My mom is a hoarder and it was because her mother didn't have any emotional attachment to anything, especially not inanimate objects because she grew up in poverty. My hoarder mother saw her treasured possessions taken away so she can barely get rid of anything. I'm just here to take care of her in her twilight years and I will handle her hoard once she is gone. Thankfully it is a very clean hoard. No trash. Just boxes of books and items.
You are blessed in that respect. My mother wouldn’t clean or do dishes so there were always fruit flies in the kitchen around old food crusted dishes and all the pots and skillets …That was just the kitchen. I have to be half dead to not do dishes every day as it’s instant depression to see a dirty dish and pan
I chose to respect people who have actual stuff kept reasonably clean. Even if I have no feelings for these books, they're still books and they mean something to her. Trash and expired food and moldy clothing is horrifying and depressing.
Should consider selling them online after its time and find someone who can appraise things. You'll likely find very old items in there, but wear full PPE gear first, its gonna get nasty.
My aunt was a bit of a hoarder. She kept so much yet she was very clean with it all. When she died, we had to clean out her his because my cousin couldn't afford to keep paying for it. Because the f how clean she always kept it, we never really realized how much stuff she had
I've tried to adopt the minimalist approach after my family lost our home and we had to move into a small apartment, but it just made me feel depressed. It was like I was enforcing the notion that I don't deserve anything nice or have the right to get attached to anything. So I started reminding myself that I pay all my bills on time, have no debt, work hard for my money and that I am allowed to buy myself something nice every so often. As a result I feel better but I still have very few items to my name. I think it's from of fear of losing my shelter all over again and needing to pack up as much as possible while trying to find a new place to live. I'm working on it and I'm still working to provide myself with a stable living situation that I can be truly comfortable with.
Becuase I moved about 7 times in my life I only keep stuff that is easy to pack. Clothing enough for a week, books and a computer. Basically all I own. However I do like even if it come from trauma
I watched Hoarders and screamed at the TV. My Grandma was a hoarder and crazy as a loon. She hoarded cats and trash. I am such a minimalist because of her that my home doesn’t look like I’ve moved in and I’ve been here 20 years.
Unintentionally became cat horders. My sister got a kitten. Never fixed her. She had kittens as soon as the last litter learned to climb out of the box. Her kittens had kittens and so forth. We finally got the girls fixed. I feel so bad because I tried to get them homes but most people wanted to sell them to science so I was very picky about where I gave them to. Though I knew since a lot of them were inbred they needed special care and I tried to do it all myself. Lots of kittens lost. I named and buried each one because I treated them like my own. Fed them every two hours and held them all the time to keep them warm. I gave the ones I could save to trusted friends and they are so loved I'm proud of them. Happy that no more kittens will be born. It was very hard to see them in such bad conditions.
I'm glad you did that. My dad did the same thing your sister did and didnt care that the house got filled with cats, I'm willing to bet it was because of his even dumber wife. He eventually got rid of them all but for years they lived like that
This is what happened to my family. My mom kept "rescuing cats" but they weren't fixed so numbers go up quickly when 3 females are pregnant at the same time. It was that way my whole life. I feel you on having to bury so many babies and inbreds with health problems. Its so sad. Luckily we're down to 5 and only have one unfixed male which will change very soon and we can separate him when needed until he can be fixed. I'm 100% a cat person but my male cat (he's mine not a family cat) will probably be one of my last since my childhood I just got so burnt out from burying them and after a point my mom just had me to put them in the trash. :(
My grandparents on both sides grew up during the Great Depression, and this resulted in both of my grandmas developing a spending/hoarding problem. This had an impact on both of my parents: my dad never wanted to spend money, and my mom never wanted to throw anything away. Our house was always cluttered and messy, which was understandable since I had four younger siblings. However, once we all became old enough to clean up after ourselves, the house still remained a mess. It was NEVER the level you'd see on shows like Hoarders, but it was bad enough that nobody ever wanted to invite friends over. Last year I finally got treatment for my ADHD and I was able to actually focus for the first time, so I spent weeks decluttering the house and there were surprisingly no complaints from my parents. I unearthed things that hadn't been touched in the 20+ years since we moved in. We found all of my dad's photos and childhood toys, which he thought were lost forever. The house is still a mess, but we can at least move around a lot easier & find things when we need them (for the most part).
My dad was a hoarder, kind of but not really. He just didn’t bother to clean, food got moldy, dirt everywhere, clothes in random places. He was a chronic alcoholic, chain smoker, slept all the time. Yes he was depressed and no he never tried to ask for help, either with the cleaning or therapy. I tried a few times as a kid but some of the filth was so ”ingrained” into the surface I could get muscle fatigue. He wasn’t a bad person, just gave up on everything about himself.
Alcohol so much makes depression worse, unfortunately, and also leads to a form of alcohol related dementia. I'm sure you tried your best to help, but it's not up to a child.
He was a so-called "messy". Hoarders collect because they develop a sentimental value and attachment to their items. Messies simply struggle to clean and keep the space around them orderly, due to mental health issues.
@@martaleszkiewicz5115 yes,alcohol is a mood suppressant, it can make you seriously depressed if you drink too much or become dependent on it. People who are depressed ,or even just chroniclie stressed, don't find the motivation to do things like clean,it's hard enough simply to keep on living.
Even my parents lost their parents within couple of months. All of 4 of us were diagnosed with depression. We all were grieving so bad that we couldn't get out of bed . We don't have any other family or people who support us so for few months, our rented house was dirt and full of trash . Last month only , we got the help we need and we start feel better. So we were able to do chores one by one but landlord found out how we lived past few months and gave us eviction notice and other tenants took a video of the house and shared it . We tried explaining to them how we have depression. They said that it's all in our head. Now the neighborhood calls us " mental family" or " drug dealers" just because we were struggling
My brother-in-law's mother filled a spacious suburban home with crap, then blacked out the windows so no one could see. He grew up in a dark maze that always smelled faintly of rotting mice. Couldn't have friends over and was thought of as odd because of how he reacted to others' houses and belongings. At least partly as a side effect of cave life, he's agoraphobic, and very anxious about his charisma, hygiene, and appearance. He and my sister were literally months getting rid of it all when he got the house. Turns out there's a maximum number of bags your town's trash service will take from you each week. My dad's got a bit of it too. His basement has four broken VCRs (that I know of), what I'd estimate to be three thousand pounds of old magazines, and so on, and so on. I think the four broken VCRs really hammer home what hoarding is like. They're not just broken. It's not just a technology that's been stone cold dead for twenty years. It's not just that he has no tapes I'm aware of to play on them if they did work. It's not just that there are four of them. It's not just that he hasn't touched any of them since putting them there decades ago, nor will he ever. It's not just that he's never once thought about getting rid of them and would be appalled at the suggestion. It's *ALL* those things.
My mom loved her hoard more than us. She verbally chose it over us again and again. I say this so no one can say "No, she didn't choose it, la la la". She. Chose. It. She told us repeatedly she wished we had never been born. We had the goat paths, rotted food, everything. Sadly, when she died, my family chose to make her a saint in their memories. I'm glad to be free and not like her.
I don’t really think she deserves to be a saint.In my opinion if she wished her kids would have never been born and that she chose her hoard over her own children then she is a psychopath
Former hoarder here... it took me breaking away and moving to the other side of the country with nothing but a crappy laptop and a spare shirt. I let my family toss what had no value. And now i try to focus on things i can use. Yes I do collect model kits and memorabilia, but the limit is set and I cant let myself go past it. Im only 35
My sister is a hoarder. Her stuff not only fills her house, kids rooms included, but the two storage buildings on our property. I can’t allow my son to visit without me because there is so much that it’s stacked on every available surface. In most places in there I have to walk sideways because there isn’t enough space to use my crutches otherwise. And definitely not enough space to use my wheelchair. I’m not sure what started all of it but it’s awful. She’s a cancer survivor and has graft versus host disease which causes lots of issues for her. She has fallen several times and my mom and I have tried to talk to her about letting someone help her but she was a jeweler and is terrified someone will make off with her tools and any items of value she has. She gets angry at me when I donate things my son has no interest in anymore. I’m not a minimalist but too much clutter is dangerous. Anything of sentimental value is kept, but organized and out of the way. It makes me sad because she feels like her gifts to him aren’t appreciated, but he’s almost six… he doesn’t need teething rings or baby toys he can’t really use anymore. I have a few things from his infant years in a box that I add special things to every year but if there’s so much that you don’t know what you have, it isn’t healthy. One thing I’ve learned from when we shared a house is what is really important and what is not
My grandfather was a hoarder. Literally eat, sleep, watch tv in a 5’feet radius in a 2000+ sq ft house. Place was full of old stuff specially mails and old news papers stack over 5 ft tall everywhere. The place would literally burn down in world record time if a fire got there.
My house looks like a hoarders place, because the few days my depression is not crippling me I need to fix things (urgently)... but usually by the time I have unearthed/bought/collected the necessery things (for hanging a lamp f.e.) I run out of steam, so all that happened is I rearranged a pile or started another 'projectpile' - which is depressing enough all by itself :P I have help now, but it is very, very slow going and no light at the end of the tunnel at all. My place is rather small so the chaos looks quite overwhelming. And there are always things that pop up and need attention *now* so the 'current projects' probably never get done. If you cant work at a normal pace, then babysteps will have to do, many many many babysteps....
See if you can somehow hide or put away each projectpile except for one so you can see that threre is only one to do. I can be overwhelming to see all these unfinished things that need doing but only seeing on thing that needs doing makes it much easier to get up to do that one thing.
This is exactly what my bf does but he has a whole house, a garage and some sheds! I've tried to help him for a long time now but it's getting too difficult for me as I'm also very depressed so I figure he can do it on his own (tried to help him move for a year now, mainly cleaning the house so it can be sold) but if not then K dunno what to do really...
@@noheadshotbear4254 Great idea, but unfortunately there is no hiding in a 1 1/2 bedroom appartment. But you are spot on about the overwhelming effect all those to-do-piles have om me :) (Thanks for understanding!) I tried boxing up the smaller to-do's and now there are boxes everywhere and I have even more trouble locating what I need -- so much for my bright ideas... (That sounds a lot like the hoarderhouses as well: "it should be around here somewhere, but haven't seen it in years / can't remember where it went".)
@@damphest3283 wow, depressed yourself and still helping others, that rules so much! (I can do things at other peoples houses to help them a bit, but not my own - so that sounds familiar.) Sometimes it really helps to get outside help just for one project. So at least that gets done/ is off the to-do-list for good.
I struggle with hoarding tendencies because my mother is such a minimalist and guilt tripped me into throwing away so many things I wasn’t quite ready to yet. Throwing things away stresses me out because I’ve either developed emotional attachment to it or ‘I don’t know if I’ll need it’. It used to be worse when I was younger and my Mum stopped exerting so much control over how I kept my own bedroom. My boyfriend is helping me work through it and it’s getting better. Even with all that though, I still know and knew hoarding was a terrible habit to get into.
Both my parents were hoarders, for different reasons. My dad was addicted to mail-order shopping. He'd buy loads of worthless crap just because he thought it was cool, cute, or clever. My mom hoards out of sentimentality. She'd save stuff like my baby socks, old beat-up furniture and worn out kitchen appliances that she and my dad bought together, and all her sewing stuff- despite the fact that she'd given up sewing years earlier due to her severely arthritic hands. THEN she'd get upset with me for re-organizing her bounty so it wasn't such a massive fire and / or trip-and-fall hazard, which it clearly was. I tried explaining this to her, but she just didn't quite get it. Only in the final months of her life did she understand. Trying to maneuver her wheelchair around tons of boxes and mountains of junk were no fun for either of us. My dad passed away in December 2018. My mom passed away last October. I miss them both terribly ( despite my dad being a bit of a douche to me during my younger years ), but i HATE the mess they left behind.
Unfortunately, for mostly older people, the reasons they hoard us that many had to grow up during The Great Depression when they were kids. Storing scraps if trash was valued, you never knew if it would be useful for something in the future. That mindset, carries on until now. Even then, when there is a shortage of things every now and then, it'd never be as bad as it was in the 1930's and early 1940's. It shaped a generation of people.
