Anyone else grow up in a hoarder's home and just get tasked with fixing it as a kid?
TW: Parentshell yeah š
Donāt forget feeling guilty for also caring that I lived in an unlivable āhome.ā Apparently Iām not supposed to care if I live in something that is up to human standards or not
why you gotta call me out like this?
Parents (hippies): "You shouldn't worry about material possessions. Learn to let go of them. Your discomfort is only because you've been brainwashed by society."
House: Nine(9) broken tvs on the porch. A whole room that had become unusable because it was full of empty! boxes that my mom refused to break down, let alone recycle. Moldy plastic bags, because "I don't want it to go to the landfill!" (why did you get it in the first place then?) A fridge so full of plastic tubs of moldy leftovers that you couldn't put anything new in (and a placenta from one of us kids in the freezer for like 10 years, for some reason - at least that's what mom said it was). "There's plenty of food in the fridge! You have to eat the leftovers before I go to the grocery." Bags and Bags of trash, just fucking everywhere. Several dead cars in the yard in varying states of dismantlement and decay. Getting evicted from multiple places because our house was a fire hazard.
My mom wasnāt a hoarder, she was an interior decorator. You know how fashion magazines can exacerbate or even cause anorexia? She had whatever Martha Stewart Living magazines caused. I was an extension of herself used to fulfill compulsive cleaning in ways that never made sense or felt good. Dusting when there was no dust. Arranging pillows over and over till they where correct because I just couldnāt get it right.
She told me that a client could visit the house and see it was a mess and when word of her bad reputation got around nobody would hire her and we would be homeless and on the street.
I have no idea how to clean for myself and whenever I attempt to my whole nervous system catches fire. In the past Iāve had experiences in extreme states on hallucinogens and hard drugs where I would just clean my house because the opportunity to do so without intense nervous system backlash presented itself. My partner totally understands that if they leave me alone for the weekend with a charcuterie plate of rave candy that they will probably come home to parts of the house being cleaned that I havenāt cleaned or acknowledged the existence of since the last time.
So many therapists have tried to give me better tools for this but it is just kinda how things are wired now
My wife figured out how to deal with her boarderline hoarder nother ar about the age of 13.Ā Too much stuff?Ā Mom complains? just start burning stuff in the front yard while her mom was at work..Ā Papers, boxes, whole broken couches, and bustedĀ mattresses.
I am just now fully realizing how fucked up it was that my parents made fun of me for not knowing how to do basic things. Like it was your Goddamn job to teach me you assholes.
Absolutely. I also got neglected and bullied at the same time, it seems like a lot of parents really love to do that. Whatever makes them feel better about themselves I guess
i can remember plenty of times i was chastised for being unable to keep my room clean but i canāt remember a single time they ever demonstrated to me how you keep a room clean
But donāt you know that if you just punish kids enough for all behavior you donāt like, they will eventually find a way to do what you do want? Itās true, and when it does work, it will definitely be in a healthy and non-traumatic way. /s
Reminds me of when my brother at about 12 asked my mum how to use the kettle and she gathered us all together to make fun of him for not knowing how to use it. (The only reason I did was because Iād asked a few years earlier)
Yeah my mom gets mad at me when I don't know how to do basic shit even though she treated me and still treats me like I'm unable to do basic shit without fucking up or hurting myself. And when I do fuck up or hurt myself she acts either mildly annoyed by it or way overreacts. Like I'm asking you for help because you made my fucking doubt my ability to do anything on my own and never taught me to do it and now you're just fucking ignoring me and acting like it's a huge burden to answer simple questions
my parents after showing me the worst toxic relationship for 20 years: ah boy, why no girlfriend and friends?? you getting older you know.
me: internal raging intensifies
parents: i canāt wait to raise children :)
also parents: what do you mean youāre not fully formed adult, youāre already 8
The house I grew up in was so filthy, I have a vivid memory of waking up with ANTS under my blanket and all over me
Iām sorry :((
dude for realz??? that sucks
Bet u live spotless now having to grow up in that filth
Not spotless, I got a 2 year old and a lab puppy, so it can get a bit cluttered with toys and what not, but not rotting food and shit all over the floor
thats the norm dude. same here. sounds like a rough childhood growing up left scars. dealing with that shit now.
My parents always told me I had to get rid of their shit but then made me ask them if it was okay to get rid of it (it never was)
It's was never okay and they would be mad if you did anything they asked.
Ugh yes. During early pandemic my mom let me move in because my housing situation suddenly needed to change and I didn't have a job. She told me she was excited for me to move in because I could help her clean and declutter.
