Ask the Adult Child of a Hoarder/Clutterer

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

Some thoughts on the comments so far…

  • spousal support - like enipla, I am blessed to have a spouse who understands. His father was a hoarder and collector, and there were rooms that just had a path into them. His paternal grandmother’s house was so bad when she died that the family didn’t even try to clean it, they just donated the property to the city. I believe it was used for firefigher training.

  • the effect of outside trauma - my maternal grandmother (my mother’s mom) had hoarder tendencies as well, kept in check by my grandfather. The Great Depression scarred an entire generation of folks, and its effect can’t be overlooked. I’ve also encountered hoarders who’ve been affected by house fires in which they’ve lost all or nearly all their possessions. This happened to my mother once. My feeling is that these traumas have a stronger effect on people whose mental or emotional well-being was precarious anyway, and it pushes them a little farther toward the hoarder side of things.

  • a point about perfectionism - this ties into the feeling of being overwhelmed by the size of the job of uncluttering or cleaning up. I am a huge perfectionist and I got it from my mother, who is a bazillion times worse than me. :slight_smile: I think a big part of her problem was feeling that she didn’t have the time or resourses (mental or physical) to clean up “properly”, so she couldn’t bother to start.

62

[QUOTE=maggenpye]
There’s an old Scots tradition of cleaning the house from top to bottom before New Year’s Eve, so that spiritually you take no unnecessary muck into the new year.
[/QUOTE]

GREAT tradition. I think I’ll do some extra cleaning this weekend! I always clean on the weekend anyway, but it’d be nice to get some extra done. Some throwing out. Yeah.

63

My mother grew up very poor. Now that she and my dad have all the disposable income they could need, she has become a hoarder. Every Wednesday they go to the local thrift store and buy bags of stuff they don’t need. She won’t give anything away to charity because that’s a waste; “if something’s still good enough to use I’ll use it or give it to family.” She has a couple of hobbies which she has allowed to consume several rooms in the house - quilting and crafting (various). She’ll buy any unfinished project she sees, sure that she will finish it. She saves all freebies. She buys bags of used clothes b/c there might be a great quilt piece in one. She saves all clothes she has for the sake of ‘pieces’; there are closets that are stuffed full (can’t be opened) and a small path in what is now only her bedroom. My dad has taken up residence in the spare bedroom.
All these bags and other piles of cloth are stacked around the dining room, front room and a bedroom upstairs. They also take up part of the garage, so I’m never shocked when she tells me about their mouse problem. When my cats stayed with them, one peed on (and in) a container of her quilting things and she didn’t notice for weeks at least. I came to get the cats, saw the urine and began cleaning it up; this upset her and I got her to admit she maybe would rather it weren’t cleaned, since I might throw away something that wasn’t *really * ruined by cat urine. My dad hoards books and magazines, but keeps them isolated and organized for the most part and they aren’t as much of a danger as the stacks of combustible cloth all over the rest of the house.
Writing this, I’m feeling overwhelmed. I know it will take a couple of dumpsters to clean out that house someday, and they’ll have to be brought up a twisting mountain driveway with a 5% grade.

64

My mother was like this. I had the fun of cleaning out her house two years ago when she died.

My parents bought the house in the late 70s. They got divorced some time in the late 80s. For the most part it was ok then, but after my father moved out it got a bit worse. When I left for college, 91, I never went back living there.

The house was two stories with a finished basement. When she died it was full of stuff. Here in Maryland they want a list of all assets, which includes everything she owned. Luckily they will take the paperwork from an estate sale.

To get everything ready for the estate sale I took two weeks off of work. I went through as much as possible. I borrowed a truck and took two tons of trash to the dump. I took another tuck load of clothes to the goodwill. When the two weeks were up the estate people had to bring two large trucks to the house to get everything out. They still couldn’t get everything out.

When all was said and done we got under 100k for everything, house included. My mother had lived in the house for 25 years or so, but kept taking loans out. The estate people took 20% plus truck rental. Everything in the house sold for $8000. Had she kept the house in nicer order it would have been worth around $300,000.

My mother kept everything, I found receipts going back to the 70s. She had old food, cat pee, and dog poop everywhere. I honestly think that the way she lived was what killed her. She lived paycheck to paycheck, though she didn’t have a lot of credit card debt. She did however have a large storage area that she paid $120 a month for.

