Sorry this will be long and is a rant/ asking for advice - I just need help :/

I (24F) and my mom (50F) have always had a complicated relationship. She has been a hoarder for as long as I can remember (i would say she’s a level 4). We had pathways going through the house to cut through the piles mounting on either side in every room of the house. In bedrooms the only carpet you would see if the area where the door opened, the basement was practically taped off because it was full to the brim, the kitchen sink was always full of dishes and sludge.. you get the picture.

At the same time, i was the only person in the house to actually care. I was the only one who would fight my mom on it and would just get shut down and told “i have a headache I don’t want to talk about this now.” (This was a common theme even to now, a few months ago I called her and this got brought up and I told her how much it hurt me and she turned it around about how it was basically my fault because I made her feel like she was never enough, the guilt was never ending). I tried cleaning and it never mattered. We’d clean for holidays and it would just go right back. It even seeped to the outside. I was embarrassed to have people drop me off outside the house - I could obviously never have friends over. I actually walked home from school in the rain one time instead of accepting a ride because I didn’t want me friends to see my house.

To add onto this, I was treated like a maid. I did my laundry, my mothers, my fathers, and my 2 younger brothers. When holidays came I was the only one who HAD to help clean - forced to clean the horrible kitchen the living room etc. it kept going until the summer before I went to college, our internet went out that summer and no one could come into the house to fix it so I spent that summer watching Netflix on my laptop with a hotspot from my phone. At this point I decided I couldn’t do college from here. I was going to be commuting and I just couldn’t do it, so I moved in with my grandmother who only lived a block away and it was the best decision I’ve made (even though my parents were incredibly angry that I did)

Now, both of my brothers have moved in with my grandmother (15M and 17M) and as much as I’m happy for them part of me is hurt that they get to live the life I wish I had (my parents were also incredibly strict with me blaming the fact I was the first child and a girl - I’m talking 1 minute past curfew and I was grounded for the next week)

It also doesn’t help that 10 years ago she started a travel agency which has taken off (and good for her) but now she’s gone traveling for “work” 50% of the time when no one else is allowed to touch her mess, so everyone just has to suffer while she gets to escape (she still does this - she also rented an office space for her company and filled it with stuff too and even worse has 3 cats there, I took our family cats because I couldn’t watch them live there)

I’ve now moved in with my husband (23M) but we live in the same town as my family (grandma has a condo she’s renting to us for CHEAP) but I still struggle with my relationship with my mother. I don’t know what to do. I probably need therapy but I don’t know what they’re going to tell me I haven’t already thought of. The problem is my mom has her good qualities she is always very supportive and in your corner no matter what but the resentment I have is still there and I feel stuck. I feel so guilty like whatever choice I make is wrong. I don’t know if I can cut her out, I just don’t know what to do

Sorry this is so long, if you’ve read this far I hope both sides of your pillow are cold and you only get green lights <3

Hello,

Returning home after finishing my second year of college has been really tough. Our living space is so small, and sharing it with my very religious grandparents makes it even harder. Everywhere you look, there are Jesus posters and cards, reminding me of how different our beliefs are. We only have two rooms for our family of five, and it's a constant struggle to deal with my grandma's hoarding. The house is cluttered with containers, cups, pill bottles, and newspapers, making it hard to even walk around. The sight of everything is awful, and seeing roaches on our dishes makes it impossible to eat.

I'm filled with anger towards my family for putting me in this situation, but I also feel guilty because they came to America for a better life. It's hard to hate them when they've given me so much, but all I want is a clean, safe home.

I'm 20 years old, and I'm not sure if CPS can do anything for someone my age, but my autistic sister is 17, so maybe they can help her? I've thought about reaching out to CPS, but I'm scared of what might happen. Will it break my family apart? Could they take my sister away? It's a difficult decision to make, especially when all I want is to live in a clean and normal environment. Plus, I'm afraid that if they find out I made the call, my once abusive father, who's better now, might revert to his old habits.

Please, what can I do?

I (43f) grew up in my Mom’s house and she’d always been a hoarder, at least as far back as I can remember. I moved out of her house nearly 20 years ago. I moved across the country from my hometown 9 years ago. I never really challenged my Mom’s hoarding. I would say she slowly progressed from a level 1/2 to a 2/3 in the years that she’d been left to her own devices (because my sibling and I had both grown up and moved out) and then after retiring and tending to my aging Grandmother until she passed, Mom’s at a solid level 3, inching toward level 4.

