Living with a hoarder support thread

[WhenSheWasBadSheWasHorrid]

Hi I'm not sure if anyone else would be interested but I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Dh is a hoarder. Not tv worthy but he definitely is an it requires managing. His "room" is the attic. Haven't been up there for years. He doesn't use it other than storing crap and I know he's never cleaned it.
I'm happy for the attic to remain in this state but it's starting to creep down the attic stairs and onto the landing.

He's promised to tackle it (in his own sweet time). I just wondered if anyone else has to deal with hoarders.

He's otherwise great and I'm convinced his hoarding is actually a problem with his brain (learnt and maybe some genetic factors). His family are all awful hoarders.

Anyone else feel like venting about their hoarder partners?

When a hoarder dies, why do people take extensive lengths of time to clear the hoard?

Because, as has been said, that's how long it takes. DM was one who had jars of money stashed away, plus envelopes with £5 and £10 notes in them. So we had to go through the hoards of Christmas and Birthday cards going back forever just to make sure that there weren't such gifts tucked away. Other things were share certificates which we needed to transfer the shares or redeem them, insurance policies which could be cashed in and so on. One or two things were interesting and worth keeping, I thought e.g. DM's war time identity card. I have that now in a box of keepsakes.

It just takes, ages and ages. I keep telling DH that, that his hoarding habit is just going to make work for his children. With DM it was to do with having a rather domineering mother. DH - I don't know exactly - again I think to do with his mother - who is one who tends to shove things in drawers.

I get stressed and emotional about DH's hoard now (I didn't used to b, but the battles rage on and the problems mount). I dread to think what I'd be like trying to 'simply' skip it all while recently bereaved.

It represents a lot of waste, frustration and futility to me.

Then, as pp said, there's the practical issue of sifting the wheat from the tonnes of chaff.

I'm worried about something happening and tipping him into full on hoarding mode

If I could go back, to the event which caused mum to go from "having hoarding tendencies" to "being a full on, incurable hoarder" and manage her reaction to the trigger, by stopping her pain being manifested primarily via the hoard, it might have turned out differently.

But I didn't even know what she was. Let alone realise that a critical, "no going back" tipping point was right there in front of us. Even if I had, I didn't have the tools, or the authority to stamp my foot down and hold it fast. And I don't know that she would have let me even if I had been equipped.

But I do have a haunted feeling that knowing when the trigger happened, if I had managed it differently, I could have saved her from this being the most dominant aspect of her life.

I do understand that your average teenager is just not equipped to recognise and deal with the identification and management of a hoarding trigger. And even if I had been, there's no guarentee I could have pulled it off.

But I still feel ...guilty for want of a better word..that I found out what I should have done, far far too late. It could have been different. We could have all been very different people, with a very different relationship. With a lot less emotional (not to mention physical) baggage.

iPost, it doesn't matter whether it's hoarding or any other mental health issue, it is not your fault. It's too much to expect a child to be responsible for their parent's mental health, to stage interventions or whatever, to manage the condition, and basically to have the maturity of someone twice their age plus the benefits of hindsight. And for these purposes, a teenager is a child.

When a hoarder dies, why do people take extensive lengths of time to clear the hoard?

My mother's not dead, but our realtionship died when she packed up her hoard (had lost her house), took out a loan she couldn't afford and sent the whole lot, in an enormous shipping container ... to my home.

(To be fair, we bought this house expressly so she could move in with us, when I found out she was going to lose hers. So I was expecting her to bring some stuff. And some crap. But I had been VERY clear the whole hoard couldn't come and live with us. Given that we had been giving her money in the interim, it never occurred to me she'd go around the expense barrier of a huge international move... by taking on more debt.)

She walked out after a few months (mucho tension, The Hoard contributed rather a lot of it)

Left the hoard for me to take care of.

And I murdered it in three days. Almost no sleep. Barely any food. Just work. Wouldn't let anybody else help. Made calls and let anybody local fall on the good, well stored stuff like locusts. Dragged bags and bags and bags of what had become rubbish 27 meters each, and paid for a special council pick up for the tip.

What I learned from doing it fast was slaying the hoard can also be an act of working through your relationship with the hoarder in some ways. Even if you don't want it to be.

I attacked the hoard as a proxy for attacking my mother. I poured all my rage and grief for the mum I used to have, into the destruction of it. And got stuck there.

