So now that we have dealt with the obvious, I'd also like to put forward what is a common advice for people in this situation, which is to go to therapy. If you are underage, your school or college usually has free psychology services. Back when I was young it never crossed my mind because I was too afraid to share my reality to a therapist - revealing the truth - especially when you are underage, when it will likely be considered parental negligence. But after 18 they are required to keep your information confidential.
Look, I wish I could tell you it was as simple as telling a health authority of what you are going through, but I can't. You'll have to analyse the severity of the situation yourself and with other sane responsible family members or friends. It's not easy to live with the consequences of such a decision.
This is why hoarding is such a moral grey area. It's not so bad that the costs may make it revealing it worthwhile, and it's not so light that you can brush it off. It's a debilitating situation that cripples your life and life stages, bringing about extreme levels of mental illness.
You have to save yourself. But you also have to consider your situation yourself. It's not uncommon that family members turn a blind eye themselves or stay in a grey area themselves, where they recognize it's immoral and unhealthy but they won't do anything to stop it through legal means.
Everyone realizes how big of a responsibility and burden it is to reveal such a situation, making everyone complicit. This is the true sickness of the hoard - it makes everyone complicit.
Even if you wait until 18 you should confide in therapists so they can help you cope and maintain a correct perspective and mental health.
I avoided it at all costs to make sure nobody knew. Being in a family with people so involved in the field made things extra complicated, and honestly hopeless. I was in a strange position of having to work against my self interest to work to my best interest. My 'best' interest wasn't all that good.
So, seek help. Don't lose years of your life that you will never get back and will destroy your career, ability to form healthy relationships, and lead you into negative spirals too hard to climb out of.
Now we can move on to relevant skills worth having if you see yourself dealing with the hoard and the hoarder without seeing a clear way out.
First you have to come to terms with 'human nature'. It's very hard to accept that such a close person can inflict so much pain and suffering, and it may be even more complicated if they also do good things for you. As I've stated before this is exactly what makes it so complicated, so draining, and so defeating. Hoarders, whether by their own faults or true deliberate sabotage, are human. And that's what can be so hard to accept. Humans, when pushed to situations they don't have ethical solutions, will resort to unethical ones. This is something you must accept. You even have to accept it of yourself.
We like to think we're special and good, but this doesn't mean we can't reach extremes and adopt extreme measures. Life can get complicated.
Obviously I'm not endorsing or being willfully blind to 'immorality' but I think it's important to recognize how we all can be immoral one time or another. The reason for this is that this breaks down your internal cognitive dissonance. You see them being bad, or good and bad, and since you see yourself as good it creates a sense of incompatibility and injustice. But the hoard is not your fault nor is it because of something you did. Not accepting this is where the sick relationship of enmeshment, and lack of boundaries, starts. You become complicit to your own demise.
Having overcome this inner tension of good-evil human nature, it becomes the time to set out on your journey of individual sovereignty. By having a solid core that is hard to shake you can then count on that to build your future and gradual action program. This is where learning about Philosophy becomes so important; namely, learning about 'categories'.
Organizing your mind, ideas, and worldview, is essential to eventually move on to organize your environment. Much of what you can do needs to start with yourself. Like a lightbulb being turned on, you must radiate a new way of being, a new way of acting, and a new way of stabilizing your emotions from the inside out. I know how scary and exasperating this may sound, especially when you need to be focused on building your financial independence and career. There is no time to waste cleaning and micromanaging another person's behavior. In truth this is exactly right. But the program I want to install in your mind is not a program for a person in a reasonable situation; it's a program for a person in an unreasonable situation.
With the right information, what you can do in a single month will make up for years wasted, affecting your performance in school or your job. If you can perform on your school or job, by all means invest in that. But if, like me, you were already anxious, depressed, having panic attacks, and, because of that, completely inefficacious and school or work, you must cut the problem by the root. And if you have no other reasonable housing solutions then you must tackle the hoard in front of you.