I have been much more emotionally close to my Mom since I moved out of her house, and since I moved to this other state and our relationship is mostly long-distance; phone calls, texting, zoom, email, mailing gifts, etc. We are emotionally closer than ever. We typically meet every morning on zoom and practice yoga together via me screen sharing a yoga video.

But I know that the space where she is doing yoga in her house is in the only bedroom in a 2-family house that can still be used as a bedroom, in a floor space that is exactly the size & shape of her “yoga mat” (it’s a dirty-looking cushion for an outdoor lounge chair that I think she took from a neighbor’s trash). Yoga should be good for her mentally and physically, but it doesn’t seem to help much with the hoarding.

She recently had a heart attack and I flew out to see her and offer my help with getting her settled at home once she was released from the hospital. I haven’t been to her house in a long time because watching it fill-up with junk and crumble around her has always been hard for me. When I went to her house this week to help her, she didn’t want my help with much physically but she did want me to “help her clean” … which amounted to me going through piles of random paper, one-by-one, to try to “organize” her stuff. It was painstaking to do and when I told her she did not need a 10-year-old newspaper clipping of a cookie recipe that she already has in her recipe box, and that we should throw this one out, she started fighting with me, so I left “to see about my sister-in-law” and said I would come back later.

That was partly true - my sister-in-law was dealing with my mother-in-law who was in a nursing home/rehabilitation facility after major self neglect due to depression which lead her to have a debilitating fall which she is now healing from. In the process of trying to figure out my MIL’s financial situation, it was discovered that my MIL’s house deed is actually in her children’s names and not hers.

Then discovered that there’s water & mold in the basement, the yard is overgrown, and there are parts of the house that are coming apart and are probably not up to code. Then discovered that she hadn’t been paying bills, including homeowners insurance and property taxes.

So my MIL can’t go back to her home as a disabled elderly woman, and the house isn’t a safe place for anyone with lungs. I left my own Mom’s house in a rage to help my SIL sort through MIL’s paperwork and personal items for bill payment records, important legal & property documents, and photos that we should salvage, because otherwise we need to hire junk removal and then sell the house as-is, to pay off MIL’s debts, pay for MIL’s nursing home needs (if it’s even enough money for that) and ultimately offload the money-pit of a house that suddenly my spouse owns half of. (I wore a heavy-duty mask in the house)

Spending a few hours sorting through belongings with my SIL was somewhat relieving in the fact that I could discern & decide what was important to keep, and what was garbage (it was mostly garbage) and no one was yelling at me for putting things into trash bags.

When I returned to see my own Mom later in the day, she asked about what I did to help my SIL and I told her the situation and she flipped out on me yelling at me like “You can’t just throw away all her things! You can’t just sell her house!”

I deflected the conversation and I helped her out by doing some laundry and moving some items from one room to another. I left her with a hug and some kind words but I have been stewing over the situation for days.

What does she think is going to happen to her house and her hoard when she has her next heart attack and either ends up in an assisted living facility or she dies?

My MIL was neglecting herself and living in a house she couldn’t afford to maintain, so depressed that she stopped functioning at all. Sorting through my MIL’s stuff to find what was valuable, important, or sentimental wasn’t difficult to do because she was barely a level 1 hoarder, so you could easily tell what was just dust-covered chatchkis and what was a box with important stuff in it.

But I contrast this to my mother, who in her hoarding is burying all of her important paperwork, and anything that’s valuable, while neglecting her home (which probably also has mold that we haven’t found yet) and driving its value down into the red. Which makes me panic over what I will have to do, and what sentimental items will be lost forever when she passes and I can’t sift through all her hoarded junk and just have a service come in to toss everything into dumpsters while I sell my crumbling childhood home as-is.

So now I don’t want to talk to her. I’m steaming mad and I have lost interest in practicing yoga with her. I would rather approach the situation as a discussion but I know that the mention of junk removal or selling houses will throw her into this angry, yelling, unintelligible “Mr. Hyde” version of herself. And junk removal and selling my MIL’s house is all that’s going on for me & my spouse right now.

I feel like a mental dam has burst in my mind and I cannot shake how outraged I am about Mom’s whole situation and the position it puts me in for the future.

AITA for not wanting to stay close with her and not wanting to do yoga with her anymore?