It would have been better to take far more time than your average person would consider necessary, to allow the emotions to percolate, evolve and reduce alongside the slowly dissapating volume of stuff.

Next time I'll take it slow. She has been diagnosed with cancer. Is delaying treatment so she can visit people, to ward off them trying to visit her. So I've been thinking about how I'll slay the final hoard a lot recently.

The final time I'm going to aim for it to be an act of finally letting the mum I used to have go. Which will mean slowing it down long enough for that to happen.

I lived with a hoarder DP for three years, and we broke up over it eventually. It started off very slowly, but by the end of the relationship we had goat trails throughout the house, piles of boxes everywhere including up the stairs and a mouse infestation. My stuff became confined to one small corner of a shared bedroom and he was so ashamed about having visitors around or of anyone seeing the state of the place that he would break down and sob and beg me not to invite anyone in. He was ashamed about how bad it was and how it looked to others, but he was willing to force me to live like that and use emotional blackmail and verbal aggression to shut me down when I tried to discuss it or make changes. I agree with a previous poster that it represented some sort of security for him.

Eventually I had to leave because it was affecting my mental health. He promised to change and sort it out so many times after I had been reduced to tears but only ever made a token gesture. I used to dread going home. After I left he pestered me with endless promises to change, but I had heard it all before and could not spend my life like that. I wanted a nice clean home (no mice!) with my own stuff around me and to be able to invite friends around. The tiny, clean, minimalist flat I moved to felt like heaven after that, and I still feel so sad when I think about that time in my life, I lost a lot of friends and spent most of it desperately unhappy.

it is not your fault. It's too much to expect a child to be responsible for their parent's mental health

I know. On a logical level, I really do. I look at my teen and know the reality of my former limits by seeing his in the flesh, in real time.

But I think Listpad's post and many others have reinterred a commonality in many co-hoard dwellers' reality. Guilt works.

It is a powerful, accessible tool in the defensive measures required to keep the hoard safe from "harm". Which is probably why it is so commonly used to keep family in line about not talking about the hoard, let alone doing anything to it.

And if you are exposed to it long enough, hard enough it can become a reflex response to the hoard, its existence, your failure to prevent/get rid of it, even to the extent that even after a hoarder dies some people can get racked with guilt as they start the task of clearing their inheritance.

A whole industry has sprung up around hoarding. (Some of it probably quite effective, some of it... not so much. There seemed to be a lot of "band wagon" jumping at one point and I'm not convinced every "expert" is quite as well informed as they believe themselves to be.) But so far, a lot less work has been done on understanding what the other buried people need, let alone any real focus on trying to undo their damage.

We tend to be left to our own devices, to try and untangle the configuration of who we have become.

And it all gets a bit like the blind leading the blind. So we bumble and bump around a lot in the dark, dangling emotional baggage we don't deserve, but don't know how to put down.

We probably could do with some kind of Al-anon style of thing. When I read people talking about an addicted parent, or partner there are differences in the experience, but I feel like there are some notable similarities too.

reiterated not reinterred.

Interesting were it a Freudian slip, but was just the iPad doing its best to cope with my sometimes rather exotic attempts at spelling.

my dp is naturally a hoarder.

for years he hoarded, having an office in every home, and destroying it, you couldn't see the walls or floor, it stank, it was awful. when we bought outer first home he destroyed the second bedroom in less than a month. it broke my heart. we spent £10k converting our garage into an office for him and in the end he couldn't get in there, there was so much stuff (i'm crying now just thinking about it) he'd go out and buy stuff and never fucking use it and it was a waste of money and it was destroying our marriage.

i am the opposite. almost no emotional attachment to stuff. dp looked on in horror when we moved and i threw out the moses basket (£15 asda) and other baby items, he couldn't understand my cold hearted behaviour. i couldn't see the practical reason to keep it.

i came home one day and he'd brought all the stuff from the garage into the house, wrecked the carpet, and was in an almost frenzy about it. i knew i couldn't live like that any more. it was having such a negative impact on my life and mental state. he's go nuts if i moved dangerous stuff out of reac of the children even, we couldn't sit on the sofa, i couldn't stay in but if i went out i'd spend the whole time terrified of what i'd come back to. he worked for himself and from home and managed to earn well during this time. he'd insist he needed it all for work. i was going to leave him. i packed a bag, got all my documents together and planned to go to my mums.