Absolutely! This has always been my reasoning as well because my aunt and my grandmother are both hoarders and when I’m depressed I do the same thing. I spiral and everything that needs get done stands no chance of being conquered. I live with a painful chronic illness so I have A LOT of repressed baggage outside of the “normal” stressors in life that need to be addressed. Coincidentally I am a Psychiatric RN so I absolutely understand that most people who hoard do so because of past trauma that went unaddressed and it’s extremely sad. Unfortunately, I’m sure that the pandemic will also cause a “mass depression” if you will. There are still stores in my area that ALWAYS run out of necessities and cleaning supplies. It’s wild. I lost my fiancé to COVID last year and Lord knows if I’d had the opportunity to hold on to ALL of his belongings (we didn’t live together yet at the time of his passing) so his family made good use of it and that’s a beautiful thing but I brought us his passing to say that trauma is ALWAYS the reason behind these kinds of behaviors and it hurts that mental health care sucks in this country. Worldwide to be honest. It’s terrible. 😢
The woman who hoarded all that construction stuff. Is everyone just gonna glance over the "that's when we discovered we had a scorpion and camel spider problem"!!!!!!
My mom was a hoarder and extremely emotional neglectful. This is a rarely talked about childhood trauma but I often went to school with matted hair, smelly clothes and had toilets that weren’t working at home. I wish someone called CPS but hoarding is so secretive and we seemed like a normal family on the outside. The main emotions I felt as a child was shame, disgust and loneliness. She definitely chose her stuff over us and no one helped us. I go between no contact and contact but as I’ve become a parent myself I’ve gotten more disgusted and angry at her. I can’t imagine putting my children through that.
I dated a guy whose mom was a hoarder. She wasn't the filthy kind with trash & poop everywhere, everything was somewhat organized but there was just SO MUCH of it. Every room was packed with rubbermaid bins of stuff, you had to walk carefully and squeeze through some areas. She'd go through phases where she'd buy different things- for a couple months it'd be tons of crafting stuff, then she'd lose interest and chuck it all into bins, then she'd find something else to start buying. Her husband was visibly depressed, the only space in the house that was his was a rocking chair in the bedroom and a small part of the closet. He built a shed in the backyard for his tools and spent most of his time out there. Her stuff took up the rest of the house and every flat surface in their bedroom was covered with creepy porcelain dolls. They had a wall of shelves & bins dividing the living room into 2 rooms and bins of stuff served as tables. I'm surprised the house didn't collapse from the weight of all the stuff in the attic, the place was a massive fire hazard too. She was a really nice lady and we were actually pretty close, she opened up to me once about her mother being very neglectful while she was growing up so I think she hoarded to fill those unmet emotional needs.
Been slowly reeling my parents hoarding back the last several years. It was starting to get pretty bad while I was in college, but my grandma moved in with them and she put her foot down. She forced them to clear out a ton of junk. The garage and basement are still pretty messy but less than hoarder level now. A big part is because of poverty. I got in a argument with my dad about a bunch of rolls of leftover hotel carpet, when I finally said if we need to replace the carpet we can buy new carpet, we aren't in poverty anymore. He just said "oh." Like he literally was just deep in the poverty mindset of every single thing could be useful one day.
My mom didnt get rid of anything she owned, even if she never used it. She had no issue throwing out things I had. She'd get so mad at me for calling her out. Everything I owed was trash to her. Everything she owed was treasure. She would rip childhood toys from my arms and get rid of them, but those damn high heels she never wore the whole 25 years I lived there were valuable and needed to stay. She still blames me and my siblings for the way the house looks.
29:37 I'm struggling with hoarding behavior in the early stages. I've had such bad luck with hard drives and such breaking that I don't feel safe leaving anything in the cloud, and started clinging to physical media like books and CDs and DVDs and VHS tapes. I also had a rough childhood and books were my escape, and my attachment to them is emotionally heavy. My folks gave one of my bookshelves to charity when I was in college, and felt guilty after learning that I remembered pretty much every book and its emotional context and its provenance... When I lost my insurance and went off my antidepressants and didn't have the energy to read the books, it was devastating. Books just kept piling up from every source. They stopped sparking joy, and I woke up and couldn't move in the house. Because it wasn't too much crap, but my ability to organize collapsed, and now the books are too far away and I forget about them, and that's just cruel to the books. I'm getting a little better since working in a German language library, a lot of which involves me sorting out old books to sell that no one can read anymore (my city used to be German immigrants, most of these came over in the 1920s and they're all in Fraktur and donated by grandchildren who can't read the alphabet even if they speak the language), and a lot of them I have to basically recycle because the local Used Booksellers only take stuff with ISBNs. I've turned a lot of them into art projects, and taken some home, but I can finally stop feeling like books are somehow too sacred to destroy. I'm downloading ebooks so I can sell the originals and make some space. And these threads are jarring, this is gonna be me sometime. Once in college, my roommate cleared the kitchen and packed all my stuff in a cupboard, and I had a panic attack. It was like I didn't own anything. The cruelty is that I need to see everything, and yet having everything out means stuff is on top of other stuff and I can't see it. I haven't found a way to make it stop hurting when I give stuff away, much less throw it out. There's gotta be something meaningful that other people see in it, but like... it hurts. Minimal houses give me existential dread. I haven't resolved this yet. I want to figure out how to live with less stuff, because I want a cat someday, and I couldn't subject one to living in a place with piles of papers on all the best perching spots. I just don't know how to make the hurt stop when I remove stuff. Any of you figured this out yet? TL;DR Inchoate hoarder needs help before it gets worse, wants to know how to make giving away her books not hurt so much.
Hey, I've lived with someone who had OCD (hoarding is a subset of OCD), and I just want to encourage you to get help. Cognitive Behavior Therapy is a great place to start because they'll help you work through the "why am I like this" and the "how do I stop thinking like this?" They may also put you on an SSRI to help with anxiety surrounding getting rid of items. Also keep in mind that no every therapist is going to be the "right one" for you. It's alright to jump from therapist to therapist in search of the one that "gets" you and can really help you. The process to get better can be hard and painful, but just remember that it gets better over time and any little improvement is still improvement. You got this!
I hope you are able to get help since you are already aware of having these anxieties and difficulty letting go of things. Having a healthy attachment to things is doable to be sure. I have some hoarding and anxiety in my family so I am vigilant for it, but I also allow myself to sometimes feel regret that some things I had as a child are no longer mine, but I like to think they are able to make someone else happy and can make room for new things to make me happy. Telling yourself something like that may help because practicing a new way of thinking is how you think differently. But yeah, not a therapist so hope you find some helpful tools to not be controlled by anxiety.
I also struggle with hoarding tendencies. It’s important to remind yourself the hurt is temporary, it isn’t fatal, and it will fade. It’s important to be logical about it. Mine is with crafting stuff, and I make myself new rules to keep things in control. -I must have a designated project for it, or it is a material I use frequently enough to warrant keeping it on hand. -I must have time for said project in the near future, and it must be more than a minimum amount (more than a 1/2 yard of fabric, no scraps). -I have a defined location for each thing, and once that location is full I can’t add to it without removing something else. This forces me to prioritize and limit my hoard. -I started with easy things that I’m not as attached to, and am working my way toward the more emotional stuff. Sometimes I go through things 3 or 4 times to whittle it down. I make categories: goes now, revisit later, definitely stays. Make rules for your books. A designated number of book shelves, reserved for the absolute favorites. The rest can go. Maybe donate to a library, and you can still check them out if you feel the need to read them. Sit with the discomfort and hurt of letting go. A lot of our hoarding is trying to avoid that discomfort, or appeasing intrusive thoughts. Realize that waiting until it doesn’t hurt is the problem. If you sit with it instead of avoid it, it gets easier and passes. But it is a skill that must be learned. Sometimes we need help to learn that part, and seeking a professional to assist in processing those feelings and intrusive thoughts is an option. Best wishes to you, and you are not alone in this struggle. You can do it, it just takes dedication and time. 💗
I may have read too much into your post, but it seems that you assign feelings to inanimate objects. This was something that I struggled with when I was younger, and occasionally now as well. It can be a sign of mental illness or neurodivergency, which may be something to look into. Knowing the underlying issue can be very helpful regarding your mental health and behavioral patterns.
My father was a hoarder. Apparently, he started when he was a teenager. By the time I was 30, he'd filled two bedrooms, 4 or 5 sheds and a 4-car garage w his crap. I'd moved out as a teenager and my sibling moved out at about 23, also due to the hoarding. Hoarding is based on anxiety, the experts say. In my father's case, the anxiety was fear of arrest and/or being beaten to death for child molesting. Edit: I forgot to mention the broken-down cars. At last count, the five in the driveway and under the piles of crap covering the front lawn plus the four in the garage. And a couple of old boats in the back garden. Edit 2: Forgot to add that he filled our cubby house to the brim a week after our uncle built it for us.
Also, I was diagnosed with dysthymic disorder (persistent depressive disorder) and as a result I have a really hard time keeping my personal space clean being as I have no motivation to clean it even when it becomes unsanitary. When I finally get around to cleaning, I cry every time I finish because I immediately feel so much better and the depression lessens a bit. It's a never-ending cycle
I used to be a hoarder as a child. I had lots of siblings and rarely had things of my own. So everything I got I kept in a case with a lock. I was obsessed and would keep all sorts of crap like key rings, post cards etc.
One of my great aunt's hoarded pictures and a bunch of stuff. Apparently she took the cake topper of my grandparents wedding cake( they got married probably in 1960- 61) and kept it in her fridge for years... it's probably still there.
This is my biggest fear! I have ADHD so I have trouble with both impulses control and organization- I have to go through my space 2 times a year and recognize ( with help since I get overwhelmed with figuring out how to organize)
I didnt realize my mother was a hoarder until after i moved out of the house, my brother wasn't doing anything around the house and she was an alcoholic so that probably attributed a lot, she also would take in any animal that was thrown her way. Did get her to move into a smaller house since she didnt need a 4 bedroom house anymore and that did help with being able to clean up easier. We did also rehoming almost all of the animals she took in too.
My parents were hoarders, specifically my mother. They moved to another country and my husband and I took over their house. It's hard to deal with the amount of stuff left behind by them.
Grandmother is a hoarder/shopping addict and will also buy bulk foods. She watches a lot of HGTV and has this delusion that this is what her house looks like. She’s made my dad turn several rooms into closets for her, there’s piles of junk everywhere, rotting food in the kitchen, and she acts like bc she decorates that it’s fine. It’s not fine. There’s roaches and I want to go home.
That first story kinda made me think of me. I have a wife and son, my country is slowly being stolen dry and infighting by a cANCer of epic proportions. I've hoarded food and medicine for incase crap hits the fan. Not rooms full, but more than required. I've seen so many malnourished kids that I just want to keep my family from going starving, it really works on my mind. On a lighter side and I guess many have this issue, Hording of electronic components because, "you never know when you might need it." ;) ;) ;)
My dad is a hoarder. Mom keeps most of the house clean, but our den has a lot of useless shit in it, including a bed that has to be at least 20 years old now. I’ve only been in that room a handful of times. Our garage has so much shit in it that there is a very small walkway, and people can only walk in there single file. We have about 20 tires in our backyard, 10 cars that are completely dead, and one dead truck. He has at least two or three cars at his dads house, piles and piles of useless stuff, and multiple bikes. When Mom and I move out I don’t want to imagine how bad things will get.
My great aunt had a serious hoarding problem. She had significant mobility issues and lived thousands of miles away from any family, so no one knew how bad it was until she contracted MRSA and had to move into a care facility. My cousin discovered the nightmare that was her house when he went out to California to prepare it for sale. A service was hired to clean it out because my cousin, who is immunocompromised, didn't want to risk going inside himself. My aunt looked like she was heading in that direction, even voicing her concerns to family herself (at least she was aware of it). A major cleaning commenced so that carpets could be replaced with that easy-to-clean hardwood and we kept her from sliding back by speaking to a friend of hers who would take on shopping trips, essentially enabling her behavior. She's still a bit of a packrat, but it's not nearly as bad as before.
My dads gf had a neighbor who was secretly a hoarder. She wasn’t seen for like to weeks, when the authorities entered the ladies house, she was long dead. Her body was just resting among the crap she had accumulated over the years.