Hi all, I’m in college and I just got done with my spring semester so I’m back at my parents for the summer (for the next three months) and I already hate being back. It was really nice living at school bc my roommate is super big on cleanliness and I could always count on the both of us doing our best to make our apartment clean. But being back home is such a dramatic shift- dishes piled up in the sink, boxes piled up to the ceiling, an ever present smell of dog pee. I hate it here. My mom is too big of a coward to just up and leave my dad bc of it (she wants to leave him she just keeps postponing). I don’t like my college town either, I just like my room there, and I like my roommate, I was just looking forward to some me time (she’s staying there over the summer). Like neither option is great- I don’t know what to do, and I don’t want to hurt my mom by leaving. But I hate living here. I hate it. I wish I could afford an apartment. I wish I could just burn the house down.

I'm in the middle of a complex emotional situation and I'm not sure how to handle it: Two sisters, both hoarders living in two separate cities. One sister recently passed away. The surviving sister had a difficult, emotionally charged, but ultimately loving relationship with the deceased.

The Surviving sister wants to clean up the house of the deceased sister. It's coming from a genuine place of love and respect, but I know it will be traumatic for her. And, I'm concerned about her ability to manage the actual project of cleaning out the house, given her own history.

At the same time, if i and my other siblings try to do the work with out the surviving sister it will cause real conflict and, most likely, a different kind of trauma.

Not sure how to navigate this: Want the surviving sister to have a chance to help and support this process, but also don't want it to be overwhelming to her and cause more pain.

Probably need a professional to help us with this, but any guidance?

My parents recently moved, they sold my childhood home to their neighbour and he sold it. They are stage 3/4 hoarders. They are 75 and 67. My mother is narcissistic and lazy and hired someone help organize and move most of her stuff which actually was really relieving. My dad has hoarded three buildings on his property with mostly tools in useless projects that he'll never get to and my mom refused to help him. Both of my parents are not the best health.

I came up to help even though I'm 8 months pregnant to help them with my truck. After over 15 trips to remove donations and dump runs, they wouldn't even pay for a drop of gas to fill the tank. I didn't even get a Thank you and when I asked my mom if I can have some water because I was tired and sweaty, she threw a half bottle of water at me, rolled her eyes and said "well, I guess I don't get any water" when she never left her chair all day.

In the end, my dad went into frantic mode and didn't get rid of anything. He has officially just moved his hoard to fill a garage, a basement and the backyard and all the living spaces in the new house that they're renting. They literally just discarded our childhood home and acted like it was a burden and literally said good riddance to it.

I ended up in the hospital that night with my blood pressure dangerously high and my legs swollen. I''m on bed rest now for the rest of my pregnancy.

I'm done, just so done with both of them. I just needed to rant, and I need to scream. They really showed their true characters and I don't want to know either of them anymore. My siblings saw this unfold as well and want to have an intervention with them, and I don't think I'm up for it because they are too far gone for help.

I could go into more insane details, but it doesn't change the premise.

First post here. I imagine there must be people on here whose hoarder relative have passed away or chronically ill. How did it end for you/them?

My hoarder mother has been diagnosed with memory loss and dementia. She can no longer do normal day to day tasks which is very sad but the worst part is how painful it is for her to lose her hoard. My mother was the victim of a great deal of trauma in her childhood and adulthood. She’s had a truly sad life and I can understand that the severity of her hoard is a reflection of that. I feel sorry for her and I love her despite the trauma her hoard has caused my sister and I.

So now we are in a position where I have to apply for Medicaid funding (Florida) for her to get her into a better situation bc she can no longer be alone. A normal person could just use that funding to pay for a nurse to do home visits but, well, we can’t do that. In order to be approved for the funding so that we can put her into an assisted living facility she cannot have the home in her name.

We were surprised by how bad it had gotten in there before she was found— and thank goodness she was. There is no running water and everything is covered in rat urine and feces. The floor is not visible and covered by 3-5 feet of trash everywhere. I can touch the ceiling when I walk through it. Every step is a gamble bc you don’t know if you’re going to fall into a pit. At first we could not tell if she had dementia or if she was suffering from ailments resulting from the rat infestation. Things like Hantavirus, leptospirosis, or LCMV.

She still owes 155k on the house. The lowest quote I received to clean the hoard was 30k. And she owes about 5k on taxes and escrow. After taking into account the cost to repair the sunken roof, plumbing, electrical, etc the house MAYBE can profit but unlikely. I honestly don’t know what to do.