She always said that she bought all of this stuff to sell and it was worth a lot of money. Had she not bought all of the stuff, and needed a storage area, she would have been a lot better off money wise, and nothing she bought was worth a penny. She probably wouldn’t have been so stressed either. She died when she was 51, never even got a chance to meet her grand daughter.

65

[QUOTE=olivesmarch4th]
Very interesting and informative thread, lisacurl, and bravo for your bravery in addressing this issue. I never really thought about it as something that affected many people.

But I do remember my friend’s house, when I was in fourth grade, was absolutely filthy. I was absolutely shocked and amazed that anybody could live that way. There were piles of clothing and crap all over the living room, you had to launch yourself all over these piles to get to the kitchen, but really you didn’t want to make it to the kitchen, because there were rat droppings all over in the silverware drawer and on the counters. It was the first and last time I ever went to her house because it was the most acutely uncomfortable experience. I can’t even imagine living there.

Regrettably, I had a neighbor once who lived in far worse conditions, who would come to our door and ask if it was safe to cook a box of noodles with dead bugs in them. That is the mildest story–the others were too disgusting to mention.

So when I put my mind to it, I see there are examples everywhere, even in my own memory. But you’ve offered a unique insight into this condition and I appreciate you raising awareness.

I might be Level 1. My mother was a neat freak and a control freak and wanted everything to be done just-so. I rebel–and I rebel against my husband when he nags me to clean. The thought of rotting food or animal droppings just laying around is repulsive to me, and I am profoundly mold phobic, so I know I would never let it get that bad. But I have let half-empty soda cans and stacks of junk mail pile up, and I lose things in my clutter from time to time. I am often terrified of letting people into my house when it isn’t spotless.

I’m curious what the warning signs for having a propensity to be a hoarder would be?

snip
[/quote]

From what I’ve seen in my pal and gleaned from websites, some of the signs are:
being afraid of being wasteful ; trouble making decisions; perfectionism; obsession with sentimentality and reminders of the past/those who have passed away; worrying about the future (“I might need that someday”); taking too long to leave a message or write a note or email for fear of leaving out some critical detail; control issues; neurotic behavior; making a big deal or drama or production out of just about everything.

66

[QUOTE=vivalostwages]
From what I’ve seen in my pal and gleaned from websites, some of the signs are:
being afraid of being wasteful ; trouble making decisions; perfectionism; obsession with sentimentality and reminders of the past/those who have passed away; worrying about the future (“I might need that someday”); taking too long to leave a message or write a note or email for fear of leaving out some critical detail; control issues; neurotic behavior; making a big deal or drama or production out of just about everything.
[/QUOTE]
Oh my golly, you’ve just described my in-laws. :eek: I have a few of those too.

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[QUOTE=lisacurl]

  • a point about perfectionism - this ties into the feeling of being overwhelmed by the size of the job of uncluttering or cleaning up. I am a huge perfectionist and I got it from my mother, who is a bazillion times worse than me. :slight_smile: I think a big part of her problem was feeling that she didn’t have the time or resourses (mental or physical) to clean up “properly”, so she couldn’t bother to start.
    [/QUOTE]

I’ll second this. It seemed very strange to me the first time it was explained to me - how can someone demand perfection but insist on living in a mess like that? But “perfect” doesn’t just apply to the end result. It applies to the process as well.

cwPartner is a clutterer and a hoarder (not nearly as bad as some of the descriptions here, but historically irrational regarding the acquisition and keeping of stuff which is of no actual use). When he does try to clean up, it can be absolutely painful to watch. He has to determine the absolutely best strategy for dealing with a mess, then he has to lay out all of the items to be dealt with, then he has to examine and reminisce over each item, and only then can he seriously consider disposing of it or putting it away (in the absolutely best possible manner). When I try to help, he tells me I can’t because he knows exactly how he wants to do it.

Basically, he has a very hard time with the concept of “good enough.” For instance, we had a couple years’ worth of old newspapers. I wanted to cut to the chase and throw them away. But to cwPartner, old newspapers can’t just go in the trash, because it would be better (in this case, less wasteful) to recycle them. But we don’t have curbside recycling, so we had to take the newspapers somewhere. The recycling center wasn’t open when we had the time to go there, so we needed another option. Fine - his workplace has recycling bins. But that was imperfect, because he felt that bringing all of those newspapers at once would be an imposition on their recycling program. On the other hand, bringing a week’s worth of newspaper in every couple of days wasn’t perfect either, because it would “take too long.” Net result? The piles stayed where they were, and continued to grow as newer newspapers were added.