After my father passed away, my mother (separated from him for over 20 years but still legally married) and I decided to go to his townhome. Judging by just how much stuff was in the upstairs bedroom (otherwise unused), he hadn't set foot in that room in at least five years, and there was virtually stuff from the floor to the ceiling. Most of it no good to anybody, and the apartment itself was infested. After the first time, I wore hazmat Tyvek suits to make sure I didn't bring any infestation home. We were able to get most of the bottom floor of the place squared away and tossed in the garbage (what couldn't be salvaged), but we didn't even bother with the upstairs, save for a couple of items. There was just so much junk and useless plastic crap that would be of no use to anybody. Along with possessions abandoned by another of his ex-girlfriends that I never got to meet.
My grandfather’s aunt was a hoarder when she was alive. He told me about how he would go over to his cousin’s house as a kid and how there were piles of garbage blocking off whole sections of the house. She was also weird in other ways.
My Grandpa who I loved very dearly was a child of the depression used to hoard toilet paper, he would have been a champ during March 2020. All of his kids got a garbage bag of toilet paper when we cleaned out their house after they moved into assisted living and my dad and I still have some of it left.
My mother was somewhat of a hoarder, but there was a lady down the street from us that was so bad that the state stepped in ( or city, I guess) Her kitchen and bathroom didn't work, you couldn't get in them anyway. They never had their trash hauled away, it was all thrown in the backyard I know when she started being a hoarder, her husband was in the Navy and he divorced her, and she held on to every single thing after that. She had a good job, so she could afford to buy fast food etc. for the kids. I worked with a lady that was a hoarder.You would never have suspected it, she was always so put together for work and when we all used to go out. Hers started when her father died and she was in her early 60's. Then there was the math professor, that lived 2 blocks from us. All we know is that her neighbors complained to the city several times but she never did anything about it and just fell through the cracks. One day her neighbors broke into her house filmed all of the mess and sent it to a local news station. They ran the story and the city finally put a lien on her house and she was forced to moved out after the city took her house. Now this was not just an average nice little neighborhood, this was a really upscale area named Huntington Harbor, a very wealthy enclave of Huntington Beach. I am not a hoarder, but I admit I am not the best housekeeper in the world, but I don't have piles of crap in every room of my house.
The trick is with food hoarders is that you ask them to eat the spoiled food to prove that it is edible. Once they are incapactitated by food poisoning, then you clean out the fridge.
My fiancee is an animal hoarder and we currently have, I think, 20 dogs and five cats. Pretty soon I might make her make the choice between me and the animals. Due to the fact none of them are trained to go outside or use the litter box and I also can't afford to feed them as is. I only make about $800 or so a month and there are five people in the house that are, for the most part, irresponsible.
My dad was a hoarder. While he stayed with me after open heart surgery, my sister and brother cleared out 2 large dumpsters worth of junk from the house, some of it not even recognizable as to what it was. A year later, the house was filled up again. The house had no heat, and could not be insured. There was nothing I could do. Sadly, he died with all that junk in the house (he lived there 40 years). The house was sold for $295K because of the condition. Someone bought the house and flipped it. Didn't really change much other than replacing everything, the house is now worth 1.3 million (it's in the bay area of CA). I tried everything to help him out of his situation, but it ended up causing me to cut ties with most of my family after I was accused of trying to get a conservership in order to "take all his money" I had PLENTY of money and just wanted my dad to live in a clean, safe environment. After he died, the sibling who accused me ended up having to deal with everything. I wanted no part in it.
I don't care what I want to keep, i'm not having the smell of shxt and piss (human or animal) be in every room because a house/apartment is that disorganized. That would drive me insane itself.
So you have the habit of defecating all over the house.??? As "disorganization" doesn't smell of anything.. Or, are you saying you'd be hoarding feces,IF you were a Hoarder.? Wait,what ARE you saying.?
It is insane. When a house is so dirty that excrement and piss can go unnoticed for months underneath piles of posessions...to me that's hoarding no it's ands or buts. In the last year I've cleaned a room that had (probably a pound of) rodent droppings, underwear and sheets with skid marks, toilet paper with some unknown human excretion on it. Did it smell bad? Not in an obvious "i know what that is" way. Will I listen to anyone who says I'm overexagerating by calling my parents hoarders...nope. There's nothing wrong with having stuff, just don't have more stuff then you're willing to clean on a regular basis.
Have one in my family. 2 full houses and 5 storage lockers. All things that could be "fixed up"or "just needs cleaned up". Also, "some people collect those and could be sold for money." Hundreds of VHS tapes, multiple fancy China dish sets, tools, furniture, and random crap.
Man that minimalist one got me. My mom is a moderate hoarder but at the same time a complete neat freak. She made all 5 of her kids clean the entire house every day and if it wasn't done withing the three hours we had from the time we got out of school to the time she got home, she would completely lose it. Imagine trying to clean a hoarders house within three hours while simultaneously trying to do your homework and cook dinner. Every day she would bring more crap home. We literally had at least 4 trash bags full of both opened and unopened mail mixed together at any given time. I wasn't allowed to go through the mail because one time one of her checks got thrown away. This resulted in me never getting important mail like my tax info from work so I'd have to get all that stuff sent to my grandmothers house who lived an hour away just so I could file my taxes
it's interesting how people that are opposite can have the same little things in life. i wouldn't say my mom is a clean freak, but she really really hates having people over because they won't respect the home cleanliness rules (which she doesn't impose on guests, which i really don't understand, it's her home), so it was a miracle when she allowed me to have someone over (i was older, so i could watch over the guests, and I never had the want to invite people over anyways, i was kinda lonely lol). think mom always had a heart attack when my friend didn't take his shoes off before stepping on the carpet (after my friends left she said she thought that would be common sense lol)
also me looking for childhood stuff and finding out my mom donated it, I'm so used to it I never got upset, and it's actually good for me because I don't like getting rid of certain things like books, childhood toys, etc, or don't like going over the process of separating the stuff so if it wasn't for mom I'd still have everything
My mom grew up in poverty around alot of hoarders and my Gran had severe depression raising her as well (neglect of personal needs is a symptom) so my mom now has a fear of clutter and dirt. Growing up with undiagnosed autism and having my happy little crafts I made from clutter for my dolls and my random collections of crap from elementary thrown out was terrible. She did feel bad about hurting me but not about taking my things... so now I don't craft or DIY I just by things already made
My father was a hoarder. He filled the cubby house my uncle built us in just days. The 4 car garage had 4 cars in it, buried under jars of rusty nails, rotting timber bought before I was born, etc etc. I left home early and never returned until my mother died and I was allowed to choose something of hers to keep. The living room was half full by then. Hoarding is, usually, caused by anxiety. In my father's case that anxiety was fear of being arrested for child molesting. I have purges of clutter periodically and my claustrophobia very likely comes from living w his hoarding as a child.
When I was a kid, I went to an old lady's house for religion classes, and she had so much stuff we took classes in her front yard. Me, being an oblivious child, didn’t thought much of it until my sister mentioned it several years later. I wonder if she's still alive.
We only ever used about 1/4 max of each room. I remember my parents wanting to get a pet door for our cats. I knew they wouldn't go through with it, but they picked one out and brought it home. it was tossed on the pile and hasn't been seen since. that was 13 years ago. I don't miss living there, but I wish I could have taken some of the pets
I was punished by having things "removed"; if I was very lucky, I could "earn" it back by being good (whatever that meant) or getting better grades (never quite good enough.) She did keep a few things, so that when company was around the house wouldn't look completely bare. So yeah, I like to have a lot of stuff around and I struggle with a lot of other issues too.
My husband keeps things because someone might need it but can't find it to give it to them or we'll use it as soon as we get all the pieces. He has all the pieces but can't find them all to put together to use it. And we have a bread maker, apple peeler, onion maker, ect ....that we never use just taking up room.
My father hoards food and old broken computer equipment. His house is filthy with an infestation of rodents and bugs. Unfortunately myself and my 2 younger children live with him. When ever we try to throw away things he gets upset. We just try to stay in a separate area of the house and I try to stay away as long as I can throughout the day.
I have hoarding tendencies specifically in regards to scrap fabric. If it’s big enough to make something else. I've started getting into the habit of throwing stuff away if I hadn't used it in a while but every so often, I end up finding a use for something long after I threw it away. But for the most part, it's good to throw it away.
I'm not sure what caused this but my mom is a hoarder who will take anything that's free or on sale even if she doesn't need it. She believes there will a come a day when someone she knows will want or need it, or she'll eventually find a use for it. She's pretty good at organizing (when she has the time) but it got even worse after she married my stepdad because he's a hoarder too, but he doesn't know how to organize at all. So there's always way too much stuff and no place to put it. They also don't keep track of all the food they have in their fridges/freezers (there's 2) and so food ofteb goes bad. And when I lived with them, it was my job to throw away nasty food and empty the containers because I had the weakest sense of smell in the family. It was awful. Now they only have my stepbrother living with them (who's 25) so the obvious proof is there that my siblings and I were not the ones making the mess, even though we had to do most of the cleaning.
This reminds me I seriously need to take out the trash. I’m not trying to keep any of it, just being lazy and can’t be arsed to do it. And for me, I admittedly hoard information. Way too many photos and apps on my iPad and smartphone, thousands of videos in Watch Later on TH-cam, can never be bothered/have the time to sort through them.
i was a horder for a lil bit, my freind took my small bag and dumped it on the floor at lunch and was like "ok we can keep this, this is trash" and i was just sitting there like "thank you" because i would pick anything i found cool on the floor
My Grandmother was a HOARDER my mum was a Horder but at half strength. I am greatful I am adopted and very much prefer the minimalist life. Growing up in that environment makes you very stressed and agitated.
I resonate with 30:30. I need to organize so badly (mainly the shed) but i have 0 motivation. My motivation only happens if someone is willing to help me (lol and guess what doesnt happen)
My mother is a hoarder, not nearly as bad as some of these here but we had a few rooms filled floor to ceiling. I have to actively watch myself or I'll keep crap I know I don't need. I get a mild anxiety attack throwing away my old torn up shoes because "they are good work shoes" lol. My mother also does that thing a few people here talked about where if you simply say you like something she will get you anything that is even a little bit similar
My Dad is not a hoarder, but he still keeps a hoard. He works estate sales in a NASA town. We got all sorts of old electronics and collectables, militaria, the kind of things you'd find in an antique store that the men look at. One of our sheds has a cabinet full of old dusty oscilloscopes. Seeing the thing, figuring out what it is, finding its price on the internet, buying it for less than $5 and selling it to the right collector for a 1000% markup is fun. Listing, packaging and mailing it is a chore. Paid for his and Mom's personal 2nweek vacation, though. I just hope the Democratic House's law putting the IRS to coming down on anyone who makes over $600pa on a hobby doesn't pass.
I think my parents count as hoarders, but 'useful' ones. They started when I was really little so I never knew anything different. Kitchenware/machinery from 20+ years ago because it STILL works now and is no longer in production. Fair enough I guess, no problems having a FEW spares but two cupboard fulls...????? A FULL HUGE drawer full of first aid stuff, 50+ years old plasters and such from nan's. Umm....? Old dead laptops/desktops, VCRs, anything with parts that can be reused for new stuff, which obviously doesn't really match now. Charging/power cables we don't even remember what they go with....! My dad with bottles of black shoe polish/metal cleaning stuff and vehicles he won't touch for years at a time, Until He Gets Around To Them to fix them or whatever. Also bits of vehicles on the kitchen counter nearest to the garage. Old clothes dad can use as cleaning/oil rags, or mother can use to make things with. (cloth bags etc.) Me, I admit, with cardboard boxes not torn open, in case I need something to put things they support in. (like tiny tubs of diamond painting diamonds to keep them all together.) Empty plain envelopes to write notes on. Empty water/soda bottles in case I need to fill them for evacuation. I'm sure there's more I'm just not thinking of but there's just stuff EVERYWHERE. No empty surfaces. Visitors must be silently horrified. I've NEVER seen my friends' houses like this, aside from their rooms as a kid but that's kids' rooms for you, and it's confused me through my child-teenhoods. Where's their stuff? XD Guess who complains we have no room in the kitchen to move around or put anything because pretty much every surface is covered? Dad. I want to be minimalist myself after all this absolute clutter but I have to have spares of things. I just have Piles Of Stuff I Know What's In What but it's just not tidy as hard as I try. My mini fridge is the emptiest thing I have. I see the point of spares but I want Less Clutter?? I've tried Marie Kondo tactics but it only lasts a few days. Hmm... Now I think about it, I'm very much a DIGITAL hoarder too... I will backup backups of harddrives of every computer I've ever had. I will blame that on dad though, he's done that with music and photos. I do it with music, photos/pictures, word documents, games, videos, audioplays/audiobooks we've ripped from CDs/tapes....! No I can't just Use The Cloud because our internet's crap (it would take YEARS to upload on 0.80mb speed at this point XD Trust me, we tried with 50GB worth of ONE Ipad. Took a week and no-one could use the internet.) and servers crash.