I don’t want to betray my mother like this and sell her home then put her in an assisted living facility but she can not go back in that house. I feel bad for the pain I am causing her by taking her hoard. I am having a difficult time handling all of this emotionally. It’s been years since I’ve dealt with the pain of my mother and I thought it was behind me but now here I am once again trapped by it.

The minimum cost of assisted living in Florida is about 3500/month. After all is said and done she will have about 2500 in financial aid and the remainder is up to us. My sister is a social worker and low income. I have 2 babies and we are barely making it ourselves. There is no way I can afford to cover the monthly 1k gap. When I asked what happens if we don’t come up with that money they told me that, sadly, those people end up on the street.

I can’t let that happen. I am stuck and stressed and also post partum on top of everything. The other day my mother in law told me that god wouldn’t give me more than I can handle and her comment made me angry. I was angry bc I realized how far she (or anyone) is from understanding the situation.

How did your hoarder situation end?

I lived with my hoarder mom until 28, when I bought a house and moved 2000 miles away with my partner. I’ve never lived on my own before and I’m really struggling with housekeeping. My mom didn’t do any cleaning and I was never taught how to do anything. Even basic hygiene I had to learn in my 20s. I work 4 days a week, 11 hours a day with a 35 minute commute each way so that takes up 12 hours out of my day. By the time I get home I’m exhausted and can’t manage to do anything. I try to do all my housework on my days off but I often find that I’m so busy just catching up on laundry and dishes that other things like dusting, wiping down counters, vacuuming/mopping, etc don’t get done, and then there’s things that are just filthy now that I never even thought about cleaning and don’t know how or how often to clean (walls, windows, baseboards, etc). It’s a huge burden on my life because I still live in that state of “I need to wake up early and spend hours to days quickly cleaning the house before anyone comes over” I am seeing a therapist on Wednesday for the first time so I’m sure that’ll be helpful but like how do you learn how to maintain a clean home after spending nearly 30 years in filth?

Do most people clean EVERYDAY? I don’t understand how people manage to have clean homes. I know most people don’t have SPOTLESS homes and that most people probably do spend a fair amount cleaning before people come over but I feel like my house is filthy all the time. Help :(

Later on this summer I’m going to visit my parents. I love my parents to no end. However, their house is not safe to be in. There are health hazards in every room. There is black mould in the bathrooms. Insects in the food. Raw food on top of fresh food- on top of rotting food. The air smells sour and stale. Mountains of trash. I’m pretty healthy and every time I’m at my parents house I get a sore throat and diarrhoea. Every time without fail. I try not to eat anything that comes out of the kitchen. How do I tell them I don’t want to be in their house without coming off rude or mean? I understand boundaries are important but this is difficult- my mom can read me like a book.

It’s so hard for others to understand the amount of self teaching we have to do when we grow up with parents who are neglectful. Which is why I joined this group and am coming here to vent. My mom and grandma were/are hoarders, alcoholics and a slurry of other undiagnosed/untreated mental illnesses. Needless to say teaching me and my siblings about cleaning or self care was not high on their priority lists. Now as an adult, it can be such a struggle to get myself to maintain a routine of self care or cleaning. Things simple to others like keeping up a skin care routine feel impossibly hard sometimes. Now I have my own son and I know I need to teach him all I wasn’t taught and model good examples for him. The depression and anxiety around it is so real. There are currently ants in my house and I’m trying to get it under control and it’s triggering so much anxiety because ants and other bugs were definitely a regular problem in my house growing up. I’ve had nightmares about an ant crawling into my infant son’s mouth and it’s hard to get the image out of my head. Has anyone had this struggle and been able to get the anxiety under control? Or have good tips about keeping routines?

Am in a bit of a desperate situation: older family member (long time hoarder, house used to be nice but now 80% filled with things) has been severely immobilized due to covid and chronic health issues, she was hospitalized, taken to rehabb facility with 24 hr treatment, and needs nursing care continued as she recuperates from the medical injuries.

We can't take her to her home given house-condition, and Medicare won't be able to cover the facility for much longer she's at, but will cover nursing assistance and PT, but we need to find a place to have her stay in the interim (3-6 weeks), so we can start to clean up the house and get two rooms fully functioning for handicap folks.

