My parents are fucked up. Our house is so full of stuff that you can barely pull out any of the dining room chairs to take a seat before it bumps into a piece of furniture. We have a huge filing cabinet and tool chest/organizer taking up like a third of the space in the dining room. A filing cabinet they haven’t opened in probably fifteen years. Nearly every horizontal surface in the house is covered with unsorted papers of some kind.
My dad has ADHD and the house is full of half-finished projects and renovations. At work, his office desk is covered in a mountain of papers and books. It takes him forever to find anything. He agrees that the house needs to change, but he expends absolutely no effort to make it so. He leaves everything in the hands of my mom, as he did with our parenting.
I think my mom might be a hoarder. She recently added shelves in the hallway such that only one person can walk through it at a time, and still have to twist their shoulders to squeeze through. She has eleven pairs of flip flops and slippers that are too worn out for her to wear, but won’t throw away because someone, somewhere could use them.
She’s always taking stuff out of the trash can that we had throw away, like my sister’s hair ties. She destroys them now before discarding. For a month I used a leg brace (~$30 from Amazon) for a broken ankle. When I had healed, it was falling to pieces and soaked with half-dried sweat. I threw it directly into the bin outside. My mom took it out, because “someone could use it somewhere”.
My parents are paying a total of probably $400/mo on at least three storage units filled with junk they never use.
My father had a huge metal shed built on the lot of property he has in the rural outskirts of town. It is filled to the brim with his father’s junk, including a band saw from 1924 and a rusting mixing bowl from a WWII-era battleship kitchen that’s five feet in diameter. His father has been dead for 24 years. My dad told me he has nightmares about his father asking “where is my stuff?” He obviously needs therapy, but considers it a waste of money and hates rich doctors. My mom agrees that he needs emotional help, but has never talked to him about it.
I told my mom that the single thing that she could do to help my depression would be to discard as many things as she could bare to. I tried to introduce her to Marie Kondo’s method, but she reacts with heartbreak whenever I criticize her style of house organization. She retorts with “our house is just too small for the five of us (mostly true); I’m doing the best I can.”
I want to have a family meeting so I play this video, and communicate my feelings.
Edit1:
A silver lining is that the house isn’t “gross” dirty. There’s no more than a normal amount of filth and dust, and the dishes and carpets are cleaned regularly. And there isn’t much stuff on the little open floor space that we do have; all the junk is piled onto desks or tables. We have way too many end tables.
Edit2:
This may be a tangent, but whenever I try to express my feelings, my mom interjects to minimize it (I think that’s the right term).
Example: When I moved back in with my parents after financial ruin two years ago (six months later my brother would do the same), I threw all my belongings in a hurry into dozens of plastic totes. No organization; it was just to make it through the move. Once home, we packed most of my totes into a storage unit (I’m part of the problem, but at least I know it). There is a lot of stuff in there that I need periodically, but which would be too much trouble to fish out.
I told my mom that my mom that I wanted to sort through all of it, because having my belongings packed away that way gave me anxiety. The only response she could give was “it’s not that disordered! The stacks of totes are very orderly.”
I never get validation. It’s always “oh sweety, there’s no need to feel that way!”
Hoarding is very often a symptom of trauma and poverty/deprivation. What makes it tricky to work with is that the hoarder themselves needs to let go psychologically or otherwise the getting rid of things tends to aggravate the underlying issues.
It’s a lot like when a person tries restricting calories or fasting - the very act of putting oneself into a state where your needs aren’t being met, you can end up bingeing and consuming more calories than you would have if you didn’t put yourself on that diet in the first place.
With that in mind, if you want a hoarding house to refill in a matter of weeks just go into it like they do on reality TV and empty the house out without addressing the underlying psychological issues. When this happens, 9 times out of 10 there’s gonna be a relapse.
If you want a hoarding house to get worse then the best way to go about it is to surreptitiously dispose of things without the hoarder’s knowledge or consent. Or you can just browbeat them into disposing things to make it feel more traumatic and to aggravate the underlying feeling of needing to hold onto everything because now they’re also going to be preparing for the next time that you do this.
And dragging someone to therapy almost never works, unfortunately.
There are ways to go about this that can be positive and transformative but it takes a lot of patience and energy. There are some strategies that I think can be useful.
With regards to the leg brace (or similar) if your mom isn’t ready to let it go you could try negotiating with her and coming to an agreement. There’s usually a lot of layers of denial that will emerge when you engage this so try to balance being grounded while being accommodating. I’d talk her around to agreeing to list the leg brace on FB Marketplace or Craigslist or whatever your country has. Ask her what price she thinks it will sell at (it will be too high) and gently reflect reality back to her about this, e.g. “I don’t think anyone would by a secondhand leg brace for $5 less than they could buy a new one. Once you factor in the extra time it will take them and paying to drive here and collect it, they will break even at best while sacrificing all of the convenience that Amazon offers.”
She might shift in her understanding or she might refuse to see the logic in your argument. Remember to be patient with her.
Get her to agree to dropping the price by a certain increment each week that it goes unsold. Once reaches the point where you’re giving it away for free and there’s still no interest in it for a week or two, that’s when I’d bring the reality of the situation to her. Be gentle but let her know that people aren’t interested in it, that it doesn’t have any value to others, and that your household doesn’t have any use for it either. Then seek her permission to get rid of it. Alternatively, at the outset you might get her to agree that if it doesn’t sell in x weeks of the listing being posted that it’s going in the trash.
With the slippers and flip flops, I’d guide her into identifying one pair of each that are in the worst state of disrepair. Then I’d seek her permission to set them aside somewhere where she can’t access them without asking you first. This probably means that they are going to live in your room temporarily, unfortunately. Get her consent to hold them for a specific period of time, maybe a week or two depending on how she responds to this idea. Once you have them, hold on to them and let her get used to not having them around. The purpose of the exercise is to help her to understand that she doesn’t really need to keep those flipflops and slippers, and that her perceived deficit of not having them is completely out of proportion to her actual experience of being without them. At the end of the agreed-upon period, ask her if she noticed that they were gone. You don’t want to stray into making grandiose plan-making for the footwear but you want to gently explore how it really didn’t change a thing for her and how she didn’t feel a sense of loss or deprivation. Then gently steer her towards discussions about throwing them away.
If you put in the effort to be patient and compassionate then you won’t be perceived as a threat, as someone who is trying to inflict deprivation. This will make it easier each time you go through this and you will be able to pick up momentum, although it will be so slow going at first that it will feel like an impossible task. But if you have the inclination to do this work or if you don’t have any other option but to start addressing this then the best time to start is now.
If you really want to get good at working with this sort of stuff then you might look at Motivational Interviewing to build up a toolkit for working with psychological barriers and the kind of resistance that hoarders experience. I’m not the world’s #1 fan of MI but I think that it’s very accessible, it doesn’t require that you grasp some huge theoretical or practical foundation in order to utilise it, and it has a place here.