Those old cables could be actually be quite valuable. There are many old pieces of technology mostly computers and audio equipment amp's, headphones and guitars that are missing their cables.
@@Roadent1241 some are like 3/4/5 pin XLR and aux cables because they've been the standard for like 60 years. Even if they don't work with new devices there is always someone who wants a spare cable for their old things.
@@Roadent1241 it's worth a try to sell them if they're in good shape there is a decent chance to get a few hundred bucks. There will always be a market for them
My grandmother was a borderline hoarder for many years, and as a result my mom is a minimalist. She throws away EVERYTHING if it sits out for more than twenty minutes. I used to have to tell my teachers that I couldn’t turn in my homework because my mom threw it away after I took a study break. She’s gotten a bit better in recent years, though.
These stories make me worried that I'll become a hoarder someday. I have lot of stuff and am pretty messy. Hopefully I can find good ways of organizing and cleaning things out periodically, because I see how my tendencies could be problematic if cranked to a higher level.
I had the opposite experience growing up. My mom was a white-glover. Like she would put on white cotton gloves and check our cleaning to make sure we didn't miss any dust. If we did my little sister (4 yrs younger) and I were made to completely clean the entire house again. My house now is permanently messy. We don't have bugs or mice but it is messy.
Read Maus by Art Spiegelman. It's the story of a son learning about surviving the Holocaust from his father. His mother and father had both been sent to concentration camps, and his infant brother had been killed by the woman caring for him, along with all the other children she was caring for, to prevent the Nazis from capturing them. Art's father lived the hoarder life, because that's how he survived. Finding anything that might be of value and trading it for money, favors, whatever he could. A moment in the book stands out to me, of Art's father finding a small bit of copper wire and becoming very excited about it.
My mom does have some hoarding issues, I guess because first, my grandpa was pretty stingy and, second, when he died, when my mom was 15, my grandma refused to work so they had to live with the money he had stated would go to them every month. At first it wasn't that bad because my dad is a very organized man, but after they divorced she started going wild. So, now she tends to keep a lot of stuff around, the fridge often gets full of stuff that will not be eaten and her room is basically 75% inaccsesible. She has an obsession with getting shelves and containers and loves getting cheap clothes at the local flea market. I often wonder how she can sleep when her bed is full of junk and she's confined to a small hole. Sometimes she would leave stuff in my room and never come back for it, so I had to be the bigger man and put it somewhere else. Luckily, this wasn't very common and most of her mess stays relegated to her room. She does love, however, getting t-shirts for me and I have more than I really need... but at least she has good taste when chosing them. Luckily she's starting to get better and has asked for help to clean out her room, so I guess she never got to a point of no return. I guess that when my grandma died and she had to clean out her room she had some sort of epiphany, but I really can't be sure.
My mom gets extremely attached to things -- partly because her family moved so many times as a kid and she often had to get rid of things during moves. She's not nearly as bad as other examples here, but she has a barn packed full of stuff and keeps picking up more stuff because "we can use it someday!" It's going to be a bear cleaning the place out when she's gone...
My friends mom was like this. She kept anything even if she had no use for it. She worked in a place where my cousin isa manager. She went too far after she actually bought his old office supplies and furniture. Desk was falling apart chairs and couch smelled like cigarette smoke, old computer that didn't work, one of those bulky printers that doesn't work on new systems. Was there helping him with my pickup when he came the Lady comes up and when we say taking the stuff to the dump she offered money for it. She came in with a van and somehow loaded it all in by herself. The desk is of course being used as a place for the old news paper and the room smells like an ash tray. The rest of the stuff put around the house.
i’m a hoarder apparently, luckily it’s never gotten nearly as bad as the hoarder houses from tv. everything is special/might be useful in the future & i have to keep it ; ;
My grandfather would carefully unwrap gifts so he could save the paper. He would save nails that were pulled wood , the bent nails he hammered straight. Pappa kept old cars/trucks and use them to store stuff.. papa said if he could figure out how to remove the print on newspaper he would save that. He had lots of tools , he had worked as a union carpenter. We moved into the house he had built , there were nails not hammered all the way in ,just in case he need to pull the nail to adjust the board. He was a perfectionist. I understand how difficult it is to finish a project. I have hoarding and perfectionist tendencies. Even the saving the first car I bought. I hope to restore it ,a 1974 VW bug. My first wife told me to get rid of it I said " I will have that car after you are gone " and I still have it !
My family has a history of hoarding. Seeming to start with my grandmother and was continued by my mom and extending to myself and my siblings. As a kid I always loved to see my mom’s collection of toys even though it was a disarrayed mess. Worse yet, at least personally, I’m autistic. So not only do I get overly attached to objects because of that but I also do because of my autism. I realized as a child that I had a problem when I found myself wanting to cry each time we went to the secondhand store and I saw a stuffed animal I wanted. It wasn’t as if my mom wouldn’t get me them, she pretty much always would, but I recognized my feelings towards them as being a problem. Especially since I ended up having so many stuffed animals my floor was completely covered in them. I started refusing to go into that store and sitting out in the car instead to avoid being put in a spot where I’d feel I couldnt leave without the stuffed animals I saw. It took years but I’m finally starting to get rid of extra things. I still have collections and all manner of oddities but they’re better kept and better quality items. However, my mom still triggers those tendencies in me sometimes. A few days ago I decided I wanted to be rid of an old piggy bank. Yellow with little flower designs on it and completely not fitting with my otherwise gothic aesthetic. Talking to her I said ‘it’s useless to me now’ to which she said ‘aw, but it’s so cute’ or something along those lines which made me instantly feel guilty. As I set it back on my shelf she said ‘you never know when you need another piggy bank’. I hate it. I can manage to detach myself from sentimental feelings towards items, it’s hard but I can do it, but when people reinforce those feelings in me it makes it feel almost impossible to do again.
my mom will do that with me sometimes when I bring down a bag of clothes or a box of things I want to get rid of. I have to run back upstairs before she looks through it or I'll end up keeping shit I don't need I know she doesn't mean to do that but it sucks hard, I know how you feel
My Aunt was a hoarder, and an abusive one at that. Trash, dog and human feces/ old papers/ toys etc. Glad I got out of there at 14. it was helldoom living there and the kicker was that it wasn't even her house: it was my GRANDPARENTS house! She really went nuts after my granddaddy died and bulldozed(literally) my poor Grandma with her crap! She also deliberately had poor hygiene and also forced these nasty behaviors on me and my cousin, like I said, I got away at 14. She died in 2007 and left our Grandma in that filth of her own making. Due to her abuse/neglect( physical and pyschological) I had a LOT of trauma to overcome being in that disgusting mess: I don't miss her at ALL.
My entire family has a hoarding problem, including me I won't lie. it's such a hard cycle especially with depression. I find myself buying things I don't need that in the moment make me happy but ultimately don't really matter. soon you have boxes of little things everywhere, clothes you haven't washed, trash, and that just makes you more depressed so you buy more shit to make yourself happy. That's what my grandma on my dad's side does too. My ma keeps a lot of things she either wants to fix or make room for, which usually never happens. My dad hoards wood, metal, and various other little things he gets off the side of the road for crafts he doesn't have time to do and my grandpa hoards mass collections of just about everything so he can resell it, when half of it is packed in old rusting vehicles, two sheds, the basement, and the rest of the house
11:05 It’s healthy you accept that... imo. So many therapists would tell you shit like, “your moms just sick, she loves you,” etc. Well she may in fact be sick and she may in fact love you but you are right, she loves that shit more than you. That sucks. But it’s true.
My grandma was a hoarder of books and clothes. But everything was stacked and organized all the way to ceiling. When she died, we found out she didn't have a bed. She had clothes that were in the form of a bed. A table made of clothes. And, you had to turn to the side to walk anywhere.
My mom works in home healthcare as a PT and unfortunately has to deal with a hoarders sometimes those people who hoard make me so sad I know that they do it for a reason but it’s just sad
And having no emotional attachment to material things is a good thing. If that’s the baggage you carry from your parents hoarding... consider yourself lucky.
i wouldn't say my dad as a complete hoarder but he definitely has more things than he should like his entire closet and half a living room full of stuff mostly found off the highway including but not limited to gas cans clothes nuts and bolts tools etc.
We’re not hoarders but I relate to the story of buying equipment and selling it when times got rough and because of it my parents and I do buy in bulk to sell just in case because we did come into the country with literally only our clothes on our back and a chair to sit in
I think my realization that my grandmother was at this point was when she asked me to go through the cabinets to throw expired stuff away, but then yelled at me and called me a n*zi for throwing away a jar of spices that was nearly a decade out of date. We live together, as neither of us can afford to live alone. I am disabled both mentally and physically. She can't afford therapy to address her hoarding disorder, and blames all her problems on me for not helping her. My mental and physical health depend on her getting help, and she can't get it, nor would she be willing to try if she could.
My Grandmother was a food hoarder, because she grew up in the times after ww2. My father does the same with food AND the Modelling of like.. boats, panzers and stuff like that. It got waaaay over the "It's just a hobby" state. The basement, the livingroom, everything is full with it. My mother got this with clothing. So my Brother, my sister and me, we all have some type of hoarding going on. My siblings and I have it all with the clothes but I struggle with Trash and empty Bottles too.I don't know why, but if I have like... empty space at the floor, it feels so insecure, you know? But I still can tell myself, "Wait, you don't need this, tf?!" and throw it away... but the empty space man, i don't know why it is like that.
My mom is a hoarder and it was because her mother didn't have any emotional attachment to anything, especially not inanimate objects because she grew up in poverty. My hoarder mother saw her treasured possessions taken away so she can barely get rid of anything. I'm just here to take care of her in her twilight years and I will handle her hoard once she is gone. Thankfully it is a very clean hoard. No trash. Just boxes of books and items.
You are blessed in that respect. My mother wouldn’t clean or do dishes so there were always fruit flies in the kitchen around old food crusted dishes and all the pots and skillets …That was just the kitchen. I have to be half dead to not do dishes every day as it’s instant depression to see a dirty dish and pan
I chose to respect people who have actual stuff kept reasonably clean. Even if I have no feelings for these books, they're still books and they mean something to her. Trash and expired food and moldy clothing is horrifying and depressing.
Hey at least your mom's an organized hoarder
Should consider selling them online after its time and find someone who can appraise things. You'll likely find very old items in there, but wear full PPE gear first, its gonna get nasty.
My aunt was a bit of a hoarder. She kept so much yet she was very clean with it all. When she died, we had to clean out her his because my cousin couldn't afford to keep paying for it. Because the f how clean she always kept it, we never really realized how much stuff she had
I've tried to adopt the minimalist approach after my family lost our home and we had to move into a small apartment, but it just made me feel depressed. It was like I was enforcing the notion that I don't deserve anything nice or have the right to get attached to anything. So I started reminding myself that I pay all my bills on time, have no debt, work hard for my money and that I am allowed to buy myself something nice every so often. As a result I feel better but I still have very few items to my name. I think it's from of fear of losing my shelter all over again and needing to pack up as much as possible while trying to find a new place to live. I'm working on it and I'm still working to provide myself with a stable living situation that I can be truly comfortable with.
Becuase I moved about 7 times in my life I only keep stuff that is easy to pack. Clothing enough for a week, books and a computer. Basically all I own. However I do like even if it come from trauma
I watched Hoarders and screamed at the TV. My Grandma was a hoarder and crazy as a loon. She hoarded cats and trash. I am such a minimalist because of her that my home doesn’t look like I’ve moved in and I’ve been here 20 years.