Am seeking websites like AurBnB that might cater to month+ home rentals that are furnished willing to accept someone with health issues and major needs. It needs to be a place that is:

- is clean / relatively spacious

- could allow nursing assistance and equipment in

- likely a house rather than condo/apt, as noise from elderly person in pain would be bothersome

- rents multi-week stays

Does AirBnB fit this need e.g. if we did a long term stay, do they take on folks for purposes of elderly / nursing care, or is that against the rules?

Are there places who would handle this? We're specifically seeking non-assisted living places that maybe offer rentals for folks recovering from debilitating medical issues.

Im so pissed that out of all the billions of people on the planet it had to be my parent who's a hoarder.

There are exactly zero resources to help when it comes to this stuff. 911 never helped me, animal control never helped me, cps never helped me.

Every single post here is from an adult who already escaped their hoard three decades ago, just telling us teens to move out as fast as we can as if that's even remotely plausible in today's world, and some of them literally even get hostile and tell you you're being lazy or purposefully choosing to be a victim if you say you can't. But direct that hostility onto the hoarders who caused the suffering in the first place, and your post probably gets removed for being abusive.

Last i heard, there's some sort of discord meeting that's regularly held for teens in hoarding situations. Im not even going to attempt to join because i know it's inactive as hell.

Is it just me or is there no situation on earth more isolating than being a hoarders kid?

My mom has been a hoarder since I can remember. I thought everyone lived that way until I went to sleepovers at my friend’s houses. Their homes were lived in but tidy. It was always the worst in the master bedroom. No matter where we lived there was an understanding that the bulk of it would be in the bedroom. It spread to other rooms some being filled to the brim. Door bell dread was very strong. My mom developed an anger to outsiders -including emergency services. No one was allowed upstairs unless they were her children. She was/is terrified of people seeing her hoard. We did try to intervene and help but she took it as an insult and rudeness. Eventually, when people refuse help over and over again you stop trying. Not because you don’t want to but because you know the answer. One night my dad was on his way to the bathroom and fell. It was dark so he reached out to balance himself. The entire hoard in my parents room fell on top of him pinning him to the floor ( he wasn’t seriously hurt). She still didn’t deal with it. My room became my sanctuary - the only room that was actually clean. Now I’m married and living in a different country. I understand that none of this was anyone’s fault. No one made her hoard. I still have a lot of resentment about it. The subject of grandchildren has come up. My husband and I are firmly against bringing infants and children into their home while it is such a hazard. Adults can choose to go into a hoarded home. Children can not. I’m not sure how to phrase that without sounding like an asshole.

My father has been a hoarder my whole life. Last March he had a stroke that luckily has left minimal effects but since then he has been staying between my siblings and I. I haven't lived at his home (my childhood home) for 5 years and it is now beyond the point of being able to send him back into his home in good conscience and there is no way for anyone to stay there with him.

I unexpectedly will have a month off between jobs and am considering just going and getting rid of everything. I know many of his item have some sort of value to him and I plan to make an effort to keep what is salvageable and worth keeping for him but otherwise clean the place out. He always makes promises of cleaning it but it is now beyond his control and I think it would be more difficult if he was a part of the process because of how upset he will be amd it will be impossible to let anything go.

I know that he will be furious and upset with me but I would rather deal with him being upset than let him continue to live in an unsafe environment that he will eventually be going back to. He is not happy living away from his home and if I clean it then at least there is the possibility for me or my siblings to spend a few days at a time there and check in on him. I hate to see the way that my childhood home is and that I cannot even stay there while visiting.

If anyone has done this before I would love to know how you dealt with the clean out as well as the anger. Any opinions, advice, anything would be greatly welcomed and appreciated. Thank you!

Im 17m. My mom is a hoarder, and also has too many pets than she can reasonably care for (3 dogs). Said pets have turned the house into a giant bathroom. If you want to leave your room you need shoes. My designated "house shoes" are literally encrusted with dog feces and pee.

Mail, clothes and every useless thing under the sun that you can think of clutters the dinner table and just about every single flat surface that exists in this house. Whenever i leave my room i am hit with the overwhelming stench of several years of built up dog pee/poo.

Being a neurodivergent person and slight germaphobe it TRULY makes me want to self harm. It dissuades me from eating. It dissuades me from showering. It prevents me from having friends over. It prevents me from taking pictures. It forces me to come up with bullsh*t stories to protect my mom who aboslutely does not deserve the protection.

