There was an interesting segment on 20/20 recently, which focused specifically on the children of hoarders. The intervention-type reality shows focus primarily on the hoarder, and his or her personal emotions and feelings, and only incidentally with the effect on children raised in such environments.
There is a follow-up interview with Jason, the son of hoarder Augustine in New Orleans. Her story was featured on the second season premiere of A&E’s Hoarders, one of the worst cases ever seen by professionals, with human and animal feces throughout the house.
There is also an interview with Jessie Sholl, who wrote the memoir, Dirty Secret, about the effects of her mother’s hoarding. She actually got scabies while trying to clear and clean her mother’s house.
The framing story of the two teenage daughters of a woman about to be featured on A&E’s show is also difficult to watch. I noticed, as perhaps only another child of a hoarder could, the mother start to blame the girls for the mess several times. This is why I rarely watch these shows, because the shame and visceral fury comes right back to me, although my childhood home has literally been torn down.
The professional being interviewed makes the very good point that children of hoarders feel like we didn’t get the basics on how to live our lives. I literally read books and observed other people to figure out things like how often you should change your bed linens or how many times you could use a bathtowel before washing it.
I remember that awesome thread! I thought I’d posted in it but I don’t see my name. My mom was a hoarder and a cat collector. It wasn’t nearly as bad as some of those episodes, but our kitchen often looked like some of those featured. Just piles and piles everywhere, dirty dishes that only got washed as a piece was needed. We usually used paper plates and plastic ware instead. We never cleaned up after ourselves, instead we’d have mass projects for remodeling, redecorating, and rearranging. Junk piles would be redistributed. Very little would ever be thrown away, but we were good with tossing empty food boxes and cans after a while. Our fridge was often disgusting though.
We were pretty good with not letting the cat poop stray too far from the box, but it was always full because we had ten or more cats at a time usually. My mom loved having baby kittens around. We had one mama cat we kept forever and she always had a either a fresh brood or one simmering. I don’t remember a stink but I do remember balls of cat hair everywhere. Clothes and blankets covered with it. I still had a happy childhood. I wasn’t embarrassed about our living conditions or anything like that. It seemed at the time more “lived in” than my friends’ homes, but as an adult I see how bad it was. Especially after watching Hoarders.
I find myself easily falling into the same patterns, especially when I get depressed. I have to be very, very careful. I’ve collected cats in the past. I am not the neatest people. My closets get stuffed but I will go through them when the seasons change and it helps that I’m so poor I can’t feed that compulsion to shop, although I will say when we’ve had a little play money I love doing yard sales and Goodwill, and I’ve come home with some stuff I never used.
Just over the past few days I’ve been watching Hoarders. I think I watched a few back when you made that thread, but I’m on season 3 now, just starting the one with the lady with the freshly deceased cats. I can’t even imagine that. I can’t imagine knowing someone like that and not doing everything in my power to help them but then, it doesn’t seem that anyone ever stepped in and helped my mom.
There was a really sad episode of Hoarders that just aired last month. One of the cases prominently featured friction between the father and daughter. His name was Ron. I don’t usually watch the show, but happened upon it… and this was a BAD CASE. Life-threateningly bad. You could not walk into his kitchen without stepping up onto two piles of stuff, arranged like precarious steps. He kept towering piles of sheet music, old newspapers, collectibles, old comics, and books in his kitchen, but purposely left an open flame burning 24/7 on his gas stove running to keep the place warm. :eek: He also had voluntarily stopped treating prostate cancer which had metastasized to his brain (because he thought traditional medicine had “done enough”), so he probably wasn’t thinking clearly (or maybe he was actively sabotaging the home so he would die there without it being “his fault,” I don’t know). But he’s been hoarding for years and years, so it started before the cancer was even an issue.
His daughter wanted to move back in with him to help him take care of himself, but his junk had moved its way into her room and it wasn’t inhabitable in that state. The bed he slept on was underneath a broken wooden support with piles of junk balanced on top of it (like a bunk bed or loft, kind of, that he slept on the bottom part of). When they attempted to clean the stuff over the top of the bed, you could see that the junk on top of it was kind of holding everything together, because the support just fell apart right after. Eventually it would have given way due to load shift, maybe while he was sleeping under it, dumping hundreds of pounds of shit onto the bed (and smothering him).