68

A few years ago I lived with a level 2-3 squalor guy. Apparently, he has issues from his childhood about his parents and the cleanliness of his room and so it and his bathroom stayed (and still stay) uncleaned. He would be relatively neat in the rest of the apartment since he was sensitive to it being shared space. But not in his own room. When he moved in, his stuff consisted of a mattress and 15-20 boxes of possessions. In the two years we lived together, nothing was ever taken out of the boxes after the first week. Apparently, once he had his 3-4 items of work uniforms and 5-6 “regular” clothes, there was no need to get anything else. He likes artwork, but left all his framed pieces sitting on the floor against the wall for two years. I once made the mistake of partially cleaning his room. This consisted of just picking up outright trash like food wrappers, putting all the spare change laying around into a jar, and vacuuming. Boy did that set him off. He threw an honest to god tantrum like I’d stolen from him. I thought it was because I’d been in his room. But apparently it was the cleaning, not the intrusion, that was the issue. And that’s where it came out about his problems with his parents.

So it seems that there are many reasons for squalor behavior.

69

lisacurl, your comments about bright shiny overachievers outside the home and survivor’s guilt had me in tears–it sounds so familiar. I wanted to thank you for this thread, and those links, because it really helps me think about my own situation (as a child of clutterers) with some perspective. I spend far too much energy worrying about things I can’t change, and I’m going to try to stop.

70

[QUOTE=vivalostwages]
From what I’ve seen in my pal and gleaned from websites, some of the signs are:
being afraid of being wasteful ; trouble making decisions; perfectionism; obsession with sentimentality and reminders of the past/those who have passed away; worrying about the future (“I might need that someday”); taking too long to leave a message or write a note or email for fear of leaving out some critical detail; control issues; neurotic behavior; making a big deal or drama or production out of just about everything.
[/QUOTE]

My mother has so many of these but the one that I have a very hard time dealing with is her attention to detail.

Every phone conversation or email is detailed to the point of harrasment.

I rarely call her for fear I will be stuck on the phone for hours. Once in a while I can get her into a normal two way conversation but most of the time I am stuck listening to some subject I could care less about and in great detail.

The same holds true for emails. There is never a one liner. I have gotten used to reading between the lines so I don’t have to be force fed the whole story trying to find the plot.

She is also controlling and in my younger years I let her dictate what I did for the most part. I think sometimes she hid it as good advice but there were times I should have not listened to her. As I got older I made more and more of my own decisions. If I did not follow her advice then she acted hurtful which in turn made me feel guilty.

The way I have learned to combat the issue is by not telling her what is going on in my life. I am very brief about everything. I don’t ask her advice any more and I figure things out on my own or with my boyfriend or friends.

I know she feels like I have cut her out of my life which again is a guilt topic but I have had to for my own sanity.

71

Is hoarding associated with depression and OCD? I’ve lately gotten on a kick of throwing stuff out I don’t use anymore…hell, I got a bath set from my MIL for Christmas, and I went through the supplies and decided what I would use and tossed the rest.

In the past, I would have felt guilty about :eek: throwing away a gift! :eek: Now I’m realizing there’s no need to keep ahold of that purse with a broken strap because I’m planning on fixing it someday. If I haven’t fixed it by now I obviously don’t need the purse that bad.

I see *Clean Sweep *on TLC sometimes and I am horrified at how people live. Do they not care that they can’t use their dining room table because it’s piled high with bills or they have to sleep on half their bed because the other half is covered in clothes? :confused: Now, I may not have the neatest house, but I would say it’s fairly clean and you don’t have to worry there will be roaches in the flour.

Does medication or therapy work best with hoarders?

72

This thread has inspired me to make a list of cleaning supplies and head home to deal with my mess. I don’t live in squalor or anything but I could easily see myself headed that way and I would like to avoid it if I can!

73

I’ve been cleaning most of the day. I need to put Christmas away, but that is a big job, so I’ll do that Sunday, with the help of the rest of the family. It feels good to clean, but it IS an endless task. I am cluttered (not even a stage 1), but I still feel the need for neat. It is so easy, with a busy family full of kids etc to NOT do it. Even one day and it looks like a bomb went off. My kids are fairly neat in shared areas, but their rooms are not. It’s not a battle I was willing to fight–and now I fear for them, too! :eek:

I am not the kind of person who does the cleaning lady thing–I would clean for the cleaning lady. Plus, I know I would go after her and think, “for the money, this should be spotless etc”, plus we can’t afford one, anyway.