then he went away with work, and in a last ditch attempt to save my marriage i got a skip and i emptied the garage, i went through it all, i kept 2 boxes of genuinely useful stuff and the rest went. i repainted (he wrote on the walls, gaffer taped stuff over the windows etc) and cleaned the fuck out of that garage. it took 4 full days and an 8 yard skip. when he came back he was mad, but after the initial screaming he admitted he felt relieved, that the huge mount of unsortable shit was sorted and manageable.

he's still a hoarder by design but i don't think he wants to be. he just sees a use for everything. he'll say 'oh keep that, we might need it one day' and i say things like 'if we ever need it i'll buy you another!' i'm pretty sure he's mentally hoarding a list of all the things i'm going to buy him instead.... but i can live with that.

occasionally we get into an argument and it'll come up and i have to remind him how awful it was, how his wife nearly left him, how we couldn't use 2 rooms in our house. and he admits it wasn't right and it was dangerous for the kids etc, but i think he misses his hoard. he couldn't tell u what was in it tho. he's never needed something and said 'oh i had one of those if only u hadn't binned it'

i've never told anyone in RL... it makes me so sad thinking about it... i hope you're ok OP (and others) it's so so hard to live with.

tata can't believe you threw out the hoard really seriously impressed.
Interesting that he had a complete fit but then felt relieved.

Creeping back in and seeing if this thread can be revived.

DP and I are still slowly discussing how we could live together. There was a massive breakthrough last week, he cleared enough space for me to stay overnight at his. Clear bed, clean sheets and space to walk around the bed. Given that he was woken up a few weeks ago by a box falling on him during the night, I am pretty impressed by that progress. I had said to him about 4 weeks in advance, that it would be so much easier for me to stay at his that night, so he has plenty of notice to mentally and practically prepare (although was still up till 2am the night before sorting stuff!). We had a wonderful weekend together including staying over at his place for one night.

However. His Dad had a word with me saying that he really is reaching breaking point and that DP really has to move out. I lightheartedly joked about it being an ongoing negotiation, but his Dad got quite serious and said he was worried that one day they would have a blowout about it and he'd end up throwing him out in the midst of an argument.

I haven't told DP what his Dad said to me yet. They don't really talk to each other about this kind of thing. DP is over at mine tonight and I think I should raise the matter, strike whilst the iron is hot kind of thing.

His dad is giving you a very clear indication of the reality of living with a hoarder.

I would say that the fact he cleared some of the hoard in order for you to stay over and after it fell on him is not any real progress since with hoarding the real problem is never the actual hoard, it is the psychological problem that causes the hoarding.

You need to be very careful here because if his dad kicks him out he is going to expect to move in with you.

Just to be clear - progress would be him taking steps to tackle the psychological problem. Tinkering round the edges of the hoard, the hoard waning (it will wax again) is neither here nor there.

Not living with partner but he is a collector of historical artifacts (apparently they are worth money) but has other 'stuff' too. They are everywhere in his house. I really can't see how we could ever live together. I just see all that kind of stuff as 'dust collectors' and can't see the point of just keeping stuff like that. I know it would drive me mad.

Who - if he is a hoarder and you are dating rather than living together/married/kids the only advice I would give is to run away very fast I am afraid.

It is sad because it is a mental health problem really but an incredibly difficult one to make progress with and one that can have an absolutely extraordinarily negative effect on the people who live with the hoarder.

Although dh would deny it he's a bit of a hoarder and so am I and we have a 4 bedroom house to go at Plus loft and garage.
Don't get me wrong, it's clean, neat and tidy in here as I couldn't live any other way but we have a lot of stuff.

I've used this month to declutter and my cupboards are breathing a lot easier. He's not even started on his stuff and we get rewired in 4 weeks.

We have a lot of floor to ceiling storage otherwise we'd never get in the front door!.
Last year I took 60 dresses to the charity shops. This year, I've taken tops, t shirts, trousers , skirts , shoes.Yesterday was jumpers and coats.
It's hardly made a dent.
When I the house is all done, I'm going to go through my clothes again. And try not to buy so many this year.

That and keep out of the charity shops!

I still don't know what to do with mums lladro and my aunts as well.
There's a full Royal doulton dinner service, another china tea set, a box full of bunnykins pottery.
All in boxes in the spare room under the. Bed.