He ended up ordering them out of the house because he couldn’t handle the cleanup anymore. Early in the show, he implied to his daughter several times that the stuff was more important to him than her, and ordered her out of his house more than once. His hoarding had caused his wife to divorce him years before that, too.
In the text at the end of the show, they said that the father had given his post-hoarding therapy sessions to his daughter. So that was nice, at least, and maybe they’re on the journey to reconciliation (though tbh he’s probably going to die soon from the cancer anyway). The psychologist that came out to help him was saying how the conditions obligated him to call Adult Protective Services. So, Ron is probably going to lose his right to live unassisted. And rightly so. I’ve seen and heard about many neglected homes due to hoardery, but I’ve never heard of a case where the person was living in SUCH a recklessly dangerous situation. And he’s a retired teacher, so he’s an educated guy and “should” know better… it’s really sad what hoarding can do to people.
I enjoyed seeing the follow up with Jason. The segment on Hoarders with his mom was just heartbreaking to watch, but I sure had a lot of respect for Jason. I know that I could not have handled that situation with as much dignity myself.
I had a grandmother who was a borderline hoarder. The only reason she never descended into true problem hoarding was her vast, enormous house. (She crammed her hoard unseen into walk-in closets and two huge bedrooms, plus two large attics). Also, she had money to hire a housekeeper to come twice a week to keep the house clean. Even so, when she passed away… what a ungodly mess there was. The sheer volume of crap she had accumulated made more than one family member take a good hard look at their own habits and change!
The clutter level of our entire family, spread over several households, went way, way down after that cleanup. Even today, I shy away from bringing anything into my house, just because I don’t want to have the make the decision to get rid of it later, or worse, fail to make that decision and wind up with a mess like Grandmother’s.
I have to admit that episode of Hoarders that featured Jason’s mother Augustine caused some post-traumatic flashback sort of reaction for me. My heart was beating too fast and I had to consciously calm myself. It hit far too close to home, although my childhood experience was mostly in the middle levels of hoarding and squalor. Augustine was a lifelong New Orleanian, like my mom. She had that distinctive accent, like my mom. She was overweight and sort of humped over with developing osteoporosis, like my mom. She would go outside of her hovel to smoke and watch the neighborhood, like my mom. She claimed to have asthma but only ‘wheezed’ when looking for sympathy or to defuse confrontation, LIKE MY MOM. Aaaaah!
It’s only been in the last five years or so that I happened to discover that one of my maternal aunts is a full-blown hoarder as well. A cousin and I bonded over discussing our experiences as children of hoarders… get this… while cleaning out the backlog of hoarding from my grandparents’ home after their deaths. (We filled a 40-foot construction dumpster three times.) It’s hard to deny that there is a family component going on with them, but I don’t know if it’s genetic or just a matter of similar personality disorders and modeled behavior. I know that most people in my mother’s family would be considered to have high-strung or difficult temperaments. The big buzz concept in counseling these days is resilency, and my mother and most of her family have zilch. Very few coping skills. There are also a lot of us younger relatives who are somewhere on the ADD/ADHD spectrum, so that could be a factor.
My father hoarded rocks. Mostly beautiful, carved or polished rocks. Flat polished rocks, skull shaped rocks, carved jade, egg shaped, spherical, carved animals… you name it. He mostly ordered them from Ebay, and there were boxes and boxes of unopened rocks. They are all over every flat surface and all over the floor with very little room to walk.
When he died, it was hard to know what to do with the rocks. Many of them are probably valuable, but they are so heavy and bulky.
I’m a hoarder. I’m not nearly as bad now as I have been, but I don’t really have it under control. I’d say my house is at first-degree squalor now, but have been up to third degree in the past.
I was very attracted to the “Hoarders” show when it first came on, but I was only able to watch one episode. It made me cry. I felt such empathy for the people and understood completely how panicky they were when others tried to throw their stuff away and how hard it was for them to make any kind of decision regarding the cleanup.