What’s crazy is this motivated me to clean my house today. Crazy how those things work.
I always feel that way watching Hoarders.
Unintentionally became cat horders. My sister got a kitten. Never fixed her. She had kittens as soon as the last litter learned to climb out of the box. Her kittens had kittens and so forth. We finally got the girls fixed. I feel so bad because I tried to get them homes but most people wanted to sell them to science so I was very picky about where I gave them to. Though I knew since a lot of them were inbred they needed special care and I tried to do it all myself. Lots of kittens lost. I named and buried each one because I treated them like my own. Fed them every two hours and held them all the time to keep them warm. I gave the ones I could save to trusted friends and they are so loved I'm proud of them. Happy that no more kittens will be born. It was very hard to see them in such bad conditions.
I'm proud of you
May God Bless you back, it's beautiful of you to do ❤️
I'm glad you did that. My dad did the same thing your sister did and didnt care that the house got filled with cats, I'm willing to bet it was because of his even dumber wife. He eventually got rid of them all but for years they lived like that
A baby explosion is different from a cat hoarder. Five horrifying words of difference. "Kitten skeletons under the pile."
This is what happened to my family. My mom kept "rescuing cats" but they weren't fixed so numbers go up quickly when 3 females are pregnant at the same time. It was that way my whole life. I feel you on having to bury so many babies and inbreds with health problems. Its so sad. Luckily we're down to 5 and only have one unfixed male which will change very soon and we can separate him when needed until he can be fixed. I'm 100% a cat person but my male cat (he's mine not a family cat) will probably be one of my last since my childhood I just got so burnt out from burying them and after a point my mom just had me to put them in the trash. :(
You should get the boys fixed first instead, way cheaper and prevents spraying urin all over the place.
My grandparents on both sides grew up during the Great Depression, and this resulted in both of my grandmas developing a spending/hoarding problem. This had an impact on both of my parents: my dad never wanted to spend money, and my mom never wanted to throw anything away. Our house was always cluttered and messy, which was understandable since I had four younger siblings. However, once we all became old enough to clean up after ourselves, the house still remained a mess. It was NEVER the level you'd see on shows like Hoarders, but it was bad enough that nobody ever wanted to invite friends over. Last year I finally got treatment for my ADHD and I was able to actually focus for the first time, so I spent weeks decluttering the house and there were surprisingly no complaints from my parents. I unearthed things that hadn't been touched in the 20+ years since we moved in. We found all of my dad's photos and childhood toys, which he thought were lost forever. The house is still a mess, but we can at least move around a lot easier & find things when we need them (for the most part).
Well I’m glad to hear that there seems to be a happy ending.
@@alexbodi5526 Thank you! I have my own hoarder impulses that I'm fighting and it's a constant struggle, but I'm determined to break the cycle!
My dad was a hoarder, kind of but not really. He just didn’t bother to clean, food got moldy, dirt everywhere, clothes in random places. He was a chronic alcoholic, chain smoker, slept all the time.
Yes he was depressed and no he never tried to ask for help, either with the cleaning or therapy. I tried a few times as a kid but some of the filth was so ”ingrained” into the surface I could get muscle fatigue. He wasn’t a bad person, just gave up on everything about himself.
Mental illness on top of physical illness really destroys people.
Alcohol so much makes depression worse, unfortunately, and also leads to a form of alcohol related dementia. I'm sure you tried your best to help, but it's not up to a child.
He was a so-called "messy". Hoarders collect because they develop a sentimental value and attachment to their items. Messies simply struggle to clean and keep the space around them orderly, due to mental health issues.
@@martaleszkiewicz5115 yes,alcohol is a mood suppressant, it can make you seriously depressed if you drink too much or become dependent on it. People who are depressed ,or even just chroniclie stressed, don't find the motivation to do things like clean,it's hard enough simply to keep on living.
Even my parents lost their parents within couple of months. All of 4 of us were diagnosed with depression. We all were grieving so bad that we couldn't get out of bed . We don't have any other family or people who support us so for few months, our rented house was dirt and full of trash . Last month only , we got the help we need and we start feel better. So we were able to do chores one by one but landlord found out how we lived past few months and gave us eviction notice and other tenants took a video of the house and shared it . We tried explaining to them how we have depression. They said that it's all in our head. Now the neighborhood calls us " mental family" or " drug dealers" just because we were struggling
My brother-in-law's mother filled a spacious suburban home with crap, then blacked out the windows so no one could see. He grew up in a dark maze that always smelled faintly of rotting mice. Couldn't have friends over and was thought of as odd because of how he reacted to others' houses and belongings. At least partly as a side effect of cave life, he's agoraphobic, and very anxious about his charisma, hygiene, and appearance. He and my sister were literally months getting rid of it all when he got the house. Turns out there's a maximum number of bags your town's trash service will take from you each week.
My dad's got a bit of it too. His basement has four broken VCRs (that I know of), what I'd estimate to be three thousand pounds of old magazines, and so on, and so on. I think the four broken VCRs really hammer home what hoarding is like. They're not just broken. It's not just a technology that's been stone cold dead for twenty years. It's not just that he has no tapes I'm aware of to play on them if they did work. It's not just that there are four of them. It's not just that he hasn't touched any of them since putting them there decades ago, nor will he ever. It's not just that he's never once thought about getting rid of them and would be appalled at the suggestion. It's *ALL* those things.
My mom loved her hoard more than us. She verbally chose it over us again and again. I say this so no one can say "No, she didn't choose it, la la la". She. Chose. It. She told us repeatedly she wished we had never been born. We had the goat paths, rotted food, everything. Sadly, when she died, my family chose to make her a saint in their memories. I'm glad to be free and not like her.
I cut my hoader mom off feels fantastic, 2yrs now and yes half my family has her as a saint,,,not me!!!!!!
I don’t really think she deserves to be a saint.In my opinion if she wished her kids would have never been born and that she chose her hoard over her own children then she is a psychopath
Bruh
Former hoarder here... it took me breaking away and moving to the other side of the country with nothing but a crappy laptop and a spare shirt.
I let my family toss what had no value. And now i try to focus on things i can use. Yes I do collect model kits and memorabilia, but the limit is set and I cant let myself go past it. Im only 35
My sister is a hoarder. Her stuff not only fills her house, kids rooms included, but the two storage buildings on our property. I can’t allow my son to visit without me because there is so much that it’s stacked on every available surface. In most places in there I have to walk sideways because there isn’t enough space to use my crutches otherwise. And definitely not enough space to use my wheelchair. I’m not sure what started all of it but it’s awful. She’s a cancer survivor and has graft versus host disease which causes lots of issues for her. She has fallen several times and my mom and I have tried to talk to her about letting someone help her but she was a jeweler and is terrified someone will make off with her tools and any items of value she has. She gets angry at me when I donate things my son has no interest in anymore. I’m not a minimalist but too much clutter is dangerous. Anything of sentimental value is kept, but organized and out of the way. It makes me sad because she feels like her gifts to him aren’t appreciated, but he’s almost six… he doesn’t need teething rings or baby toys he can’t really use anymore. I have a few things from his infant years in a box that I add special things to every year but if there’s so much that you don’t know what you have, it isn’t healthy. One thing I’ve learned from when we shared a house is what is really important and what is not
My grandfather was a hoarder. Literally eat, sleep, watch tv in a 5’feet radius in a 2000+ sq ft house. Place was full of old stuff specially mails and old news papers stack over 5 ft tall everywhere. The place would literally burn down in world record time if a fire got there.
My house looks like a hoarders place, because the few days my depression is not crippling me I need to fix things (urgently)... but usually by the time I have unearthed/bought/collected the necessery things (for hanging a lamp f.e.) I run out of steam, so all that happened is I rearranged a pile or started another 'projectpile' - which is depressing enough all by itself :P
I have help now, but it is very, very slow going and no light at the end of the tunnel at all.
My place is rather small so the chaos looks quite overwhelming. And there are always things that pop up and need attention *now* so the 'current projects' probably never get done.
If you cant work at a normal pace, then babysteps will have to do, many many many babysteps....
See if you can somehow hide or put away each projectpile except for one so you can see that threre is only one to do. I can be overwhelming to see all these unfinished things that need doing but only seeing on thing that needs doing makes it much easier to get up to do that one thing.
This is exactly what my bf does but he has a whole house, a garage and some sheds! I've tried to help him for a long time now but it's getting too difficult for me as I'm also very depressed so I figure he can do it on his own (tried to help him move for a year now, mainly cleaning the house so it can be sold) but if not then K dunno what to do really...
@@noheadshotbear4254 Great idea, but unfortunately there is no hiding in a 1 1/2 bedroom appartment.
But you are spot on about the overwhelming effect all those to-do-piles have om me :)
(Thanks for understanding!)
I tried boxing up the smaller to-do's and now there are boxes everywhere and I have even more trouble locating what I need -- so much for my bright ideas...
(That sounds a lot like the hoarderhouses as well: "it should be around here somewhere, but haven't seen it in years / can't remember where it went".)
@@damphest3283 wow, depressed yourself and still helping others, that rules so much!
(I can do things at other peoples houses to help them a bit, but not my own - so that sounds familiar.)
Sometimes it really helps to get outside help just for one project. So at least that gets done/ is off the to-do-list for good.
I feel this one.
I struggle with hoarding tendencies because my mother is such a minimalist and guilt tripped me into throwing away so many things I wasn’t quite ready to yet. Throwing things away stresses me out because I’ve either developed emotional attachment to it or ‘I don’t know if I’ll need it’. It used to be worse when I was younger and my Mum stopped exerting so much control over how I kept my own bedroom. My boyfriend is helping me work through it and it’s getting better. Even with all that though, I still know and knew hoarding was a terrible habit to get into.
Both my parents were hoarders, for different reasons. My dad was addicted to mail-order shopping. He'd buy loads of worthless crap just because he thought it was cool, cute, or clever. My mom hoards out of sentimentality. She'd save stuff like my baby socks, old beat-up furniture and worn out kitchen appliances that she and my dad bought together, and all her sewing stuff- despite the fact that she'd given up sewing years earlier due to her severely arthritic hands.
THEN she'd get upset with me for re-organizing her bounty so it wasn't such a massive fire and / or trip-and-fall hazard, which it clearly was. I tried explaining this to her, but she just didn't quite get it. Only in the final months of her life did she understand. Trying to maneuver her wheelchair around tons of boxes and mountains of junk were no fun for either of us.
My dad passed away in December 2018. My mom passed away last October. I miss them both terribly ( despite my dad being a bit of a douche to me during my younger years ), but i HATE the mess they left behind.
Unfortunately, for mostly older people, the reasons they hoard us that many had to grow up during The Great Depression when they were kids. Storing scraps if trash was valued, you never knew if it would be useful for something in the future. That mindset, carries on until now. Even then, when there is a shortage of things every now and then, it'd never be as bad as it was in the 1930's and early 1940's. It shaped a generation of people.
Absolutely! This has always been my reasoning as well because my aunt and my grandmother are both hoarders and when I’m depressed I do the same thing. I spiral and everything that needs get done stands no chance of being conquered. I live with a painful chronic illness so I have A LOT of repressed baggage outside of the “normal” stressors in life that need to be addressed. Coincidentally I am a Psychiatric RN so I absolutely understand that most people who hoard do so because of past trauma that went unaddressed and it’s extremely sad. Unfortunately, I’m sure that the pandemic will also cause a “mass depression” if you will. There are still stores in my area that ALWAYS run out of necessities and cleaning supplies. It’s wild. I lost my fiancé to COVID last year and Lord knows if I’d had the opportunity to hold on to ALL of his belongings (we didn’t live together yet at the time of his passing) so his family made good use of it and that’s a beautiful thing but I brought us his passing to say that trauma is ALWAYS the reason behind these kinds of behaviors and it hurts that mental health care sucks in this country. Worldwide to be honest. It’s terrible. 😢
My mother isn’t a hoarder hoarder. But there’s piles/baskets in every room of her house.
