even considered having to take control of his possessions is when I have totally lost the plot, screamed and sobbed at him like a madwoman, and shocked him (and me). As in 'christ, if she's THAT mental about it, maybe something is a bit wrong....'

I do agree that it is something that ends relationships. With two very small children, I am not about to leave my partner over this, especially given the other aspects of family life which he is good at. But I cannot imagine living out the rest of my life in an environment which feels like a constant overwhelming battle, and in a house where people cannot come, or have to stay in one room if they do.

It may seem like an ultimatium, but what else can they do, live in a smaller and smaller bit of the house in the hope that one day the person will recognise there is a problem and get help?

I don't think that will be kind to either of them.

ah, x post -

Spirited, thank you for your post - being respectful, I don't think you understand hoarding. I'm thinking here of the way you talk about having negotiated a hoarding 'agreement', like 'you can hoard in that room but nowhere else.' That's like saying to an alcoholic, 'okay, you can get steaming drunk on the first thursday of the month, but no other time.' Do you think that would work?

Hoarding is a process, and an addiction, and it isn't controllable without a LOT of effort, and it doesn't have boundaries.

The poster upthread who said that if they moved to a bigger house, her husband would fill it, and if they won the lottery and moved to a mansion, he would gradually fill it over some years, has got it in a nutshell.

And a hoarder saying nicely 'please don't move my things without my permission, it makes me anxious' is the speech of someone who recognises they have a problem. Not the panicky agressive knee jerk of someone who feels threatened by what THEY feel is unreasonable behaviour. If my partner accepted that sorting and throwing stuff away made him anxious, we'd be getting somewhere.

PS

"I felt a burden at times but I also know that I was giving and supportive of him so it wasn't all onesided."

You are talking about your own life with agoraphobia here, and the effect it had on your partner - and you're right, the problem for a lot of people living with partners with mental health or addiction issues is that it isn't all 'onesided.' A relationship that is WHOLLY abusive, or exploitative, or when one partner has to do everything to support a partner with a problem, are a different kettle of fish.

You also say it was helpful your partner saying that he loved you anyway even if you never got 'better.' That's sort of the opposite of an ultimatum, isn't it? What would you do if your partner was a hoarder who never 'got better'?

jeans I should maybe make it clear that just because I think that you shouldn't have to put up with it, it doesn't mean I would blame you for the situation.

Obviously everyone has their own opinions on when being compassionate and supportive of a partner becomes enabling. For me, I think it would be based on whether I felt my partner respected and supported my needs (and where needs are in conflict is prepared to compromise and/or seek help) and whether I thought I could live with the situation if it never improved.

I couldn't do it. Live with a hoarder, I mean. I see it as an addiction like gambling or drugs.

I once heard a recovering crack addict tell the story of the time he went on a binge two days before Christmas. He sold his wedding ring to the drug dealer for one rock, then the keys to his car for another, and then went home long enough to grab the kids' Christmas presents, and sold those, too. On the night of Christmas eve, so his kids woke up to nothing under the tree.

As far as I'm concerned, making your family live in a hoard is as selfish and damaging as that. I couldn't stay.

I think my previous post was too harsh. I realise there are hoarders on this thread, and it's obvious that they are working on the issue.

Guh, sorry, I was busy and I just got back.

Throwing stuff away when a hoarder's back is turned does not work and it never will, it just exacerbates things. I can trace part of my problem back to my mother getting angry with me for having an untidy room and throwing away all of my toys except for my teddy and my walkman. She threatened to do it again multiple times over the years, and after I moved out she often said she wanted to take a match to my house and burn everything inside. Once I got free of her I was like 'Haha! Keep ALL the stuff!'

Hoarding has its roots primarily in OCD. I simply replaced the hoarding compulsion with other, less obvious compulsions. It's not great either, but I'm okay with it.

Other causes could be attachment disorders (insecurity in childhood leading to fixation on objects) or depression. Once you figure that part out , you start the cleanup.