I’m pretty sure my Dad’s a borderline hoarder but as my mother never lets him bring any of his useless crap (old tools mainly, scythes, two handed saws and the like all the way up to a sixty+ year-old bulldozer) into the house my upbringing was relatively normal.
To be fair some of the acquisitions are actually used (he loves making little tracks around the place “to get firewood” withthe bulldozer) and I have fond memories of scything the orchard with my late grandfather (keep you blade stupidly sharp and take long sweeping strokes) most of the stuff lies rusting away in various sheds around the place.
After reading about the different degrees it looks like I may be coming close to that first degree. It could be because we were, up until 2 weeks ago, six in a two bedroom house. With seven pets, five of which are indoors only. It’s just so cramped we have to move piles to sit, to prepare meals, etc. If I don’t sweep and dust at least every other day we get fur and dust balls everywhere.
My SO and I split so now there’s only five and we found a home for the biggest dog. But it’s still pretty tight. My little girl and I share the living room so there’s a big bed instead of a sofa. I don’t really have piles now and a big reason is because I started watching Hoarders.
Oh and believe me I have cried and cried nearly every episode. I don’t think there’s any way I could ever be brave enough to have camera crews and other strangers in my house and I definitely wouldn’t want them touching my stuff. It gives me the willies just thinking about it.
I know of a couple where the husband is a hoarder. He’s a veteran, retired, and goes to garage sales during the day, hauling stuff home. Their house is packed. There’s only one entrance, a 2 foot wide space up the stairs into the house, in the back. A fire hazard! The yard is full of cars, parts of cars, half cars, trailers, old bikes, motorcycles. Countless trash bags full of stuff, everywhere, who even knows whats in them? The wife said they had it under control some years ago, he got treatment, and it kind of crept back. To look at them, you’d never know they live in such squalor. It’s a shame.
It’s such a huge undertaking to correct the situation, I guess she’s given up.
I thought it was this thread (but it wasn’t) in which someone recommended the book Stuff, on hoarding. I’m reading it now, and it’s fascinating, so thank you whoever you were. I can identify certain traits that I have, and that my daughter has–we’re not hoarders, but I can see problematic behaviors in us that I’ve been working on for a while now. I watch the shows because of the tips and the motivation, and I’ve improved, I think.
But there’s always more stuff, so today I got rid of some.
I can understand the compulsion to keep things. I figure it’s like constantly thinking that you’ll need it some day and how bad you’d feel if you threw it out and ended up needing it. Or for another type, feeling like you need to get a bargain in order to prove your worth as a human being.
What I don’t get is why hoarders don’t see empty space as an asset. They don’t seem to understand that air is a useful thing to have, and that bringing in a magazine isn’t increasing your assets; it’s merely converting it from space/air to something tangible and material.
Can someone explain that to me? Why isn’t air treasured as much as baubles?
I’m not a hoarder (I have too much crap, for sure, but aside from some clothes on the floor in the bedroom I’m not past ‘messy’ unless you count my storage locker ) but I think the thought process of a lot of them is not so much “I might need it later” (though that certainly figures in) but that they have emotional attachments to items. I’ve caught myself doing it occasionally (“Oh, this thing reminds me of when I did this, so I should keep it”) but I think hoarders do it to the extreme. I don’t get how people can save McDonald’s wrappers or other things that are essentially trash…but on the other hand I’m carefully saving a little stick-on security tag that I got from the hospital last month when going to visit my mom (who died there). Maybe the hoarder might see that McDonald’s wrapper and it reminds them of a lunch they had with a friend, or a happy day they had.
Hoarding makes me sad. I started watching the show on Netflix a few months past and it’s inspired me to slowly clean up even the relatively minor amount of clutter in my house. I never want to end up like that.
Okay I get the animal feces throughout the house…you just quit cleaning up after the pets. But human feces throughout the house? Is there some link between being a hoarder and just taking a dump anywhere you damn well please?
So there’s a correlation between hoarding and illogical thinking?
The toilet is broken, I know, I’ll just start randomly shitting all over the house, instead of confining it to one place and throwing it out.