Reminds me of a video I watched on ADHD and clutter piles. It talked about clutter in motion and clutter in stasis. It was really interesting
@@KiraNightshade I was going to say that this sounds like ADHD “doom boxes”
Or a beginner hoarding stage
The woman who hoarded all that construction stuff.
Is everyone just gonna glance over the "that's when we discovered we had a scorpion and camel spider problem"!!!!!!
Wtf where
My mom was a hoarder and extremely emotional neglectful. This is a rarely talked about childhood trauma but I often went to school with matted hair, smelly clothes and had toilets that weren’t working at home. I wish someone called CPS but hoarding is so secretive and we seemed like a normal family on the outside. The main emotions I felt as a child was shame, disgust and loneliness. She definitely chose her stuff over us and no one helped us. I go between no contact and contact but as I’ve become a parent myself I’ve gotten more disgusted and angry at her. I can’t imagine putting my children through that.
I dated a guy whose mom was a hoarder. She wasn't the filthy kind with trash & poop everywhere, everything was somewhat organized but there was just SO MUCH of it. Every room was packed with rubbermaid bins of stuff, you had to walk carefully and squeeze through some areas. She'd go through phases where she'd buy different things- for a couple months it'd be tons of crafting stuff, then she'd lose interest and chuck it all into bins, then she'd find something else to start buying. Her husband was visibly depressed, the only space in the house that was his was a rocking chair in the bedroom and a small part of the closet. He built a shed in the backyard for his tools and spent most of his time out there. Her stuff took up the rest of the house and every flat surface in their bedroom was covered with creepy porcelain dolls. They had a wall of shelves & bins dividing the living room into 2 rooms and bins of stuff served as tables. I'm surprised the house didn't collapse from the weight of all the stuff in the attic, the place was a massive fire hazard too. She was a really nice lady and we were actually pretty close, she opened up to me once about her mother being very neglectful while she was growing up so I think she hoarded to fill those unmet emotional needs.
Been slowly reeling my parents hoarding back the last several years. It was starting to get pretty bad while I was in college, but my grandma moved in with them and she put her foot down. She forced them to clear out a ton of junk. The garage and basement are still pretty messy but less than hoarder level now. A big part is because of poverty. I got in a argument with my dad about a bunch of rolls of leftover hotel carpet, when I finally said if we need to replace the carpet we can buy new carpet, we aren't in poverty anymore. He just said "oh." Like he literally was just deep in the poverty mindset of every single thing could be useful one day.
My mom didnt get rid of anything she owned, even if she never used it. She had no issue throwing out things I had. She'd get so mad at me for calling her out. Everything I owed was trash to her. Everything she owed was treasure. She would rip childhood toys from my arms and get rid of them, but those damn high heels she never wore the whole 25 years I lived there were valuable and needed to stay. She still blames me and my siblings for the way the house looks.
29:37 I'm struggling with hoarding behavior in the early stages. I've had such bad luck with hard drives and such breaking that I don't feel safe leaving anything in the cloud, and started clinging to physical media like books and CDs and DVDs and VHS tapes. I also had a rough childhood and books were my escape, and my attachment to them is emotionally heavy. My folks gave one of my bookshelves to charity when I was in college, and felt guilty after learning that I remembered pretty much every book and its emotional context and its provenance...
When I lost my insurance and went off my antidepressants and didn't have the energy to read the books, it was devastating. Books just kept piling up from every source.
They stopped sparking joy, and I woke up and couldn't move in the house. Because it wasn't too much crap, but my ability to organize collapsed, and now the books are too far away and I forget about them, and that's just cruel to the books.
I'm getting a little better since working in a German language library, a lot of which involves me sorting out old books to sell that no one can read anymore (my city used to be German immigrants, most of these came over in the 1920s and they're all in Fraktur and donated by grandchildren who can't read the alphabet even if they speak the language), and a lot of them I have to basically recycle because the local Used Booksellers only take stuff with ISBNs. I've turned a lot of them into art projects, and taken some home, but I can finally stop feeling like books are somehow too sacred to destroy. I'm downloading ebooks so I can sell the originals and make some space.
And these threads are jarring, this is gonna be me sometime. Once in college, my roommate cleared the kitchen and packed all my stuff in a cupboard, and I had a panic attack. It was like I didn't own anything. The cruelty is that I need to see everything, and yet having everything out means stuff is on top of other stuff and I can't see it. I haven't found a way to make it stop hurting when I give stuff away, much less throw it out. There's gotta be something meaningful that other people see in it, but like... it hurts. Minimal houses give me existential dread. I haven't resolved this yet.
I want to figure out how to live with less stuff, because I want a cat someday, and I couldn't subject one to living in a place with piles of papers on all the best perching spots. I just don't know how to make the hurt stop when I remove stuff. Any of you figured this out yet?
TL;DR Inchoate hoarder needs help before it gets worse, wants to know how to make giving away her books not hurt so much.
Hey, I've lived with someone who had OCD (hoarding is a subset of OCD), and I just want to encourage you to get help. Cognitive Behavior Therapy is a great place to start because they'll help you work through the "why am I like this" and the "how do I stop thinking like this?" They may also put you on an SSRI to help with anxiety surrounding getting rid of items.
Also keep in mind that no every therapist is going to be the "right one" for you. It's alright to jump from therapist to therapist in search of the one that "gets" you and can really help you.
The process to get better can be hard and painful, but just remember that it gets better over time and any little improvement is still improvement. You got this!
I hope you are able to get help since you are already aware of having these anxieties and difficulty letting go of things. Having a healthy attachment to things is doable to be sure. I have some hoarding and anxiety in my family so I am vigilant for it, but I also allow myself to sometimes feel regret that some things I had as a child are no longer mine, but I like to think they are able to make someone else happy and can make room for new things to make me happy. Telling yourself something like that may help because practicing a new way of thinking is how you think differently. But yeah, not a therapist so hope you find some helpful tools to not be controlled by anxiety.
Btw, this is not helping, and for that, I apologize. But paper is generally a cat's happy place to perch! Every one I've ever had, anyhow!
I also struggle with hoarding tendencies. It’s important to remind yourself the hurt is temporary, it isn’t fatal, and it will fade. It’s important to be logical about it. Mine is with crafting stuff, and I make myself new rules to keep things in control.
-I must have a designated project for it, or it is a material I use frequently enough to warrant keeping it on hand.
-I must have time for said project in the near future, and it must be more than a minimum amount (more than a 1/2 yard of fabric, no scraps).
-I have a defined location for each thing, and once that location is full I can’t add to it without removing something else. This forces me to prioritize and limit my hoard.
-I started with easy things that I’m not as attached to, and am working my way toward the more emotional stuff. Sometimes I go through things 3 or 4 times to whittle it down. I make categories: goes now, revisit later, definitely stays.
Make rules for your books. A designated number of book shelves, reserved for the absolute favorites. The rest can go. Maybe donate to a library, and you can still check them out if you feel the need to read them.
Sit with the discomfort and hurt of letting go. A lot of our hoarding is trying to avoid that discomfort, or appeasing intrusive thoughts. Realize that waiting until it doesn’t hurt is the problem. If you sit with it instead of avoid it, it gets easier and passes. But it is a skill that must be learned. Sometimes we need help to learn that part, and seeking a professional to assist in processing those feelings and intrusive thoughts is an option.
Best wishes to you, and you are not alone in this struggle. You can do it, it just takes dedication and time. 💗
I may have read too much into your post, but it seems that you assign feelings to inanimate objects.
This was something that I struggled with when I was younger, and occasionally now as well. It can be a sign of mental illness or neurodivergency, which may be something to look into.
Knowing the underlying issue can be very helpful regarding your mental health and behavioral patterns.
My father was a hoarder. Apparently, he started when he was a teenager.
By the time I was 30, he'd filled two bedrooms, 4 or 5 sheds and a 4-car garage w his crap. I'd moved out as a teenager and my sibling moved out at about 23, also due to the hoarding.
Hoarding is based on anxiety, the experts say. In my father's case, the anxiety was fear of arrest and/or being beaten to death for child molesting.
Edit: I forgot to mention the broken-down cars. At last count, the five in the driveway and under the piles of crap covering the front lawn plus the four in the garage. And a couple of old boats in the back garden.
Edit 2: Forgot to add that he filled our cubby house to the brim a week after our uncle built it for us.
Also, I was diagnosed with dysthymic disorder (persistent depressive disorder) and as a result I have a really hard time keeping my personal space clean being as I have no motivation to clean it even when it becomes unsanitary. When I finally get around to cleaning, I cry every time I finish because I immediately feel so much better and the depression lessens a bit. It's a never-ending cycle
I used to be a hoarder as a child. I had lots of siblings and rarely had things of my own. So everything I got I kept in a case with a lock. I was obsessed and would keep all sorts of crap like key rings, post cards etc.
One of my great aunt's hoarded pictures and a bunch of stuff. Apparently she took the cake topper of my grandparents wedding cake( they got married probably in 1960- 61) and kept it in her fridge for years... it's probably still there.
This is my biggest fear! I have ADHD so I have trouble with both impulses control and organization- I have to go through my space 2 times a year and recognize ( with help since I get overwhelmed with figuring out how to organize)
I am sooo glad my parents were clean and actually cleaned our house and cared about me🥰
I didnt realize my mother was a hoarder until after i moved out of the house, my brother wasn't doing anything around the house and she was an alcoholic so that probably attributed a lot, she also would take in any animal that was thrown her way. Did get her to move into a smaller house since she didnt need a 4 bedroom house anymore and that did help with being able to clean up easier. We did also rehoming almost all of the animals she took in too.
My parents were hoarders, specifically my mother. They moved to another country and my husband and I took over their house. It's hard to deal with the amount of stuff left behind by them.
Grandmother is a hoarder/shopping addict and will also buy bulk foods. She watches a lot of HGTV and has this delusion that this is what her house looks like. She’s made my dad turn several rooms into closets for her, there’s piles of junk everywhere, rotting food in the kitchen, and she acts like bc she decorates that it’s fine. It’s not fine. There’s roaches and I want to go home.
That first story kinda made me think of me. I have a wife and son, my country is slowly being stolen dry and infighting by a cANCer of epic proportions.
I've hoarded food and medicine for incase crap hits the fan. Not rooms full, but more than required.
I've seen so many malnourished kids that I just want to keep my family from going starving, it really works on my mind.
On a lighter side and I guess many have this issue, Hording of electronic components because, "you never know when you might need it." ;) ;) ;)
My dad is a hoarder. Mom keeps most of the house clean, but our den has a lot of useless shit in it, including a bed that has to be at least 20 years old now. I’ve only been in that room a handful of times. Our garage has so much shit in it that there is a very small walkway, and people can only walk in there single file. We have about 20 tires in our backyard, 10 cars that are completely dead, and one dead truck. He has at least two or three cars at his dads house, piles and piles of useless stuff, and multiple bikes. When Mom and I move out I don’t want to imagine how bad things will get.
My great aunt had a serious hoarding problem. She had significant mobility issues and lived thousands of miles away from any family, so no one knew how bad it was until she contracted MRSA and had to move into a care facility. My cousin discovered the nightmare that was her house when he went out to California to prepare it for sale. A service was hired to clean it out because my cousin, who is immunocompromised, didn't want to risk going inside himself.
My aunt looked like she was heading in that direction, even voicing her concerns to family herself (at least she was aware of it). A major cleaning commenced so that carpets could be replaced with that easy-to-clean hardwood and we kept her from sliding back by speaking to a friend of hers who would take on shopping trips, essentially enabling her behavior. She's still a bit of a packrat, but it's not nearly as bad as before.
My dads gf had a neighbor who was secretly a hoarder. She wasn’t seen for like to weeks, when the authorities entered the ladies house, she was long dead. Her body was just resting among the crap she had accumulated over the years.
When my mom would buy storage units instead of getting rid of her hoard whenever we would purge the house. She is currently at 4.
After my father passed away, my mother (separated from him for over 20 years but still legally married) and I decided to go to his townhome. Judging by just how much stuff was in the upstairs bedroom (otherwise unused), he hadn't set foot in that room in at least five years, and there was virtually stuff from the floor to the ceiling. Most of it no good to anybody, and the apartment itself was infested. After the first time, I wore hazmat Tyvek suits to make sure I didn't bring any infestation home. We were able to get most of the bottom floor of the place squared away and tossed in the garbage (what couldn't be salvaged), but we didn't even bother with the upstairs, save for a couple of items. There was just so much junk and useless plastic crap that would be of no use to anybody. Along with possessions abandoned by another of his ex-girlfriends that I never got to meet.