It is VITAL that you have the hoarder sort out his own property, even if it takes weeks. Get three large boxes, label them KEEP, DONATE and SAVE and try and make the SAVE box smaller than the other two. Hoarders like to think their hoard is going to be useful to someone else so encourage donating, big time.

Switching to an online hoard is useful. If he has a lot of books, get a Kindle and hoard ebooks on the computer. Hoard info, films and TV shows on External Hard Drives. Get him onto a forum where he can interact and make connections with other people so he can have something to focus on, and all the info he accumulates there will be online.

Lastly, get him a hobby. Hoarders tend to be creative types who build up a lot of hobby supplies (the two things I hoard now, but gently, are fabric and vintage clothes) so a creative hobby that takes him out of the house is more useful. Pottery classes or glasswork, something that doesn't involve building a workshop in the house.

I know it's hard, but try to be supportive. It's difficult to understand it unless you've been there.

As far as I'm concerned, making your family live in a hoard is as selfish and damaging as that. I couldn't stay

If the relationship were on an equal footing, spouse to spouse, then to some extent, neither would anybody else.

But it doesn't appear to work like that all that often. A dependance creeps in. As a teenager I felt responsible for my mother, for containing the hoard, for slowing down the incoming, speeding up the outgoing, and hiding it. The hiding it was important. To save her from judgement, shame and legal consequences.

I've seen that replicated in couple relationships. Where the non hoarding spouse overtime becomes worn out from the inexorable overtaking of their life on so many levels, and they become the gatekeeper, the White Knight, the smoother, the last defence against being found dead buried under collapsed piles of crap, or a smouldering corpse that was once somebody you loved who had no hope of escape when a fire broke out.

And unlike other addictions there isn't the same social sanction as there is for alcohol, gambling or drug addictions. There is a very real pressure externally to "sort it out", "get him/her help", "deal with the hoard". Walking away, as I have learned, can cause as much damage to your self image as staying. Becuase having spent so long feeling responsible, you have no defence stratagy when the hoard leaks to the point of visible and the world and its mother looks at you askance saying "how could you let him/her live like that ?".

Parents I think have a worse dilemma to deal with than I did. Becuase their children will likely be exposed to the hoard and its associated behavoirs without their "non hoarder" presense in terms of limit setting and brake power.

Or social services will intervene and the children won't be allowed in the hoarding parent's home causing them very real grief. Becuase they aren't stupid. They see a parent drowning, it looks like nobody is helping and they can take that on their own shoulders emotionally, if not physically.

And the truth, they aren't wrong. Nobody is helping. Leave a gambler, an addict of drink or drugs and you can push for help and services to be sent their way.

The help for hoarders is very very limited. The people who love them are often the only defence against them actually drowning (to the point of life changing injury or death) in their stuff.

It's not easy to walk away under those circumstances.

And even if you do, it's not over.

I feel like Damacles' sword is hanging over my head. Just waiting for the day she is found buried under The Hoard 2.0, and the entire commenting public on the Daily Mail et al sucks their teeth and judges me a heartless selfish bitch on wheels. And I'll believe them. Becuase a large part of me thinks they are right.

OP thankyou so much for starting this thread -really helpful insights.

Can anyone recommend specific professional declutterers/counsellors?

cross posted again. Sorry!

Yes, I see what you mean about the hoarding not being controllable (by either the hoarder or by compromise with the spouse). I didn't really think it was - I was mentioning that because people said that they had tried to contain it and it had spilled out of the agreed areas. I suppose I was pointing out how very unreasonable they were being in comparison to how couples who treat each other respectfully would act. I realise now that was not helpful, you already know the behaviour of hoarders is unreasonable!

Yes, my husband's unconditional acceptance of who I am, and the fact I was deblitated by agoraphobia is a kind of anti-ultimatum. He decided he could live with the situation as it was. Maybe he could have lived with it if I had gotten worse and refused to go out even with him. My DH knew that I was very aware of my problem though, I didn't make excuses or blame him for wanting to go out so often.