I HAVE CALLED THE POLICE. They did absolutely nothing. IVE HAD MULTIPLE SOCIAL WORKERS COME OVER. They did absolutely nothing. Animal control never even picked up. I GOT IN TROUBLE FOR CALLING FOR HELP.

Ive been living like this for damn near all my life. It has ruined my life. Taken away my highschool years. Even got me into trouble at school bc ive been put into situations where i couldnt be honest/come clean to the staff about why i mightve done this or that, bc the real reason had something to do with the hoard.

Completely and utterly ruined whatever small droplets of self esteem or confidence i had. Filled me with shame that i dont deserve. Makes me feel like a disgusting unhygienic person for a choice MY MOM MADE. Showed me that dogs and useless mail and other garbage has more value than me in my mothers eyes.

Please dont tell me to have sympathy for her. Please dont tell me "its a mental illness". Im not trying to be coldhearted but I DO NOT CARE. She doesnt care about me. Shes perfectly willing to see me become a socially inept recluse, not shower for weeks at a time or even brush my teeth, all just to protect her feelings because i guess the world would come crashing down if anyone dare touch her hoard. She had the choice not to have kids but she did.

Imposing this on your kids is child abuse, no excuses.

My mom just recently turned 70 and I don’t know what to do with her anymore. Her kitchen and only bathroom don’t work anymore, she washer broke so she does laundry at a laundromat, her roof has multiple leaks, and here fence is basically about to fall over if there’s a storm. Oh and I forgot to mention she’s a millionaire. My sister and I are tweeting to get her to buy a new house of renovate her current home since she could easily do either with cash alone. But every house we show her isn’t good enough for her, and her very long list of wants and needs. And anytime we bring up the renovation she doesn’t want to live with my sister or I during the construction. So we’re basically just stuck watching our mom live in a home like this. I don’t know what to do or how to just let her live like this until she basically just dies one day. I’m not here for tips or advice but I don’t know who else to talk to about this. Thanks y’all.

i’m a teenager that lives with my mom full time, (i can’t live with my dad for personal reasons) and she is a hoarder to the point where every single room in our house is filled with garbage, dirty laundry, and random shit we don’t need. and she keeps trying to deny it. i’m not in a healthy mental state as it is, and living like this makes it worse. i feel like my only option at this point is to kill myself. it’s going to be years before i’m of age to move out, and even then the cost of housing where i live is way too shitty for a young adult. please give advice.

Hello all, I just found this because I'm new to Reddit. I have been married for more years than many of you have lived, to a man who is a hoarder. It's a bit of a long story, but for the past several years we have maintained separate households. And I am so much less stressed out than I was when I lived with him, even though living separately is expensive. I have accepted that he will never change. But I get so upset when I go to his home that I cannot bear it for long. I have been asked why I don't just divorce him, but it is not that simple. We have never been able to have a real marriage because of his hoarding and other (medical and mental health) issues of his. I feel like I've wasted so much of my life.
Thanks for letting me vent.

I am sharing this only through personal experience. I am not a hoarder (knock on wood) but I have found regular MACRodosing has helped me with OCD tendencies and has always been effective in creating a disconnect from all of my superficial anxieties (social media, physical appearance, etc).

I know my mom has been interested in trying it in the past (for reasons unrelated to hoarding) but I suppose part of me has always been hesitant to give her the opportunity because….it could be heavy to process EVERYTHING she has been denying for decades. I would not want to thrust her into an insurmountable guilt. But it also seems like that’s the sort of revelation necessary for someone with this illness to consider changing.

Idk, does anyone know of this has been tested as a treatment option? I do lot think like daily microdosing would be especially effective but again, I only have personal anecdotes to draw on.

Hey everyone. Sorry if I ramble or anything, I'm kind of a crying mess right now. I'm just trying to process this interaction I had with my mom, and how upset it made me. I'm not really a crier, so it kind of caught me off guard. I walked into the house I share with my hoarder mom, and my purse kind of grazed a stack of glass plates she had stacked up by the door. (Our house is just a maze of narrow pathways, many of which you have to turn sideways to fit through.) She heard the clinking sound, and had the audacity to scold me for not picking my purse up off my shoulder as I walked by. I'm sort of used to her blaming others, but I just couldn't believe this. I called her out on it, and tried to get her to admit that maybe the plates just don't belong there, but she refused.