Start with your personal area. Your room is your 'base of operations'. You must enforce territorial boundaries there. That means enforcing rules of trespassing. And simplest way is to have a key to your room they can't access and keep it locked.
Hoarders can be extremely invasive, lacking any concept of boundaries. And not enforcing physical boundaries is the same thing as not enforcing psychological boundaries.
See, one thing you can work out with hoarders is that both of you can improve your lives - because it's not just about the living situation, as that's only a symptom. With some tact you can work a plan that can benefit both parties without being some big dramatic event.
As I've mentioned earlier, study 'categories', even games like Tetris, or other logic games, can help you organize, understand priorities, and set a living plan that's sustainable, and makes your life manageable. The hoard is one big 'to-do list'; a pile of procrastination. Once you clear everything, all it matters is to not let things get back to where they started. This requires discipline; it requires habits; and it requires that you and the hoarder learn that procrastination feeds into itself. The more you postpone the more you postpone. Because every task will be harder to solve.
Having a stable emotional and philosophical foundations allows you to build a continuous method and behavioral repertoire, but then you must employ tactics, not only to manage space and objects, but also to manage the hoarder's behavior. One thing to keep in mind is that people are copycats - if you behave in a way they acknowledge as productive they will also adhere and copy it eventually. The difficult part is to get past the initial emotional outbursts and tantrums. But you have to endure it in the beginning. It may take a month or two but they will adhere if you show consistently the results of your actions.
This is what's behind hoarding, and mainly procrastination behaviors: the person has a hard time conceiving how one behavior leads to better states of mind. Because that's the key difficulty that leads them to stall. It's not intuitive for them how 'change' can relieve their stress and lead to a positive state of mind.
Imagine you go from point A to point B; you know what to expect; now why go to point C instead of B? Not only will you gain anxiety because you aren't unsure of the result, but it also might go badly, to top it off. So it requires extra mental resilience and ability to deal with extra stress. So it makes it easier to go to point B than try a point C altogether. A further problem arises when changes in simple things can also lead to changes in other adjacent things, which becomes harder to calibrate. So it's a web of new variables that become even harder to manage and comprehend. Simple changes can create reverberations of problems that lead to an escalation of problems without a known solution. It all just leads to more anxiety and stress.
The point is, to solve this, is to become a minimalist and adopt solutions as they arrive. At first glance this may seem to lead to more anxiety for those that like to be prepared in advance, but the point is not to relieve anxiety in the short term, but to do so on the long term, and overall!! See, this is why it's so hard to for procrastinators to relate one state of consciousness with another in terms of physical causes and their effects. A consciousness state has no clear relation with another consciousness state. We can link each state with different circumstances but each state is not intuitive how it's supposed to present and how it can evolve. Unlike with physical states where we can literally see one thing leading to another.
This makes emotional management that much harder to navigate, specially when it clouds our judgement. But the trick is to reach clear states and use them to the best of their potential. And try to increase and improve the conditions that makes them arise.
This may sound all too complicated, but it's ironically the easy road. And it's a road that gets better/easier over time.
A substantial part behind positive conditioning is finding elegant strategies and reinforcements that make behaving in a specific way rewarding and inviting. From beauty, to playful, to correct design, to rewarding, to novelty, there are tons of ways to make organizing, to make habits become interesting, pleasurable and motivating. You can even use the hoarder's behavior or compulsive purchasing to your advantage if you learn to guide it. If they buy candles, find a clever reason - spiritual, celebratory, relaxing - to burn all the candles in one go; if they buy newspapers, use them to cover the ground in painting projects or to make recycled paper, or to cover porcelain vases or other fragile objects you want to store.
The point is to consume their hoard faster than they can produce it. This seems like a time consuming handful, but it's still better than wasting in depression and misery in the middle of piles for years. As long as you think it would take you to do the work, it will take you longer to overcome the hoard and the damage it will do to you psychologically and your relationships.