The difficulty with something like hoarding is that it staying the same or getting worse could make a home difficult/impossible to live in normally. Its not something that could be ignored indefinately, is it?

My reference to boundaries wasn't so much about the hoarder, it was about the partner's boundaries. How much hoarding can they live with before they feel their life is so severly affected by it that they have to live seperately?

What a sad sad thread :(
I went to school with a girl whose mum was a hoarder....bits of paper from 40 years ago, newspaper cuttings...piles of random crap.
She couldn't ask anyone back to her home...I was one of the few who saw it.
I have therefore seen firsthand the damage it does to the dc - for any of you suffering or living with sufferers...please get help.

Excellent thread this - it is giving me a lot of insight into my DP and his parents.

I was joking at the weekend he needs Hoarders Anonymous BUT HE DOES!! I am in the nice position of having my own tidy minimalist home near to his. We would love to live together but there is no room for me or my things. And I am not taking on The Hoard as a challenge.

So what is the ideal plan?

1. get him to recognise his behaviour is dysfunctional (I'm there!)
2. work out the underlying issues causing it
3. Agree a plan that manages his Hoard so we can move to a shared property. I rather like the idea of zones for each of us. My bit, his bit, and public mess free areas for visitors like the bathroom kitchen and living room. With yellow and black hazard tape to prevent him bring his stuff into other areas!

Or I just stay in my own place and we visit each other.

Badvoc while it is sad don't forget for those of us who grew up with hoarders it is normal. So we don't see what you see. We just struggle to manage our things. If only we had enough time or enough shelves or enough spare rooms/garages then everything would be organised. Except that never happens!

I rather like the idea of zones for each of us

Hoards have a very "liquid" quality. They leak.

And space, clear surfaces, have a magnetic quality.

You might be able to save both of you future pain by seeing if he would be willing to acknowledge there is an issue and work on it with professional support (councelling etc) to the point where the hoard is gone and he is maintaining consistently over time ..... before you consider moving in together.

You might be able to maintain the veetoed zones. But it would not be without a price. It's hard work being Queen Canute. And the Sea usually isn't often too happy about the constant tussling, ultimatums and restraint demanded either.

Lemon...I can assure you my friend saw it and knew it wasn't normal.
She is not a hoarder and neither are her brothers.
I don't think it follows hoarder parent = hoarder child.

carpe, you should write the book. Seriously.

And i agree about the judgement on partners/children of hoarders. It has cropped up on this thread - 'how could you let it get like that? I couldn't live with it.' etc.

It is also seen as a MORAL failing - just an extension if slovenliness - in the way that other disorders are not. Do we really see hoarding as a mental health problem on a par with agoraphobia? spiritedwolf - you do see that hoarding has a finite 'end', where eventually possessions take over a house completely and effectively push the occupants out - but surely agoraphobia can reach a point where alll semblance of normal life is lost, the sufferer never leaves the house, and life for the partner becomes an extreme, if not intolerable, situation?

I think too that because it is domestic mess - inside a house, our living space - then assumptions about gender roles come into it, without people necessarily being aware of it. I face 2 frustrations - I cannot organise and keep the creeping hoardy mess at bay, and I also feel that when (some, not all) people come round, they register the clutter and mess, and failure to keep on top of it is laid at my door.

i don't feel that the children of hoarders become hoarders, BUT it has some effect. Very few things in my parents' house have a home. Although my father was not then a hoarder in the way that he is now (when I was growin up, I mean), surfaces were filled with random collections of stuff. Paper, jewellery, cutlery, toys, coins etc. My mother didn't mind throwing things out, but she could never find anything.I struggle with this in my own home now - HOW to organise things, how to remember where they are and to keep on top of a 'system'. C

