Hoarding in your family?

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I had one of those "flash" special interests a couple of weeks ago about this subject, ( after reading a thread here in News and Current Events about a woman who was found dead under her rubbish ), and stayed up till nearly 3 am watching clips from the USA TV show, "Hoarders/Hoarding: Buried Alive".

The thing is that I see tendencies to it in all of my family:

My dad collects/hoards books; he has so many that every single bookcase is two or three deep all arranged with microscopic precision to make maximum use of the space, and the cellars under the house are so full that when he, or my sister, ( who has stored some of her hoards there too ), go down there they have to crawl between the boxes.

My mother hoards receipts, old letters, kitchen gadgets and margarine tubs, empty jars, and a couple of other categories, but it's kept within reasonable bounds.

My sister mainly collects old newspapers and journals, and books that noone else wants, but she also has quite impressive collections of margarine tubs, etc. Two of the rooms in her house are full of boxes full of newspaper clippings, etc. A few years ago in another house her bedroom had so many boxes in that there was only a tiny passageway to get to the bed.

And after a couple of decades ( from early-mid teens onwards ) of loathing and binning clutter, with a sort of anorexic fervour, which had me throwing out mountains of perfectly wearable clothes, good books, music tapes, ornaments incl family heirlooms, and letters from people, aswell as ruthlessly weeding my own papers, journal, artwork, poetry, etc ... I seem to have passed some sort of watershed in the last 5-10 years, and have begun collecting; clothes and DVDs mainly, but also books and papers, ... and in recent months I have begun to feel slightly oppressed by my clothes ... there are so many of them, most of which I don't wear.

Which is why I felt horribly connected to the cases I saw on the TV clips. I could so understand them, not the ones who live in appallingly dirty messes so much as the ones who carefully organise their clutter, and the woman, ( who I was pretty sure was probably on the spectrum ), who says that she is almost afraid of going out because she can't pass a secondhand shop or even a roadside rubbish collection point without thinking, "I'll just have a look ..." which I know so well.
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My mom. She accumulates a sea of junk and old clothes around the bed and bedroom so you have to walk over it, an entire couch in the living room gets covered in clothes, boxes, and other junk, every table is cluttered, the floors getting stuff piling up too, from boxes and basins, stereos and used food containers. Kitchen clutter is bad enough that apart from the infrequent times when it gets cleaned (maybe once every few months or so), I'm unable to do any cooking there, and dishes may sit in the sink gathering mold for weeks on end. That was more in my teenage years, though. She always buys compulsively these cheap trinkets and wares from discount stores, filling the house up as if it boosts her in some way to have a multitude of worthless things as opposed to saving up for a small quantity of valuable things.

The worst was at our last residence before packing up across country. It accumulated over 13 years, but she's doing this in the bigger space they're in now as well. I'm a neat-freak, needing everything tidy in order, but since my first go at university I had to leave during a major depression during which I stayed in the dorm for a few weeks straight, failing to even brush teeth, she thinks I hoard things too. One sister saw how I kept the room the next year when leaving though.

My grandmother hoards. Mostly fabric, paper, and other potentially useful things. Her "bedroom" is actually just storage. She sleeps on her couch.

My Great Grandma Suzie had a very vast collection of dolls. She had tonnes of them. I have about 50 diecast Routemaster buses.

My dad's parents never got rid of stuff. I was surprised they still had old suitcases out in the barn and their old TV set and some other things. I even seen old clothes my grandmother wore when she was young. But now lot of that stuff is gone now because my family did a huge yard sale and donated the left overs to Salvation Army or whatever. They kept some things for themselves but sold the rest. Sadly I couldn't be there.

My parents hoard, but they have a big house, so it does not seem bad. I'm a hoarder myself.

I think my mother is/was a horder. I think I had a natural tendency to hoard things due to the AS.

I had no friends as a child, I didn't know how to make them and there were so many evil kids at my school. so in a way my stuffed animals were my friends. After I finnaly got a real puppy of my own, I no longer felt I needed pretend animals for friends but I couldn't get rid of them because I felt like I was throwing away close friends. I was eventualy able to let some go, ones I had no real connection to, but the majority of my stuffed animals are in Space Bags in the garage. I think I am a compulsive shopper when it comes to stuffed animals and a horder. I used to have to collect everything lizard related because I felt if I didn't, I wouldn't love my bearded dragon the right way and she would die.

As a kid, I was more concerned about objects than I was for people and this really worrried my mom and she was always telling it it was just "stuff" and that I couldn't take it with me to Heaven. Heaven was a strange concept to me as a child and still kinda is I guess. I would make myself sick if one of my stuffed animals or a crayon was missing, but acted obvlious if someone in the family was sick. I can just see myself on one of those hoarder shows and when they tell me it's hurting my family emotionaly, I would just shrug and say, "So?" or that I didn't care and I would mean it and kick the people meant to help me out. My mom once stated she was worried I would grow up to be an animal horder and I think she may be right. I'd have an insanely difficult time finding proper homes for the animals becuase I can't trust people but I do believe there are fates worse than death.