5:40
That snake is probably living it up in that house.
Plenty of places to hide, and so many mice to eat.
It’s snake heaven.
My grandfather’s aunt was a hoarder when she was alive. He told me about how he would go over to his cousin’s house as a kid and how there were piles of garbage blocking off whole sections of the house. She was also weird in other ways.
My Grandpa who I loved very dearly was a child of the depression used to hoard toilet paper, he would have been a champ during March 2020. All of his kids got a garbage bag of toilet paper when we cleaned out their house after they moved into assisted living and my dad and I still have some of it left.
Kids, get the trash bags. You know what time it is..😂
My mother was somewhat of a hoarder, but there was a lady down the street from us that was so bad that the state stepped in ( or city, I guess) Her kitchen and bathroom didn't work, you couldn't get in them anyway. They never had their trash hauled away, it was all thrown in the backyard I know when she started being a hoarder, her husband was in the Navy and he divorced her, and she held on to every single thing after that. She had a good job, so she could afford to buy fast food etc. for the kids. I worked with a lady that was a hoarder.You would never have suspected it, she was always so put together for work and when we all used to go out. Hers started when her father died and she was in her early 60's. Then there was the math professor, that lived 2 blocks from us. All we know is that her neighbors complained to the city several times but she never did anything about it and just fell through the cracks. One day her neighbors broke into her house filmed all of the mess and sent it to a local news station. They ran the story and the city finally put a lien on her house and she was forced to moved out after the city took her house. Now this was not just an average nice little neighborhood, this was a really upscale area named Huntington Harbor, a very wealthy enclave of Huntington Beach. I am not a hoarder, but I admit I am not the best housekeeper in the world, but I don't have piles of crap in every room of my house.
Holy Moley Camel spider problem in your house?? Those spiders are so petrifying 😨🙀
Fun Fact: Camel spiders aren’t true spiders.
They’re part of an entirely different arachnid family.
I think they're actually related to scorpions, but as an arachnophobe, I would die of a heart attack 😭🕷🤯
The trick is with food hoarders is that you ask them to eat the spoiled food to prove that it is edible.
Once they are incapactitated by food poisoning, then you clean out the fridge.
I watch and listen to holder episodes and get motivated to clean more than I already do.
My fiancee is an animal hoarder and we currently have, I think, 20 dogs and five cats. Pretty soon I might make her make the choice between me and the animals. Due to the fact none of them are trained to go outside or use the litter box and I also can't afford to feed them as is. I only make about $800 or so a month and there are five people in the house that are, for the most part, irresponsible.
My dad was a hoarder. While he stayed with me after open heart surgery, my sister and brother cleared out 2 large dumpsters worth of junk from the house, some of it not even recognizable as to what it was. A year later, the house was filled up again. The house had no heat, and could not be insured. There was nothing I could do. Sadly, he died with all that junk in the house (he lived there 40 years). The house was sold for $295K because of the condition. Someone bought the house and flipped it. Didn't really change much other than replacing everything, the house is now worth 1.3 million (it's in the bay area of CA). I tried everything to help him out of his situation, but it ended up causing me to cut ties with most of my family after I was accused of trying to get a conservership in order to "take all his money" I had PLENTY of money and just wanted my dad to live in a clean, safe environment. After he died, the sibling who accused me ended up having to deal with everything. I wanted no part in it.
I don't care what I want to keep, i'm not having the smell of shxt and piss (human or animal) be in every room because a house/apartment is that disorganized.
That would drive me insane itself.
So you have the habit of defecating all over the house.??? As "disorganization" doesn't smell of anything.. Or, are you saying you'd be hoarding feces,IF you were a Hoarder.?
Wait,what ARE you saying.?
@@juri_xiii9977 thank god I'm not the only one with the same questions. Like wtf?!
It is insane. When a house is so dirty that excrement and piss can go unnoticed for months underneath piles of posessions...to me that's hoarding no it's ands or buts. In the last year I've cleaned a room that had (probably a pound of) rodent droppings, underwear and sheets with skid marks, toilet paper with some unknown human excretion on it. Did it smell bad? Not in an obvious "i know what that is" way. Will I listen to anyone who says I'm overexagerating by calling my parents hoarders...nope. There's nothing wrong with having stuff, just don't have more stuff then you're willing to clean on a regular basis.
I can't understand buying living animals in every color as if they were toys or trading cards. I feel bad for those poor animals.
Have one in my family. 2 full houses and 5 storage lockers. All things that could be "fixed up"or "just needs cleaned up". Also, "some people collect those and could be sold for money." Hundreds of VHS tapes, multiple fancy China dish sets, tools, furniture, and random crap.
Man that minimalist one got me. My mom is a moderate hoarder but at the same time a complete neat freak. She made all 5 of her kids clean the entire house every day and if it wasn't done withing the three hours we had from the time we got out of school to the time she got home, she would completely lose it. Imagine trying to clean a hoarders house within three hours while simultaneously trying to do your homework and cook dinner. Every day she would bring more crap home. We literally had at least 4 trash bags full of both opened and unopened mail mixed together at any given time. I wasn't allowed to go through the mail because one time one of her checks got thrown away. This resulted in me never getting important mail like my tax info from work so I'd have to get all that stuff sent to my grandmothers house who lived an hour away just so I could file my taxes
it's interesting how people that are opposite can have the same little things in life. i wouldn't say my mom is a clean freak, but she really really hates having people over because they won't respect the home cleanliness rules (which she doesn't impose on guests, which i really don't understand, it's her home), so it was a miracle when she allowed me to have someone over (i was older, so i could watch over the guests, and I never had the want to invite people over anyways, i was kinda lonely lol). think mom always had a heart attack when my friend didn't take his shoes off before stepping on the carpet (after my friends left she said she thought that would be common sense lol)
also me looking for childhood stuff and finding out my mom donated it, I'm so used to it I never got upset, and it's actually good for me because I don't like getting rid of certain things like books, childhood toys, etc, or don't like going over the process of separating the stuff so if it wasn't for mom I'd still have everything
My mom grew up in poverty around alot of hoarders and my Gran had severe depression raising her as well (neglect of personal needs is a symptom) so my mom now has a fear of clutter and dirt. Growing up with undiagnosed autism and having my happy little crafts I made from clutter for my dolls and my random collections of crap from elementary thrown out was terrible. She did feel bad about hurting me but not about taking my things... so now I don't craft or DIY I just by things already made
My father was a hoarder. He filled the cubby house my uncle built us in just days. The 4 car garage had 4 cars in it, buried under jars of rusty nails, rotting timber bought before I was born, etc etc. I left home early and never returned until my mother died and I was allowed to choose something of hers to keep. The living room was half full by then.
Hoarding is, usually, caused by anxiety. In my father's case that anxiety was fear of being arrested for child molesting.
I have purges of clutter periodically and my claustrophobia very likely comes from living w his hoarding as a child.
Bloody hell I'm repeating myself.
When I was a kid, I went to an old lady's house for religion classes, and she had so much stuff we took classes in her front yard. Me, being an oblivious child, didn’t thought much of it until my sister mentioned it several years later.
I wonder if she's still alive.
We only ever used about 1/4 max of each room. I remember my parents wanting to get a pet door for our cats. I knew they wouldn't go through with it, but they picked one out and brought it home. it was tossed on the pile and hasn't been seen since. that was 13 years ago. I don't miss living there, but I wish I could have taken some of the pets
I was punished by having things "removed"; if I was very lucky, I could "earn" it back by being good (whatever that meant) or getting better grades (never quite good enough.) She did keep a few things, so that when company was around the house wouldn't look completely bare. So yeah, I like to have a lot of stuff around and I struggle with a lot of other issues too.
Depressing. My father's a hoarder as well, but less than these.
My husband keeps things because someone might need it but can't find it to give it to them or we'll use it as soon as we get all the pieces. He has all the pieces but can't find them all to put together to use it. And we have a bread maker, apple peeler, onion maker, ect ....that we never use just taking up room.
I'm a horder and it's one of the many reasons I wil never have kids
Just go get help dude, dont resign yourself to that shit
I'm the child of a hoarder who (like stuff) had too many kids and I approve this message.
My father hoards food and old broken computer equipment. His house is filthy with an infestation of rodents and bugs. Unfortunately myself and my 2 younger children live with him. When ever we try to throw away things he gets upset. We just try to stay in a separate area of the house and I try to stay away as long as I can throughout the day.
I have hoarding tendencies specifically in regards to scrap fabric. If it’s big enough to make something else. I've started getting into the habit of throwing stuff away if I hadn't used it in a while but every so often, I end up finding a use for something long after I threw it away. But for the most part, it's good to throw it away.
The ai voice over makes this that so much better.😂😂
I'm not sure what caused this but my mom is a hoarder who will take anything that's free or on sale even if she doesn't need it. She believes there will a come a day when someone she knows will want or need it, or she'll eventually find a use for it. She's pretty good at organizing (when she has the time) but it got even worse after she married my stepdad because he's a hoarder too, but he doesn't know how to organize at all. So there's always way too much stuff and no place to put it. They also don't keep track of all the food they have in their fridges/freezers (there's 2) and so food ofteb goes bad. And when I lived with them, it was my job to throw away nasty food and empty the containers because I had the weakest sense of smell in the family. It was awful. Now they only have my stepbrother living with them (who's 25) so the obvious proof is there that my siblings and I were not the ones making the mess, even though we had to do most of the cleaning.
This motivated me to clean up my nasty ass apartment. Admittedly, I've only done around the turlet and sink
Be fair, most canned food is still good long after the expiration date. As long as it's not bulging, rusted or opened, it's probably ok.
Wouldn't it immediately become dangerous to eat as soon as you open it though? That's my logic anyway.
@@Roadent1241 no because of the caning process itself. If the can is sterilised the food can be cooked and then become safe.
@@annieinwonderland I see, thank you.
Be honest though, if you've kept a can of food for 10 years, you're probably never gonna eat it.
@@tidepodpadthai2633 Ashens will in the future though XP
This reminds me I seriously need to take out the trash. I’m not trying to keep any of it, just being lazy and can’t be arsed to do it.
And for me, I admittedly hoard information. Way too many photos and apps on my iPad and smartphone, thousands of videos in Watch Later on TH-cam, can never be bothered/have the time to sort through them.
i was a horder for a lil bit, my freind took my small bag and dumped it on the floor at lunch and was like "ok we can keep this, this is trash" and i was just sitting there like "thank you" because i would pick anything i found cool on the floor
My Grandmother was a HOARDER my mum was a Horder but at half strength. I am greatful I am adopted and very much prefer the minimalist life. Growing up in that environment makes you very stressed and agitated.
I resonate with 30:30. I need to organize so badly (mainly the shed) but i have 0 motivation. My motivation only happens if someone is willing to help me (lol and guess what doesnt happen)
My mother is a hoarder, not nearly as bad as some of these here but we had a few rooms filled floor to ceiling. I have to actively watch myself or I'll keep crap I know I don't need. I get a mild anxiety attack throwing away my old torn up shoes because "they are good work shoes" lol.
My mother also does that thing a few people here talked about where if you simply say you like something she will get you anything that is even a little bit similar
My Dad is not a hoarder, but he still keeps a hoard. He works estate sales in a NASA town. We got all sorts of old electronics and collectables, militaria, the kind of things you'd find in an antique store that the men look at. One of our sheds has a cabinet full of old dusty oscilloscopes.
Seeing the thing, figuring out what it is, finding its price on the internet, buying it for less than $5 and selling it to the right collector for a 1000% markup is fun. Listing, packaging and mailing it is a chore.
Paid for his and Mom's personal 2nweek vacation, though.
I just hope the Democratic House's law putting the IRS to coming down on anyone who makes over $600pa on a hobby doesn't pass.
Alright I’m gonna clean my room up after watching this
I think my parents count as hoarders, but 'useful' ones. They started when I was really little so I never knew anything different.