XH was a hoarder (among many other jolly characteristics). Nothing could be thrown away. He threw a huge wobbly when I put some clothes in the charity hopper, including a leather jacket that was past its wear-by date, because he had been planning to, er, cut it up and make book covers with it? We had garage tools under the dining table because he was afraid they would get stolen if left in the garage (how about putting a door on the garage then, I suggested. Don't be silly, he said). Shortly before we split up he finally got a job (!), but alas, it was for a company clearing council flats after eviction, and instead of taking sacks of people's household effects down the dump... well, you get the picture. He even brought home a used pregnancy testing kit once. And a bag full of little girls' clothes, just in case any of our sons grew up and had daughters eventually and didn't have any money to buy them new clothes. Plus a pair of girl's skinny jeans covered with glitter - ok, he found a use for those - he wore them.

He was absolutely livid when, as part of the pre-sale house tidying process, I threw out a massive collection of large sacks full of supermarket plastic bags, festering against the house under what used to be a beautiful bay window. They would have been useful for keeping stuff in! I pointed out that said bags had been kept outside in the garden over the winter and were now full of mud and slugs, but it didn't calm him down. (Not that I was interested in calming him down at that point; we were well over, for more reasons than two.)

I am sure XH had depression, but as he would never admit it and would die rather than see a counsellor, I'm the one who ended up on ADs, which gave him the chance to tell the boys gleefully that "mother is a psycho".

No, I don't know how to live with a hoarder. It wasn't living, it was kind of existing (though obviously for more reasons than just the clutter). Either LTB or invest in a blowtorch and earplugs, is my harsh advice.

How do we know it's a compulsion and not just being bloody selfish and too stubborn to tidy up a very obvious mess?

There are people who can come to your home and help you organise and suggest storage solutions.

It is also seen as a MORAL failing - just an extension if slovenliness - in the way that other disorders are not.

Yes. That by extension if the other family members had decent standards of hygene/tidyness...it wouldn't, couldn't have happened. That in some way they are complicit.

And that is probably where the shame motivates internally to become the Hider in Chief. I think eventually the Hoard hiding is as much about judgement proofing yourself as the relation of a person who hoards, as it is about protecting from judgement the person who hoards.

Shame is such a negative force. What little energy that remains stands a poor chance against great waves of despising yourself for not being able to do what other people see as "just".

"Just" throw it away.
"Just" tell them to stop
"Just" don't let them bring more stuff in

Intellectually I know "Just" statements were as acheivable as "just" find a magic wand and spirnkle fairy dust everywhere and make whatever trauma happened to them undone, and they can be whole and unharmed again.

But when I hear or read them..emotionally I feel two inches tall in face of other people's confidence that it is a question of molehill, and not the climbing of Mount Everest in ballet slippers that I lived.

How do we know it's a compulsion and not just being bloody selfish and too stubborn to tidy up a very obvious mess?

A lazy stubborn git will let you clean and tidy around them, sort and chuck their crap, organise their nice stuff and still act like they did you a favour.

A person who has a compulsion to hoard....not so much.

One of the more eyewateringly obvious examples for me was the "adopt stuff" aspect.

I could not even throw anything of mine away. It would get fished out of the bin, "rescued" and kept as hers. I didn't even have the right to dispose of my stuff that had no sentimental (or other) value for me, becuase she would invest "by proxy" sentimental (or other) value into the object and ... adopt it as part of the Hoard.

A person who hoards can be selfish, stroppy, stubborn, ouright abusive, manipulative and ..heartless. And those behavoirs cause all sorts of problems in their own right. But the behavoirs are selected in the main for their ability to defend the hoard, rather than being the cause of the hoard.

See what I mean ?

I kind of picture XH as like a rat making a cosy nest out of old shredded paper and stuff.

My friend and I run a professional decluttering business. We are not encouraged to work with hoarders unless they have worked with a phsycologist first. You could clear the house but the original problem is still there so they will just carry on as before because the problems that caused the hoarding are still there.

If you or your partners thought they had mental health issues, do you think they would seriously think about letting things go or even get help.