One brother who has been espicaly mean to me since childhood (my mom says he subconciously resents me because I demanded so much attention as a baby and child like it is my fault) has ALWAYS harassed me for my special intrests and sensory issues and said some really mean things about Pippin the last time he was over. I still haven't forgivien him and it would be really easy to disown him. I detest babies and young children, and when I get my own place, they will be forbidden. Heck, I'd spray cat urine all over the place myself if I knew it kept philthy rugrats at bay and as a result. Breating cat urine would be worth it to keep people away.

It digusts me when I watch that new animal planet show about animal horders and they fuss and moan about how their family won't come over anymore. Why do they even care about their family? If my family had problems with my animals, I would disown them. A lot of them seem to be women who got married super young (even before finishing high school), do they truely love animals or are they just super dependent types who cannot handle even tempory issolation?

My mom was always a bit of a hoarder & I'm an even bigger hoarder now, myself. But I've been trying to get better & have thrown away at least seven 39 gallon garbage bags full of stuff since December. That might not sound like a lot to most people, but it's a lot for me.

Some of the older folks I think were traumatized by growing up during the Great Depression and in turn their children were influenced by that as well. My father was a big hoarder but it never got to the level like on the show. I am, but I fight against the tendencies. It's funny because I am interested in the Buddhist concept of non attachment but here I am holding on to a 50 year old teddy bear that belonged to the sister of a former therapist. Because it meant something to somebody once I guess.

I mostly save papers because I'm afraid I'm going to throw away something I need but it is in no order. Boxes and boxes of papers.
I also save small useful household items but they are also in no order.

I'm working on it though.

Oh and clothes too, that's a big problem.

Is a classic hoarder - containers, mechanical stuff she can take apart (like old typewriter ribbon cartridges) and keep the parts to, clothes, all sorts of papers, art supplies, magazines. She's never been *quite* as extreme as the really bad hoarding cases I've read about, but she's incapable of keeping the house clean because she can't bring herself to throw stuff out, especially the above types of things.

At least, I don't hoard live insects.

My Dad was a hoarder. My mom was a throw it in the trash-er.

I take after my mom. Throw it all out, it makes life too complicated for me.

Unfortunately my family is a bunch of hoarders, even my mom who is big on cleanliness never keeps anything in order. The only thing I have a major hoarding issue with is with paper trash and recyclables. But things from other people in the house get really mixed up.

Until today I thought my dad was the worst but we've been cleaning out my older sister's house to get it sold while she's out of the country doing an English teaching program. She has junk everywhere and the bathroom sinks and toilets in her house and molding up. Today we tried to go through her fridge and I was mortified by what I saw. She had half a gallon of milk that expired two months ago, and the drawers are packed with food that has completely rotted. She has cheese and meat stocked up in her fridge that expired two years ago. It was mortifying. We contacted my sister and she claims that some of that stuff came from when our grandma owned the house before but I call BS on that because the expiration dates on that food were years after our grandma moved away. It was the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. We have expired food at our house but it was nowhere near as bad as what we saw at my sister's today.

And did I mention she was a real estate agent who constantly acts all classy and considers herself a professional designer and planner who was living like this? Oh my god. I couldn't deal with it. I can't believe she left us to deal with all of this crap. You'd think with her career she would have a little more class to keep her house clean. My dad is gonna clean out the fridge by himself tomorrow but I'm very worried that he's going to fill up our fridge at home with lots of expired and rancid food from her house because he's a big anti-waste person. I don't think I plan to eat anything from our fridge for a long time unless it was recently bought fresh from a store. Yuck!

My mom was a hoarder, among many other things. I was conspiring with my father's other daughters to get my dad out of there when he suddenly died. She died months later because of the mess in the garage. She became trapped and injured. I'm not too sure on the details, but my brother - her son and greatest enabler - found her after she'd died. Thankfully, she'd written me out of the will so I wasn't responsible for any of that crap! Since I didn't care to inherit any of my dad's well-earned fortune because it was accompanied by too much bitterness with having to share it with people who weren't even his kids, it seemed a fair trade off to not have to deal with any of her hoarding crap. Let her kids do it.

My mom did this after a major trauma, not with saving trash like you see on the tv show, but more like buying excessive amounts of the same stuff.

I don't know whether I should call myself a hoarder or a collector. I'm a neat freak, and I can't stand a cluttered disorderly house. I also quickly dispose of things that are useless to me; whether clothes that I don't like anymore, or furniture not needed, etc. I give it to charity if it's worth anything, or sell it sometimes, or throw it away if worthless. I immediately get rid of magazines and stuff like that as soon as I have read them, OR if I decide that I won't have time to read them before the next one comes.

BUT: I do have 14 cars & trucks; all Toyota and GM Diesels from the 1980s. And I have a whole building full of spare engines and parts, and even the whole front of a Toyota Diesel limousine cut off and sitting on a pallet here, which I had shipped from overseas. I also have a few hundred old TV sets ranging from the first mass-produced American TV sets in the 1940s to tiny Sony color TVs from the 1980s.

Again, all orderly, clean, properly displayed or shelved, and in the case of the vehicles; all in perfectly good highway-ready condition with current tags and insurance. None sitting outside and rusting away like might be what someone would think they are, hearing of somebody with a whole bunch of old cars. And I have a few thousand pounds of Cold War era air raid sirens around the house

With all that said, I guess I'm a hoarder of some sort.

Charles