Kitchenware/machinery from 20+ years ago because it STILL works now and is no longer in production.
Fair enough I guess, no problems having a FEW spares but two cupboard fulls...?????
A FULL HUGE drawer full of first aid stuff, 50+ years old plasters and such from nan's. Umm....?
Old dead laptops/desktops, VCRs, anything with parts that can be reused for new stuff, which obviously doesn't really match now. Charging/power cables we don't even remember what they go with....!
My dad with bottles of black shoe polish/metal cleaning stuff and vehicles he won't touch for years at a time, Until He Gets Around To Them to fix them or whatever. Also bits of vehicles on the kitchen counter nearest to the garage.
Old clothes dad can use as cleaning/oil rags, or mother can use to make things with. (cloth bags etc.)
Me, I admit, with cardboard boxes not torn open, in case I need something to put things they support in. (like tiny tubs of diamond painting diamonds to keep them all together.)
Empty plain envelopes to write notes on. Empty water/soda bottles in case I need to fill them for evacuation.
I'm sure there's more I'm just not thinking of but there's just stuff EVERYWHERE. No empty surfaces. Visitors must be silently horrified.
I've NEVER seen my friends' houses like this, aside from their rooms as a kid but that's kids' rooms for you, and it's confused me through my child-teenhoods. Where's their stuff? XD
Guess who complains we have no room in the kitchen to move around or put anything because pretty much every surface is covered?
Dad.
I want to be minimalist myself after all this absolute clutter but I have to have spares of things. I just have Piles Of Stuff I Know What's In What but it's just not tidy as hard as I try. My mini fridge is the emptiest thing I have.
I see the point of spares but I want Less Clutter?? I've tried Marie Kondo tactics but it only lasts a few days.
Hmm... Now I think about it, I'm very much a DIGITAL hoarder too... I will backup backups of harddrives of every computer I've ever had. I will blame that on dad though, he's done that with music and photos.
I do it with music, photos/pictures, word documents, games, videos, audioplays/audiobooks we've ripped from CDs/tapes....!
No I can't just Use The Cloud because our internet's crap (it would take YEARS to upload on 0.80mb speed at this point XD Trust me, we tried with 50GB worth of ONE Ipad. Took a week and no-one could use the internet.) and servers crash.
Those old cables could be actually be quite valuable. There are many old pieces of technology mostly computers and audio equipment amp's, headphones and guitars that are missing their cables.
@@genericname108 Are they compatible with newer devices though?
@@Roadent1241 some are like 3/4/5 pin XLR and aux cables because they've been the standard for like 60 years. Even if they don't work with new devices there is always someone who wants a spare cable for their old things.
@@genericname108 Ohhh, right, thanks, so they'd be best going off to a charity shop?
@@Roadent1241 it's worth a try to sell them if they're in good shape there is a decent chance to get a few hundred bucks. There will always be a market for them
So its kind of like people who used to be in poverty grow up to be stingy with money?
My grandmother was a borderline hoarder for many years, and as a result my mom is a minimalist. She throws away EVERYTHING if it sits out for more than twenty minutes. I used to have to tell my teachers that I couldn’t turn in my homework because my mom threw it away after I took a study break. She’s gotten a bit better in recent years, though.
These stories make me worried that I'll become a hoarder someday. I have lot of stuff and am pretty messy. Hopefully I can find good ways of organizing and cleaning things out periodically, because I see how my tendencies could be problematic if cranked to a higher level.
I had the opposite experience growing up. My mom was a white-glover. Like she would put on white cotton gloves and check our cleaning to make sure we didn't miss any dust. If we did my little sister (4 yrs younger) and I were made to completely clean the entire house again. My house now is permanently messy. We don't have bugs or mice but it is messy.
Read Maus by Art Spiegelman. It's the story of a son learning about surviving the Holocaust from his father. His mother and father had both been sent to concentration camps, and his infant brother had been killed by the woman caring for him, along with all the other children she was caring for, to prevent the Nazis from capturing them. Art's father lived the hoarder life, because that's how he survived. Finding anything that might be of value and trading it for money, favors, whatever he could. A moment in the book stands out to me, of Art's father finding a small bit of copper wire and becoming very excited about it.
My mom does have some hoarding issues, I guess because first, my grandpa was pretty stingy and, second, when he died, when my mom was 15, my grandma refused to work so they had to live with the money he had stated would go to them every month. At first it wasn't that bad because my dad is a very organized man, but after they divorced she started going wild. So, now she tends to keep a lot of stuff around, the fridge often gets full of stuff that will not be eaten and her room is basically 75% inaccsesible. She has an obsession with getting shelves and containers and loves getting cheap clothes at the local flea market. I often wonder how she can sleep when her bed is full of junk and she's confined to a small hole. Sometimes she would leave stuff in my room and never come back for it, so I had to be the bigger man and put it somewhere else. Luckily, this wasn't very common and most of her mess stays relegated to her room. She does love, however, getting t-shirts for me and I have more than I really need... but at least she has good taste when chosing them.
Luckily she's starting to get better and has asked for help to clean out her room, so I guess she never got to a point of no return. I guess that when my grandma died and she had to clean out her room she had some sort of epiphany, but I really can't be sure.
My mom gets extremely attached to things -- partly because her family moved so many times as a kid and she often had to get rid of things during moves. She's not nearly as bad as other examples here, but she has a barn packed full of stuff and keeps picking up more stuff because "we can use it someday!" It's going to be a bear cleaning the place out when she's gone...
My mum is not a hoarder but sometimes it's hard to throw or get rid of stuff. She's like you might want to use it or wear it in the future etc
My friends mom was like this. She kept anything even if she had no use for it. She worked in a place where my cousin isa manager. She went too far after she actually bought his old office supplies and furniture. Desk was falling apart chairs and couch smelled like cigarette smoke, old computer that didn't work, one of those bulky printers that doesn't work on new systems. Was there helping him with my pickup when he came the Lady comes up and when we say taking the stuff to the dump she offered money for it. She came in with a van and somehow loaded it all in by herself. The desk is of course being used as a place for the old news paper and the room smells like an ash tray. The rest of the stuff put around the house.
i’m a hoarder apparently, luckily it’s never gotten nearly as bad as the hoarder houses from tv. everything is special/might be useful in the future & i have to keep it ; ;
If you grew up with a hoarder, chances are you're a minimalist now.
I'm not much of a minimalist but I have a massive chuck out every few years and a few small ones every year.
My grandfather would carefully unwrap gifts so he could save the paper. He would save nails that were pulled wood , the bent nails he hammered straight. Pappa kept old cars/trucks and use them to store stuff.. papa said if he could figure out how to remove the print on newspaper he would save that. He had lots of tools , he had worked as a union carpenter. We moved into the house he had built , there were nails not hammered all the way in ,just in case he need to pull the nail to adjust the board. He was a perfectionist. I understand how difficult it is to finish a project. I have hoarding and perfectionist tendencies. Even the saving the first car I bought. I hope to restore it ,a 1974 VW bug. My first wife told me to get rid of it I said " I will have that car after you are gone " and I still have it !
My family has a history of hoarding. Seeming to start with my grandmother and was continued by my mom and extending to myself and my siblings.
As a kid I always loved to see my mom’s collection of toys even though it was a disarrayed mess.
Worse yet, at least personally, I’m autistic. So not only do I get overly attached to objects because of that but I also do because of my autism.
I realized as a child that I had a problem when I found myself wanting to cry each time we went to the secondhand store and I saw a stuffed animal I wanted. It wasn’t as if my mom wouldn’t get me them, she pretty much always would, but I recognized my feelings towards them as being a problem. Especially since I ended up having so many stuffed animals my floor was completely covered in them.
I started refusing to go into that store and sitting out in the car instead to avoid being put in a spot where I’d feel I couldnt leave without the stuffed animals I saw.
It took years but I’m finally starting to get rid of extra things. I still have collections and all manner of oddities but they’re better kept and better quality items.
However, my mom still triggers those tendencies in me sometimes.
A few days ago I decided I wanted to be rid of an old piggy bank. Yellow with little flower designs on it and completely not fitting with my otherwise gothic aesthetic. Talking to her I said ‘it’s useless to me now’ to which she said ‘aw, but it’s so cute’ or something along those lines which made me instantly feel guilty. As I set it back on my shelf she said ‘you never know when you need another piggy bank’.
I hate it. I can manage to detach myself from sentimental feelings towards items, it’s hard but I can do it, but when people reinforce those feelings in me it makes it feel almost impossible to do again.
my mom will do that with me sometimes when I bring down a bag of clothes or a box of things I want to get rid of. I have to run back upstairs before she looks through it or I'll end up keeping shit I don't need
I know she doesn't mean to do that but it sucks hard, I know how you feel
Me--the child of two neat freaks--watching this: *Interesting*
My Aunt was a hoarder, and an abusive one at that. Trash, dog and human feces/ old papers/ toys etc. Glad I got out of there at 14. it was helldoom living there and the kicker was that it wasn't even her house: it was my GRANDPARENTS house! She really went nuts after my granddaddy died and bulldozed(literally) my poor Grandma with her crap! She also deliberately had poor hygiene and also forced these nasty behaviors on me and my cousin, like I said, I got away at 14. She died in 2007 and left our Grandma in that filth of her own making. Due to her abuse/neglect( physical and pyschological) I had a LOT of trauma to overcome being in that disgusting mess: I don't miss her at ALL.
My entire family has a hoarding problem, including me I won't lie. it's such a hard cycle especially with depression. I find myself buying things I don't need that in the moment make me happy but ultimately don't really matter. soon you have boxes of little things everywhere, clothes you haven't washed, trash, and that just makes you more depressed so you buy more shit to make yourself happy. That's what my grandma on my dad's side does too.
My ma keeps a lot of things she either wants to fix or make room for, which usually never happens.
My dad hoards wood, metal, and various other little things he gets off the side of the road for crafts he doesn't have time to do
and my grandpa hoards mass collections of just about everything so he can resell it, when half of it is packed in old rusting vehicles, two sheds, the basement, and the rest of the house
11:05
It’s healthy you accept that... imo. So many therapists would tell you shit like, “your moms just sick, she loves you,” etc. Well she may in fact be sick and she may in fact love you but you are right, she loves that shit more than you. That sucks. But it’s true.
My grandma was a hoarder of books and clothes. But everything was stacked and organized all the way to ceiling. When she died, we found out she didn't have a bed. She had clothes that were in the form of a bed. A table made of clothes. And, you had to turn to the side to walk anywhere.
My mom works in home healthcare as a PT and unfortunately has to deal with a hoarders sometimes those people who hoard make me so sad I know that they do it for a reason but it’s just sad
And having no emotional attachment to material things is a good thing. If that’s the baggage you carry from your parents hoarding... consider yourself lucky.
i wouldn't say my dad as a complete hoarder but he definitely has more things than he should like his entire closet and half a living room full of stuff mostly found off the highway including but not limited to gas cans clothes nuts and bolts tools etc.
We’re not hoarders but I relate to the story of buying equipment and selling it when times got rough and because of it my parents and I do buy in bulk to sell just in case because we did come into the country with literally only our clothes on our back and a chair to sit in
I am the hoarder. It’s hard to toss out a tiny scribbled doodle.
I think my realization that my grandmother was at this point was when she asked me to go through the cabinets to throw expired stuff away, but then yelled at me and called me a n*zi for throwing away a jar of spices that was nearly a decade out of date.
We live together, as neither of us can afford to live alone. I am disabled both mentally and physically. She can't afford therapy to address her hoarding disorder, and blames all her problems on me for not helping her.
My mental and physical health depend on her getting help, and she can't get it, nor would she be willing to try if she could.
My Grandmother was a food hoarder, because she grew up in the times after ww2. My father does the same with food AND the Modelling of like.. boats, panzers and stuff like that.
It got waaaay over the "It's just a hobby" state. The basement, the livingroom, everything is full with it. My mother got this with clothing. So my Brother, my sister and me, we all have some type of hoarding going on.
My siblings and I have it all with the clothes but I struggle with Trash and empty Bottles too.I don't know why, but if I have like... empty space at the floor, it feels so insecure, you know?
But I still can tell myself, "Wait, you don't need this, tf?!" and throw it away... but the empty space man, i don't know why it is like that.