I don't want to part with it or display it so am a bit stuck with it.
Some of the lladro is 30 years old it just not my taste. I'm thinking of maybe an auction house and setting up bank accounts for grandchildren with proceeds.
I don't live near antique shops.

This is an interesting thread

My mother is a hoarder and she actually managed to learn how to control it. It took years and years and a house move to really make this happen and some very horrible and difficult discussions to make her take stock of her life and choices. I did at one point say it was selfish to leave my family the legacy of throwing all her crap into multiple skips when she has died, why would you put that extra burden on us all? Also how would we know what was actually special? How would anyone care for her in a house of horrors? She didn't think she was important and this stuff made her feel secure.

She started hoarding when she got divorced and along with collecting cats, it turned rank and dusty and smelly and disgusting along with all the hoarded, broken, unwanted items. She also would feel the urge to get rid of things and make piles but then just leave the piles there for years.

She had to move for mobility reasons and I told her that if she did not cull the hoard down and get some help for her emotional issues I woule not visit her again ever.

a lot of her hoard was related to keeping her fathers memories alive which I understand but it's not a memory if it's in a dusty box under a bed in fact IMO it's disrespecting their memory to lock random belongings in a box you never look at that no one benefits from just so you can lie to yourself you feel 'connected' to that person. It's a strange way of grieving and not what my grandad would have wanted, you know, stacks of newspapers from 1992 causing his family to be unhappy.

So far, so good with the hoarding but this was about her letting go or acknowledging the issues, not just letting go of the items.

I feel really anxious when I have accumulated things, I do throw a lot away and have virtually nothing that is special or meaningful to me, it's all just useful.

There's no doubt a house move saved me. I moved from a big one bed flat to rent a room in a friends house and stuff had to go. I filled up one and a half of those giant metal council wheelie bins with my useless shit possessions. That doesn't even count the literal van full of stuff that went to the charity shop.

I still can't believe how painful it was, but yet how relieving at the same time. I now (deliberately) live in a studio flat, which means I have to get rid of stuff periodically or I can't move in the place.

Marie Kondo has been my saviour. The 3 second thing has been transformational, and if anything I think I've gone too far the other way. I think that, but I've never been in the position of actually needing any of the shit I've thrown away.

I've noticed that books seem to be the last acceptable thing to hoard. So many of my friends were amazed at the amount of stuff I threw away, but horrified that I'd got rid of my book collection. So many people have book cases full of books they never read as some kind of intellectual wank fodder.

The fear of being a hoarder like someone off the telly is one of the main things that keeps me in line.

I understand your point about the underlying problem, Offred, and your feelings about attempting a relationship with someone with hoarding disorder, given your experiences.

I do feel the weekend was progress though - previously DP was not comfortable for me to even be in that room, let alone stay over in it.

I do envision a gradual move being used as a filter to sort through things. We have had discussions about respecting the people you share living space with and I point out specific instances when I feel he is not respecting his Dad's space.

I think I'm going to tell him what his Dad said tonight. I think he'll say he doesn't want to talk about it and it makes him feel uncomfortable. It makes me bloody uncomfortable too!

If he doesn't respect his dad's space, even if he clears the current hoard to move, without actual therapy to look at the reasons for the hoard it will just creep back in to your house IMO.

Getting rid of things from the hoard is only progress if it is associated with some kind of psychological progress re the relationship with the hoard. Moving some things can just be 'oh I will have to sacrifice this bit of the hoard, for now, in order to save the overall hoard' If it is that thinking rather than 'I really don't need this hoard anymore' it hasn't helped. Hoarding can sometimes spring back worse due to the negative feelings experienced by letting the small part go too.

It is really really hard to understand and take seriously because to other people it is 'just stuff'.

I think rather than getting rid of the stuff because his dad is unhappy or getting rid of the stuff so he can move a much better approach would be to see if he is open to actually confronting his problem for his own self.

Ofred. I've thought about running/leaving simply because of this but in some ways it seems so shallow. The first time I went to his house I just thought 'I could never live with you'. He would never call himself a hoarder. He would say he's a collector and the stuff is all valuable. But I hate it!

It's not shallow at all. Unfortunately as Ipost said further up the thread people tend to think it is all just a bit of a laugh because of the TV shows, and she is right - the family get all the shit about it.