Cue her never wanting to do it. But she wanted it done. But if I did it she got mad. And depending on the project it would enrage my abusive alcoholic stepfather. So I stopped. Then they were mad I never did anything.
After I moved out again they finally sold the house and literally got dumpsters and trashed everything.
Visiting my dadās family for the weekend: itās easy to keep things clean, just do a little every day and it will never overwhelm you.
Back at momās: Navigate a trail between 5 foot tall stacks of clothes and boxes, all sitting on a soaking wet molded carpet from the last time the plumbing went bad.
lmao do we have the same parents? š
Truly. There is a tipping point where regular small efforts wonāt make a dent. Then a sense of hopelessness kicks in
I, as a non professional, have identified a few characteristics about hoarders. I may easily be wrong so please inform me on the things I am missing or miss understanding.
Resource scarcity- People save things because they think they will need it in the future. Makes sense to a point.
Depression- functioning on top of a debilitating disease. Blurs lines unable to define new lines.
Physical disability- can't keep up
Agoraphobic and/or paranoia. Having issues with society.
Some sort of mental disconnect, unsure of the name. Like it doesn't seem to be that bad in the person's mind as the hoarding becomes bigger. Other people can't make the person see it as a problem. I read once somewhere that hoarders usually had no control over some parts of their life and that manifests itself into hoarding. Something like that.
I only want to understand better about this behavior. I know this is reddit, I don't expect experts to respond. It's just nice to know others are familiar with the situation and all it's different forms. Opinions welcome. ty.
Yeah, it was my fault the house was a mess because I never helped clean, it was my fault we had 30+ cats because one cat had a litter of kittens and I thought they were cute and wanted to keep them all because what kid wouldn't want a bunch of kittens, etc etc etc
I was never taught or enforced anything and then I'd get in trouble for not knowing how to do it.......
You, and those cats, deserved better. I'm sorry you went through that.
Yeah, thinking about this fills me with so much anger sometimes. I grew up living in my grandparents' basement, and my mom was unfortunately disabled, so she couldn't clean. My dad didn't clean at all. So I was never taught, and things got pretty messy. My grandma would show up unannounced to do cleaning sprees, and my mom's shame and stress about the mess ended up being transferred to me. My mom's since passed, and our living space is still awful and crowded because my dad never, ever cleans, and I was never taught, and my mental health has been fucked from the start.
I want to learn, though. I just need energy and a good adhd day to actually follow through with it. I know when I live on my own, I'll never let my space get like that. Neeever.
Growing up neurodivergent and absolutely not knowing how to clean or organize anything because all the advice I ever got was āStop being lazy! Just do it!ā
My mom insisted I āmade the house that wayā as a small child? Really? You think a 5 year old could do all that? Lol.
My partner's parents are hoarders pretty bad. One year, to help out their sickly mother, we offered to clean the house for them. We filled two of those big trash bins you can rent. It was the first time their house didn't smell like mold and cat piss.
They didn't talk to us for a week after they saw the place. That was a few years ago. Their place is almost back to how it was before we cleaned it.
I've never seen so many comments that I relate to when it comes to this situationš an impossible amount of mess, that I didn't create and no matter how many times I clean it there's too much to keep up with and somehow its all my fault.
When your family never taught you how to clean, actively discouraged you from cleaning or doing housework (āthatās my jobā, āfocus on your schoolworkā, āit upsets me more when you do houseworkā), then calls you a parasite stealing their life because you didnāt clean or do housework.
My grandmother was a caterer and a hoarder. When the health department came, she would spend two days prior deep cleaning [meaning she paid some drug addiction friend of her children to do it] and move all her stuff from downstairs in the basement, where she worked, to on her bed. She would sleep in the living room instead of her own bed because she could close the door and hide her shame. Everyone enabled her until she got dementia.
Yup!!!!!!! School kids would make fun of me too. āYou canāt even keep your yard cleanā āyou have such a messy houseā āwhy donāt your parents cleanā neighborhood kids would even throw trash in our yard just because. One time I had a āfriendā over and she literally threw a popsicle stick on the ground, in front of me. And when I got mad she was like āwhat?ā WHAT ???!
The part that hurt the most for me was when it didn't follow me when I moved out
REAL
My father would make me and my siblings clean his own hoarding situation all the time. I had a hoarding situation myself and was punished constantly for it and when i asked for help I was told āyou make the mess, you clean itā this quote never applied to the men in the house ever.