One of the problems of living in a hoard is that it's constant stress inducing, given the amount of 'to-do' problems and how it hinders any new tasks you could use the space to do. This will create an emotional snowball effect that will put you in a permanent state of stress, overwhelm, along many other symptoms that stem from an overstressed and overtriggered nervous system. Not only you need to manage the sources of stress from any source - people, situations, music, shows, news, etc - you also must become aware of the states of mind you're in. This is one of the most difficult problems I've faced. It's like a frog boiling in slow heat - you're inside it and it's too late. This is what I refer to as a 'black box trap'. When you fall into foggy, negative, stressful, states of mind it becomes very hard to have the perspective and self-care to tell yourself 'hey, go for fresh air, or for a run.', 'breathe', 'don't hang out in these stressful environments or with those people so much', 'stop consuming so much alcohol or smoking, or watching stress inducing media'. Inside the 'black box' you can't see 'outside' it. You become trapped until something pulls you out of it. So the exercise is to recognize these states and that you can fall in them and to mitigate the stressors that lead into those states of mind. Because cleaning a hoard and dealing with a hoarder is very psychologically taxing and it's getting stuck in quicksand or in a spider's web.
I can list a few things to watch out for that can lead you down the black box, although this isn't the main purpose of this page, and it's more about emotional self-regulation and stress management.
- Negative, pressuring, mean people
- Scary, negative, stressful content
- Fried food and with excess salt
- Coffee
- Alcohol
- Tobacco and cannabis
- Drugs
- Disorder
- Lack of air circulation
- Sedentarism
- Lack and excess exercise
- Excess eating; not fasting
- Excess screen time
- Social isolation; oversocialization
- Toxic work environment
The importance of managing negatives influences on your mind is primary, but on the same flavor, introducing positive influences can serve to compensate the negative to a certain extent as well.
You can also self-soothe for the same purpose like taking warm baths, relaxing on the beach, eating comfort food, etc. See it's not about over-indulgence but about finding equilibrium and learning to know your body and manage the stressors and the positives accordingly.
As I may have alluded to, the hoard is a battle field. It's the materialization of a mind and it's expanding to wherever it can. If you don't start to invade areas, plant 'flags' and enforce area control you will be eaten by the hoarder's extension - objects. This may all seem like convoluted metaphors but it's really as creepy and horrific as it sounds. Hoarding is alien warfare. It wouldn't be surprising that may stem from some literal parasitic infection altering their behavior, akin to zombie parasites or to rabies.
By all means employ any spatial conquering strategy you see in strategy games. For me it worked to set up aquariums and plants and paintings in the walls, as an appeal to something worth preserving and maintaining. But whatever works for you, adapted to your hoarder's character, is game.
Hoarders are invasive like weeds growing. If you don't stop their growth they will sabotage your plans. You need to create boundaries, whether by not giving them access to your space by locking areas, or by removing access to yourself by not being available or by refraining from reacting to them. Boundaries also have to do with the things you accept. You can deny certain conversations, topics, or habits. They can't do a thing about it. See, the hoarder is trapping you. If you have the courage to test it you'll see they are scared out of their minds to lose you. The moment you realize this is the moment you gain back control.
Without beating a dead horse, I think it's important to stress the quality of human enmeshed minds where they'll start to calibrate to one another. This is a problem in regards to negative emotions. And it's a two way street. This requires you to manage your emotions as contaminants, not just because they'll affect the hoarder, but because the hoarder will affect you. You must move like a spy infiltrated in the Soviet Union or like an undercover cop. Anything you give them they will use against you to further their own position. Do not have a sliver of doubt.
As they say: 'what goes around comes around.'
A clever tactic to keep the hoarder engaged with the new changes is to set up easter eggs to keep them engaged. Either by giving life to some of their hoarded objects in meaningful contexts and uses, or by finding other quirky things in the new set up that weren't possible in the hoard, you got to keep their novelty seeking impulses busy. If you're clever and creative it's not as big of a deal. You can use this to your interest. Most tactics I mention are to be used for the CoH's interest, even if they are supposed to charm the hoarder as well.