My question is this: how does one head this stuff off at the pass? How to prevent becoming this way? Do anti-depressants help these people, like SSRIs do for OCD?

74

Like others, I’m finding myself with the irresistible urge to clean.

My husband is sentimental. I’m not sentimental, I’m lazy. :smiley:

I’ve started subscribing to the “one item in, one item out” rule. If you get a book, you have to give a book away. If you get a pan, you have to get rid of a pan.

So far, that’s working, but I still have too many books and other stuff that I didn’t like in the first place and should give away.

And I tell you, if I had a trauma happen, I know I would become one of the super-squalorers. I feel it in my tiny, shriveled heart. Because stuff makes me happy. It does. I love stuff. I’m greedy.

Gah.

I’m going to go clean out a closet.
Edited to add: If anyone is cleaning and finds blankets and bedclothes that are too ratty to donate to people, contact your local animal shelter or humane society or rescue organization and see if they can use them.

75

Fudge. I meant to start a new thread. Sorry.

76

[QUOTE=ivylass]
Is hoarding associated with depression and OCD? I’ve lately gotten on a kick of throwing stuff out I don’t use anymore…hell, I got a bath set from my MIL for Christmas, and I went through the supplies and decided what I would use and tossed the rest.

In the past, I would have felt guilty about :eek: throwing away a gift! :eek: Now I’m realizing there’s no need to keep ahold of that purse with a broken strap because I’m planning on fixing it someday. If I haven’t fixed it by now I obviously don’t need the purse that bad.

I see *Clean Sweep *on TLC sometimes and I am horrified at how people live. Do they not care that they can’t use their dining room table because it’s piled high with bills or they have to sleep on half their bed because the other half is covered in clothes? :confused: Now, I may not have the neatest house, but I would say it’s fairly clean and you don’t have to worry there will be roaches in the flour.

Does medication or therapy work best with hoarders?
[/QUOTE]

Hoarding is believed to be a form of OCD or at least related to it. They certainly are compulsive about it. I don’t know that meds work at all; cognitive behavioral therapy is what I’ve heard of more frequently. The person would have to allow the therapist to come into the home with them and walk them through the process of deciding what to keep, trash, sell or donate.

77

I think I’d put myself at about .5 on the squalor scale. I tend to ignore floors – sweeping, vacuuming, and dusting are the bane of my existence – and I let things pile up in certain areas. But I also go through and at least sort the crap out on a regular basis, and toss out what isn’t actively useful.

My biggest problem right now is that when we moved here, we ended up in a house about half the size of our former house. We’ve already had to give away things I really did not want to – such as my grandmother’s china cabinet – simply because we do not have room for it. Bu after two years of still not having enough room and regularly freecycling, I still find myself buried with clutter. This thread is definitely inspiring me to do a much more serious de-clutter!

While I’m a dreadful procrastinator where housework is concerned, I think the one thing that saves me from a serious squalor in my future is that I simply cannot stand to have a dirty kitchen or bathroom. Food garbage gets tossed immediately, human toilets and the cat box is cleaned regularly, and so while my house has dust and dog hair on the floors, it’s not uncontrollable; a few hours will take care of a lot of it – as long as those hours include getting rid of a bunch more books! I’ve already downsized my books three times, but apparently there’s another big downsizing in my immediate future. :frowning: But I could have guests come to stay with probably no more than 3-4 hours of work, most of that devoted to de-cluttering and trying to figure out where to put a few things like the 3 boxes of my kids’ childhood photos that I don’t want to put in the attic so they don’t get ruined.

As an aside, to those who are planning to clean and de-clutter – as long as you can get it done before New Year’s and donate the stuff to charity, don’t forget it’ll be a nice tax deduction (as long as it’s genuinely usable stuff, not junk!)!

78

[QUOTE=ivylass]
Is hoarding associated with depression and OCD? I’ve lately gotten on a kick of throwing stuff out I don’t use anymore…hell, I got a bath set from my MIL for Christmas, and I went through the supplies and decided what I would use and tossed the rest.

In the past, I would have felt guilty about :eek: throwing away a gift! :eek: Now I’m realizing there’s no need to keep ahold of that purse with a broken strap because I’m planning on fixing it someday. If I haven’t fixed it by now I obviously don’t need the purse that bad.