I'm just so tired of feeling like I live in a warehouse instead of a home, and I guess that incident was what broke the dam and got the crying and emotions flooding. I guess her blaming me also made me realize why my self esteem has always been so low. Thanks for listening, and even if no one replies, it made me feel a lot better just to get my feelings out in writing.

My mom is in her 60s and lives alone (her husband lives in a separate house - don’t ask me!) She has been diagnosed with ADHD, she is medicated for it. It doesn’t make a difference. Sometimes I come to her house to visit )many states away but I currently work remotely)to make sure her cats are okay. It’s is hard to leave because she is insanely destructive. She cannot be in a room for more than a few seconds without filling it with garbage and creating a mess. Filth seems to materialize out of ether. She has enough energy always to make a mess but never to clean it up.

After 36 years being her child I should know how hopeless this question is. But there must be something that can help her at least see that the way she lives is sad and unacceptable.

Maybe it is “just ADHD” but it doesn’t seem like any meds she’s tried help with her situation. She uses ADHD as a scapegoat for all of her self created chaos. There is always some external “reason” that she can’t get her shit together. How do I frame her reality in a way that resonates as unacceptable? She gets incredibly indignant when I even hint at the blatantly obvious in terms of her destructive patterns and their consequences.

Most of this context is probably unnecessary so basically: She thinks having ADHD meds has solved her hoarding/destruction problem. It hasn’t. Has anyone had luck with talking reason into their HP to at least the point of them agreeing to address the issue in therapy? Thanks.

My nephew, who’s 14, is the child of a hoarder. His mom knows this is a problem - she was dx’d after perusing treatment on her own, but it didn’t go much past that. Since I last visited a few years ago, the house has apparently gotten MUCH worse.

No obvious health hazards, she cleans as well as possible and there are no pests, mold, etc. they always have clean clothes. But there are trails between stacks and stacks of boxes to get from one room to another, and according to family who were there recently the entire patio is now huge stacks of boxes. She doesn’t have any support (married to a jerk, to put it politely, who is apparently fine with this) but I also don’t think I have the bandwidth to do much myself for her or the house. We have a challenging relationship.

But I worry constantly about my nephew. He’s very sheltered, and even without this I would worry about his eventual “reckoning” with the real world. I don’t know how he feels about the house, but he does have some issues that are at least in part because of stress and environment (parents fight all the time as well).

Is there anything I can do for him? He’s an amazing kid and I know enough about trauma to be very concerned.

I believe my mom’s hoarding has ruined my life and I only have myself to blame. Because of the environment I was raised in, I never got to grow up and am now an emotionally-stunted adult who struggles with the most basic of tasks (making phone calls, holding down a job, personal hygiene). As I get older, her situation only gets worse, and I feel more and more powerless to do anything to help. My mom won’t listen to me when I try to reason with her. She won’t listen to anyone because she is incapable of admitting she has a problem.

On the one hand, I want to help because I know she’s sick. On the other hand, I know my mom is a narcissist who has neglected me for most of my life and it’s hard to have sympathy for her. And yes, I consider hoarding (forcing a child to live with rats, take cold showers in the winter, and be completely isolated from friends and family) neglect.

The problem is, I never did move out of my mom’s place. When I had the chance to move away and go to college, she was diagnosed with cancer and I had to stay home and take care of her. Then, when I was planning to move away after graduation, Covid forced me to stay home again. Now I have a stable job, but due to the skyrocketing cost of living I have no chance of ever affording my own place. We have since moved into a new house and, within the span of a few years, she has already recreated the nightmare that was my childhood.

Despite everything she’s done, I can’t help but blame myself. I know that I’m a failure and an embarrassment to my family. If I had been a better kid growing up, or was a better person, maybe I could’ve fixed things. But I wasn’t and I’m not.