The main architecture of 'easter eggs' is to bank on the hoarder's addictive need for quick dopamine to fill their bottomless empty well. Not only can you keep them going you can also steer their behavior with positive conditioning along the way.
Note: And no, this is not immoral. This is a way out. And will lead to better outcomes and states for both you as a CoH and the hoarder. Don't lose sleep on what seems like machievellianism. You deserve to change your life and live that life with pleasure. But you need to fight for it.
Understanding who people are, how people are, and how it affects us is essential to manage and learn to sidestep negative influences. Learning how to read people's intentions, or notice whether people are trauma dumping, or burdening you unnecessarily with their problems, is a great way to diagnose who has or doesn't have your best interest in the moment. Whether because of enmeshment or simply because you share an environment, it's very important to change the 'frequencies' you are exposed to. I'm using 'frequency' as a metaphorical way to convey emotional, behavioral and attitudinal patterns. In the same way you become [dys]regulated by the hoarder you will also carry that to other relationships.
Such a pathological environment is bound to generate 'codependency'. The hoard creates convergence and stagnation which leads to depression, anhedonia, lack of energy, and codependency. In order to avoid this, you must generate activities outside of the hoard - reasons to escape it - meanwhile developing independence, financially, and in terms of skillsets. Nothing releases you from the control and psychological grasp more than not needing the other person.
The biggest blow isn't usually the hoard. Yes, the hoard is extremely crippling and shameful, but that doesn't do a fraction of the damage compared to knowing that a person who's supposed to love you is not doing anything to revert the situation, while being well aware of how it's negatively affecting you. This does a lot of harm to one's view of human nature, of love, and of trust. Little by little it's important to learn who to trust and who not to; rather than trusting everybody or nobody.
It's just as damaging to trust the wrong person with your vulnerabilities, as it is to trust nobody. We need people. We need to connect and feel understood; and we need to release tension by depositing trust in others. This process can take a while and requires maturity which will give you enough psychological margin and perspective to read people and find appropriate situations to open up. Naturally, therapy is one of these spaces, but should not be taken without a grain of salt. After all, therapists are also human and not devoid of flaws. Tread cautiously.
Inside the hoard there's no hope. This leads you down to a lack of possibilities, lack of relationships, and lack of mental health. It's a narrow road. And it narrows our possible future self. We tend to think we have a plan, but we rarely end up where we imagine; it gets worse if you have the hoard and hoarder working against you.
This is where it's important to not lose faith in your story and become creative in developing yourself despite the setbacks.
People tend to succumb to depression and to hopelessness because they see no road ahead. But this is a mistake. You don't need to see the road ahead; you just need to act by doing things that widen your odds. Cultivate yourself - read -, train yourself with new skills, do sports to keep your mind healthy and on the move, and try new things. Don't let yourself get demoralized. You have only to lose by staying the same. The cost of loss isn't half as bad as we imagine. We just have to stop linking our failures or delays with our self-worth. Only not trying should make us ashamed.
Any changes you will muster, either on you or in your hoarder parent will all have to come from a place of unconditional love and understanding. It's not your place to judge. Even when it hurts. Even if you feel wronged, don't let anger, vengeance, or resentment eat you alive.
I know better than most the amount of negative emotions the hoarder parent raises on you; I also know well how disgusting loving them feels, but if you expect change it's only route. Any forcing you attempt will be seen as you seeing them as an hindrance and something to be overcome. And it will be met with more resistance, less compliance, less motivation, and less compassion for you on the hoarder's side.
So, love. Not for you alone, not for the hoarder; love for the love of life. Because as bad as the hoard and the hoarder may have been, they not only don't have the right, but you can't also let them swallow your life in their drama and plot. Life is much more than that, that's what you should love wholeheartedly.