Oooh this one has oddly specific spice š
Real
My dad developed it after getting divorced, so I had to watch the house I grew up in change. I wish I could do something about it, but anytime I'd try and help, it wouldn't change.
My mom also developed it after getting divorced. She was a little like it before, but it got way worse after.
Is that house in the images famous or something? I feel like Iāve seen it before
It might be from the āhoarding:buried aliveā show, just a guess though!
Not as a kid bc it wasn't so bad then, but whenever I'd visit my mum later, which was maybe once a year, it was like "oh good, you're here, you can clean." But how, there's not enough room to clean anything. The one time I tried to set a boundary on this, it turned into the biggest fight we ever had.
I'm glad she lives in a home now where people have an eye on her.
My mom had hoarding tendencies and ADHD so I would throw things away when she left the house so she would assume that she lost them.
My room was the one they shoved things into so they wouldn't have to think about them.
I was blamed as the reason the house had mice because I, a shy depressed teenager living in a hoarded house, would sometimes bring a snack up to my room and not immediately bring the empty paper plate back downstairs to the kitchen trash.
Meanwhile the house was hoarded with stuff as well as... Birds. Live pet birds. Meaning a ton of seed and dust and dirt, and because of neglect filthy cages and occasional dead birds.
But yeah my cluttered room and a snack was the problem.
For us it's not that bad as it's hygienic and most the furniture is free of whatever is around, but it makes me legitimately unable to see messes and now my parents call me messy
I grew up in a hoarding house and constantly got yelled at as a CHILD how it was my fault and how I was ruining our home lmaooo. The hoard was months and months of mail and tons and tons of dollar store bullshit. Dollar store bullshit would break immediately and weād keep the trash ājust in caseā. I am a fully grown adult so I wonāt say my hoarding today is my familyās fault but god is it hard to unlearn everything you were taught was normal as a kid.
I'm not exactly sure if my mom was a hoarder per se. But we always had random shit thrown around, mountains of stuff just lying around one thrown on top of another, we didn't have a single clean surface anywhere in the house, everything was dirty and we couldn't clean it properly because there was things in disarray everywhere. She didn't hoard things, there was just too much of them if and nobody bothered to do a good clean up or throw something away. Our balcony was full of random bullshit too. We had cockroach infestation for years and I could only sleep with my underwear and pajamas on even in the summer because I was so afraid something will crawl in there. We also had fleas infestation a few times.
And my mom had the nerve to ask me why can't I just clean my room or put things where they belong. Honey I do NOT know where they belong. Not a single thing in this household has a place, they've been thrown around since eternity, and I am incapable of somehow organizing mountains of ten year old at best trash in my room by myself. I got a severe depression in middle school and it didn't get better for years and years, so it was hard to organize even the things that I would use every day, and combined with complete lack of organizing skills, at the end of the day I started to hahe my own personal mountains of trash everywhere.
It only get better when I moved in HS and even to this day I still have extreme fear of abandoning my cleaning duties because I fear that if I won't clean it up today, there may be a possibility that I won't be able to clean tomorrow as well and maybe this whole week and then maybe a month and then my apartments will just become the same chaos I escaped from. I've become a paranoid clean up/organizing freak :/
My parents threw out my entire closet because they wanted me to "arrange" it
Btw this is it after I did some cleaning it was all on the ground
My mom does this. If its not to her liking, she throws it on the floor as punishment. If she's angry she does it too, just for no reason. Gosh its annoying. I'm so sorry your parents do this.
Well this ain't that bad honestly better than getting all the curtains in my room removed
(my room is made in a way that there is no place where without curtain I couldn't be seen)
But I hope you're better too and in a better place where you don't gotta experience this
I don't have a door or curtain for my room either, women can't be trusted with privacy, so says my parents. I have to try to wait for when they aren't around so I can even change clothes. Still hard cuz they have cameras all around the house.
I am *not* in a great place, not in the slightest. I've had a shit day especially, tbh, but really everyday is shit. I'd say I hope you're in a better place but it doesn't seem like you are :( I'm sorry.
I wish we could find a better place and I hope we will in the future sucks but I guess that's life for people like us
Yes!!! Me too!! I have since learned how to clean. Kinda. Still live in the pigsty, but I have made it liveable for me. I don't clean for her. I clean for my baby brother. My sister is just like my mom, I've taught her everything I know but she just says she's too lazy and doesn't want to. So, I clean for me and him. The rest of them can have fun living in their own filth
It is so important for parents to teach their kids how to clean and WHY it itās important to keep things clean.
Iāve never had one unique experience šØ
Yea. It sucked. Im the problem solver in the family.
Yes.
Yes yes yes yes yes and yes.
My grandma was the matriarch and had complete control; huge hoarder and you dare not get rid of anything without her say-so. Became my responsibility to fix the situation or find a way out on my own, with no guidance for that either.
My mother has taken up similar, albeit lower severity behavior. My grandma pulled a āgone to get milkā maneuver, so the main culprit got up and left on their own anyways.
Iām out of it now regardless, so I never did fix it for them :)
No I just got in trouble for fixing it bc my dad went through the trash and put old food back in the fridge.
my mom would watch shows about hoarding, look at me and go āsee, thatās what happens when you donāt clean.ā and it made me mad because i like to clean, itās just hard because it takes so much energy to do it. i wish that when i cut her out of my life i left her house a mess just to spite her.
This one just hits different (I feel like it's all my fault for no valid reason)
I was homeschooled too so I didn't visit a lot of homes growing up. Imagine my reaction when I discover that normal homes don't have a lot of stuff and you re supposed to do light cleaning routine everyday š«
Gang gang
it was like this until my family moved, and then it took WEEKS of heavy deep cleaning and many, many more hands to finally look presentable
My living room was unreasonably dirty as fuck, but I'm epic and always kept my room super clean while everyone else lived in a trash yard
My father is a "closeted hoarder" (he pretends he's organized but has another house exclusively for his hoarding). When he was married to my mother he had a room in the house for his hoarding, it was isane - car parts inside our home, piles of old newspapers and magazines, old furniture... Mixed with dirt and cat poo.... yet he shamed me for not having my things organized when I was a 8 y.o.
He or my mother never taught me how to organize things (actually they taught me about messy environments) and expected me to be organized because "what will people think seeing your stuff like that?" WTF? I cleaned a lot of their messes growing up and I ended up being very organized. The only thing I want is distance from those crazy hypocrites.
Relatable
Yup yup, still stuck with a disgusting house and a gross room. It's not as bad as it used to be since we moved, but there's just so much junk and trash
In case youāre not already following, r/ChildofHoarder was recommended to me by my little sis and itās helpful/cathartic there. Luckily our family has mostly gotten better from hoarding, but it was a bad place to be for a bit lolā¦
Good luck to you<3 I know itās hard learning these adult skills when you havenāt been properly taught/shown how to maintain it. Though Iām SO proud of you for trying to learn how to be happy and healthy for yourself as an individual now, godspeed my dudes and dudetts you can slowly but surely get ābetterā/through it and progress to healthy happiness<3 š«
My mom was talking to me the other day about how clean my room was, the context being my brother left for uni last year and I was told to tidy it about a month ago. And I have not moved a single thing since
My dad isnāt a hoarder but heās extremely messy, my parents split when I was a kid so Iād never lived with him until I was about 17? He went to work one day on the weekend so I cleaned the house, did a few loads of laundry and stripped and changed the beds.. this businessman was baffled that I, a 17 year old knew how to change bedding.. it makes me wonder how I wouldāve coped if my dad raised me instead. He was 56.
This is so relatable lol. My family werenāt hoarders but our house was always messy.
I feel this deep in my bones, weirdly relieved that I'm not the only one with this experience. And I continue to wonder why I'm so dysfunctional with cleaning. Still not as bad as my dad was though.
I'm sorry you got put through that shit. With me, my dad would literally yell and throw total fits if I didn't clean what he wanted me to. Then he would get upset and yell at me for not magically knowing how to sort everything the exact way he wanted it with little to no instructions. Insane fr.
I grew up away from my father and moved in when I was 16. My stepmom and half sister are hoarders. Itās intolerable and I cleaned that house up several times because I heard, āI would but itās overwhelming and I just donāt know where to start!ā Bullshit. I repeatedly fixed the problem and they always get out of control again. Iām out. They can drown in useless stuff.
My parents aren't hoarders, but they definitely have a problem. It's their papers all over the house not mine, but my brother and I still need to clean it up
THERE ARE OTHERS???
Yeah, I also got tasked with completing all the home improvement projects they started, got bored with, let sit for months and then panicked about when they realized the family was coming over for Christmas (the one day a year people were allowed in the house). There was basically a week in December where sleep just wasn't a thing. The mess got shoved into the spare room and garage, and I learned how to tile, hang drywall, and run electrical by myself at like 2 am.
my current situation rn
Yeah my one role in life was to fix nearly unfixable problems that I neither created nor perpetuated yet somehow was meant to feel guilty for not being able to šŖ