While I have been seeing a therapist, and have been taking steps to improve myself, at this point in my life it honestly feels pointless. I am trapped. Even if I leave, I will never know peace due to the guilt of abandoning my mom. I also doubt that I would be able to survive without her if I can barely hold a conversation with other adults or get ready for work without crying. I am useless with zero life skills and it’s honestly all my fault.

hi, all. kind of hard to talk about, but i (17f), have three younger siblings. i turn 18 in august of this year. i don’t really know if my situation can be considered hoarding, but it is absolutely disgusting. i won’t get into details because it is uncomfortable for me, but i can no longer continue living this way. i have cleaned the entire house several times alone, with my boyfriend, and with my siblings. my father refuses to keep up with the mess and within days it goes from completely spotless to horrendous. my younger siblings don’t know how to clean because they have never been taught, so i will never blame them, but i don’t know how to get my dad to listen to me. i have asked, begged, and cried wanting him to clean the house, and he just won’t make a difference. i feel like shit for wanting to abandon my family, but truthfully i can no longer live this way. my boyfriend is very supportive of me, and i could live with him if it came down to it, but honestly i don’t care where i go, as long as it’s not here. help? advice? thoughts? support? thank you.

Hi All,

I have been coming to terms lately with my parents hoarder status. My stepdad passed last year and my mom recently had a major stroke which has required us to start cleaning out their home, garage, and 3 sheds that are just full of randomness. We need to sell it sooner than later for nursing home funds for her.

We started by getting a dumpster to pitch her bed, trash, clothes that were damaged by smoking inside. As a consolation we did sell a lot of his woodworking tools/machinery and that helps. But the amount of stuff this is (and they had bad mice infestations) and the amount of work is just ALOT.

I’ve always felt a little OCD and dream of minimalism for my own life as a result of this. My bio Dad is also a “collector” of things, but thankfully doesn’t have the dirty, disrepair situation that they have. I have young kids and while it is hard to keep toys and things tidy, I’m always in sort/donate mode. I try to limit buying things for hobbies unless I know I have time for them. And I try to edit and pare down my closet often. I realize, truly, that extra stuff is not going to make me happy and I hope my kids won’t be in the same mess I’m in.

My title says grumpy bc it was just Christmas and we’ve been so busy with my parents stuff that our own house is in a bit of disarray. I did manage to clean up most of our decorations today, but I can’t say I was the most pleasant wife/mom.

I don’t know the point of this post, but saying hello and putting myself out there. Anyone else feel a desire for minimalism after dealing with hoarders?

I'm writing about my experience growing up with a hoarder.

I hate that I understand the logical reason that it happened, disability, mental illness, pride, shame, pain. Knowing that doesn't change the effect it had on me as a person. The impact on my psyche and physical form.

My psychiatrist told me if I ever wrote a book she'd love to read it.

I just (finally) got home from 9 days in my hometown. We stay with my grandmother instead of my hoarder parents.

My parents’ house has pretty much always been infested with fleas. When I lived there, I would scrape together the money for monthly flea meds for the cats and give it to them, but my parents don’t bother. My brother (who is too autistic to understand that hoarding is a problem) lives with my grandmother now to be around to help her out with things. He apparently still keeps some of his clothes at my parents’ house and brings them back and forth. He’s moved the fleas into my grandmother’s house as well with this.

My cat and dog (who are on monthly preventatives) also immediately started scratching. My husband is super sensitive to any bug bites, so he has bumps all over. He’s been obsessively researching how to get rid of fleas, because he’s worried we will get our own house infested.

I didn’t even know fleas bit humans. I guess my body is just so used to it that it doesn’t affect me.

Now that we’re home, I just feel myself shutting down. I feel guilty enough dragging my husband to my hometown, but seeing the three of them itching from fleas is just another level of guilty. I gave my cat and dog another capstar and have basically been staring at a wall since.

I’m the bright side, I think I’m finally ready to accept that my parents’ hoard has mentally affected me enough that I should seek therapy.

Im an only child living with my mom. She is a hoarder Id say level 2-3. She likes collecting things and holds on to memories like crazy. She has a lot of things from her childhood. She has furniture from her grandmother her father her mother etc. We have a large house so it is spread out enough to where we can walk and everything okay. Her main downfall is recycling. My mom is very into the environment and being eco friendly which is great but she is obsessive with recycling. Everything needs to be washed and sorted and recycled. Tiny paper clippings and plastics need to be sorted. Wrappers and food needs to be sorted. It piles up as you can imagine. On top of that something ive really struggled with is she adds to it my bringing things home. Shes in the medical field and brings home garbage to recycle from work. Bags a day. She picks things of the ground she brings garbage home from the beach etc. And it always ends up in our home for months. Nothing can be put in the garbage. We throw virtually nothing in the trash. Im struggling to accept her ways. Ive always lived in a mess and never felt comfortable in my home. Im struggling a little.