I see *Clean Sweep *on TLC sometimes and I am horrified at how people live. Do they not care that they can’t use their dining room table because it’s piled high with bills or they have to sleep on half their bed because the other half is covered in clothes? :confused: Now, I may not have the neatest house, but I would say it’s fairly clean and you don’t have to worry there will be roaches in the flour.

Does medication or therapy work best with hoarders?
[/QUOTE]
One of the challenges of the problem is that each situation is unique. On the Squalor Survivors website, they put it like this:

So while grief counseling and anti-depressant medication would work wonders for one person, another might need specifically tailored cognitive-behavioral therapy for OCD.

I’ve been talking about this a lot with my husband, as starting this thread has stirred up a lot of old feelings for me, and I really feel in my gut that recovery from this is rather like recovery from alcoholism. The person has to admit there is a problem and that their life has become unmanageable and then be motivated to ask for help and sustain a change in behavior over time.

I also think it’s important that person have loved ones or a support group to whom to be accountable when they are recovering. That’s why I was so impressed with the Squalor Survivors website and group. It is a great resource for people who have been very isolated to reach out and find a group who understands and won’t judge harshly.

79

[QUOTE=cwthree]

cwPartner is a clutterer and a hoarder (not nearly as bad as some of the descriptions here, but historically irrational regarding the acquisition and keeping of stuff which is of no actual use). When he does try to clean up, it can be absolutely painful to watch. He has to determine the absolutely best strategy for dealing with a mess, then he has to lay out all of the items to be dealt with, then he has to examine and reminisce over each item, and only then can he seriously consider disposing of it or putting it away (in the absolutely best possible manner). When I try to help, he tells me I can’t because he knows exactly how he wants to do it.

[/QUOTE]

This is so my husband. I am utterly incapable of understanding what makes him do this. When we moved back to Utah, he spent a full day going through receipts. And when I say “going through receipts” I mean, “looking at and reading every single receipt for every single item we bought in the past 5 years and considering whether we need it and the best way to get rid of it.” I about hit the roof when I realized the vast majority of our clutter consisted of 1) receipts he wouldn’t part with 2)newspapers he wouldn’t part with 3)mail he wouldn’t part with (old bills, junk mail, whatever) and 4)magazines (there were lots of other things, but it’s those 4 that really pissed me off). I think we have every single Entertainment Weekly published in the past seven years, and when I called him on it, he, I swear to god, insists “They’re my magazines and I might need them one day.” I can’t even be in the house when he goes through the process. It makes me absolutely batshit. we moved into our new apartment 5 months ago, and everything is still in boxes. When I ask him why (he won’t let us unpack anything) he calmly explains he needs shelves and bins and crates and whatever the fuck else. He doesn’t need any of these things, but he’s convinced it’s “the right way” and so I’ve simply accepted that nothing will get unpacked ever.

At first I thought he was just being lazy when he refused to throw anything out. Our moving costs were much more than I expected, to the tune of several hundred dollars, because he will not throw anything out.

This behavior really scares me, because I am also a very messy person, but for completely different reasons. I’m not sentimental about anything, and I don’t feel the need to reminisce over receipts and movie tickets and magazines and concert programs. However, I’m daily rebelling against my parents. I know I’m doing this. I know it’s utterly stupid. I know I should just get over it, but I can’t help my very strong, “Fuck you, you can’t tell me what to do!” reaction when it comes to cleaning. My parents absolutely terrorized me over cleaning. Nothing was ever clean enough, ever. And then they would shout, scream, threaten, ground, slap, kick, claw, pull your hair.

So my husband is sentimental over every piece of garbage that passes through our lives and I’m incapable of getting over the childish need to rebel as long and as hard as I can.

80

[QUOTE=Mama Tiger]
I think I’d put myself at about .5 on the squalor scale. I tend to ignore floors – sweeping, vacuuming, and dusting are the bane of my existence – and I let things pile up in certain areas. But I also go through and at least sort the crap out on a regular basis, and toss out what isn’t actively useful. <snip>
[/QUOTE]

That’s about where I am, too. The kitchen and bathroom gets cleaned regularly, the sheets and towels get changed regularly, I do laundry regularly, and the floors - well, I have house shoes. The bane of my existence is the clutter. One of my challenges is that I like to store things OUT, not inside other things. I need shelves lining every room of my house, not closets and drawers.

I think I might clean and pack stuff up to take to charity this weekend. :slight_smile: