Welcome to Children of Hoarders
A guide to dealing with hoarder parents
Nobody will truly understand the strain it puts on a person to live with an uncompromising self-absorbed hoarder, and more so if you are a child, but I'm here to walk you through a success case of rehabilitation (to an extent) and how you can cope with a hoarder family member in your household.
The little information online will only address that they have a problem and that they need professional help but as it was in my case it was particularly complicated on top of it (because the person worked in the mental health system) and people around couldn't be unbiased - as the person's treatment would completely destroy the credibility of the person in their career - and so, sometimes, one must take measures into ones hands to cope, survive and overcome living with a hoarder.
You'd argue the person could somehow set up a new career, but stable jobs are hard to come by and I wasn't willing to break it down for and carry the guilt on my conscience (even if it was justified), specially in a country with a fifth living on minimum wage. Even I was on the fence and never ended up reporting the situation (to create a schism to remove the veil of lies) that would put the career in jeopardy. It is in many ways a form of stockholm syndrome mixed in with self-interested out being affect by it as well. You grow up inside the chaos and it is part of you whether you want it or not.
Yes, I was a child raised in a hoarder's house.
Information online talks about hoarders but rarely about their children and the hurdles they have to face daily for years, even decades.
In many countries there isn't even an health system ready to deal with hoarders and all the environment that comes with such obsessive compulsion, let alone talk about their offspring and methods for coping.
So here I am to give you some hope, and more than that, to give you some pointers from my anecdotal perspective as to how you can try and change your situation.
First off, I'd like to make it clear that I'm not a professional in the mental health field. I am a person that grew around people that worked in the national health system, and so I became accustomed to the medical mental health jargon and to how mental health declined and was tackled. Ironically, no one is safe from becoming mentally ill or developing unhealthy behaviors that may put an overwhelming strain on the person and those around them.
So, in order to figure solutions to the problem at hand we must first understand it; and after we inteligentely frame it, we must slowly but surely converge on its cyclical identity and then create a parallel substitute modus operandi. The point is not only to pinpoint the problem and find solutions to fix it, but to not let it degenerate again to the same tragic situation.