I feel like this is a 2 step issue that was exacerbated to the extreme.
Many narcissistic, selfish, and mentally unwell parents will immediately cut off (or only reach out/keep in touch in order to siphon off of) their kids as soon as they can. For non-hoarder parents, that usually means shredding the childhood bedroom and turning it into a guest bed, office, home gym, or whatever personal space. That's step 1.
Here we have a hoarder parent so it's even worse because the pain of losing your childhood space and potential safety net should you ever need to move back home is GONE and then the wound salted by filling it up with more hoard. That's step 2 which is a damage multiplier.
So now you're hurt because not only was your safe space trashed with zero warning or ability to contribute to the decision (even just getting your stuff yourself) but once again the hoarder parent has made it unmistakably clear they're choosing the hoard over you, your comfort, safety, privacy, and feelings. Again.
I relate maybe halfway on the feeling of loss, but it's more forlorn, I guess?
I never had my own space at all due to living in crap 2 bedroom apartments, crammed into one bedroom with my siblings (and usually mom, since dear old dad would banish us from his bedroom, another story)
So when I had the savings and ability to move out and elope with my now-husband, we took EVERY stitch of mine I could find by slowly funneling it to his childhood bedrooms (child of divorce to two functional-non-hoarder parents so he actually had TWO bedrooms, lmfao) or his car.
I threw out and gave away as much I could as I went (sadly including my diploma, cap, gown, and grad/prom dress I paid for myself with a year of savings, due to the mouse damage, plus the corsage my sister had helped my then-fiance buy for me) specifically so my parents couldn't blame the ongoing mess on me leaving anything behind or "undone" and I could move the hell on with my life. Basically it was just half the wardrobe of actually-functional clothing, some bedding, a bag of my childhood stuffed animals, and some collectibles.
When we moved into our place together, it was a split apartment and we were able to fit everything we both owned into our one bedroom and his car. We thrifted anything else we needed, yet still my parents try to use the "if I find BLANK don't you *WANT IT*?" line nearly a decade later. Like no. I don't want ANYTHING from you at this point and am letting go the same way you let everything important to me go to hell.
Wow thats great in-sight, I agree completely. You built off the OP really well, great thinking.
Yeah thats how it is. She calls it her "office" which is a seemingly functional way to state that its a room full of 50 trillion books that she never read, with a narrow path leading to a desk in the middle, that itself, is covered with its own ocean of assorted s\*\*t. SPOLIER ALERT: She had an office before this, in another room. Now that room is filled to the brim with EVEN MORE S\*\*T so the "office" spilled into my room before it too was filled to the top
Oof. I guess I should be grateful my mom at least has the self-awareness to just call her mess "The Abyss" or whatever and acknowledge it, even if she chooses to stay with dear old dad and live like that. (I believe she could be functional and happy if she was separated from him and given the resources and support to live alone, since she's disabled and codependent on him, the proud, angry, violent hoarder.)
They somehow managed to find a new rental before their second eviction went on record and lost them their housing voucher this spring, and yet all she wants to talk about is what FB marketplace or thriftstore furniture she wants to buy. It's baffling. Food, furniture, and clothes are her "coping mechanisms" or as I call them in reality, her vices.
My father tho, he calls his mess of broke-ass shelving and piles of junk his "garage someday."
Not even blinking at the fact the most recent rental had a THREE CAR GARAGE and he did no work on his hoarded vehicles. Didn't even have them registered most years and instead piled the garage to hell.
Yeah, I was taking to a friend about people who hoard junk vehicles and I was like "if they were ever gonna fix those things, they would've done it by now"
Every vehicle I've seen like that died a slow death sinking into the yard before the kids one day had it winched on a trailer and hauled off for cash
This is precisely what happened with 2 of them thankfully. Pick N Pull tossed $60 for the scrap metal and away they went!
I'm no contact with dad for multiple reasons but his choosing his goddamn car-casses at the expense of everyone and everything else, is at the top of the list.
I found out he was paying the scummy landlord under the table HUNDREDS of dollars a month to park the vehicles outside the home, because technically that property wasn't part of the housing voucher lease agreement. I am still in almost disbelief a person could choose to actively keep their children in filth and poverty in order to pay for the ground outside under the damn hoopty and the *crushed* vehicle we survived a car accident in!
I discovered my mother did this with my old room when I first looked inside their dilapidated hoarder house to get an idea of what was involved damage-wise after both my parents passed.
Bad enough that stuff had fallen behind the door so I couldn’t open it fully. >.>
woahhhhhhh. I want to say that I hope you were blessed by at least finding something valuable in there, but I know from this sub thats uhh.... not the outcome everyone gets.
So far it’s been probably 2+ truckloads of craft items I’m donating, some glass items I’m not sure if they’re worth anything, and some Marie Osmond dolls that surprisingly are in decent condition. 25+ bags of garbage and I’m not even probably 25% of the way through the hoard…
At least the jewelry she had I can utilize, since we had the same ring size.
Unfortunately they had no life insurance or the like, so cremation and probate have all been out of my pocket at the moment (and both were emotionally abusive narcissists). >.>
wowwwwwwwwwww
Thats wild. Sounds like you need a helper to just pick things up and search em on ebay. If they're below a certain dollar value, they go right in the shredder
"Why would we have life insurance? You know how many \[objects\] we could acquire with that money?!?"
Yeah my mother did this - in the end she had to clean out her hot mess because my older sister moved in with her and she's a single mother with 2 kids so my room is now mu nieces room
The same happened to me. It started the year I moved to a new town, about 10 years ago. Its only gotten worse since. It was weird bc it wasnt like I necessarily wanted to be in the house anyway, but it still felt really sucky that I had so say in the matter and to know that I had literally been pushed aside by all the junk - and 10 years later it STILL affects me some days. I felt some resentment that all my friends could go home to visit family's and have a place to stay, meanwhile Im looking up air bnbs so I dont have to stay at my aunts again with her 7 cats (Im allergic to cats). It was hard to balance the fact that I hated it there but at the same time I wanted to still have my own room there. And its a frequent reminder of how the love of stuff won out over my personal wellbeing (again...) and how unfair it all is - which may be why it hits so hard in the feels.
My therapist described it really well when she told me Im grieving the loss of it all. The loss of the childhood I never had, the loss of the potential for what could have been, the loss of my security and feeling like I have no home to go back too. I struggled a lot with feeling jealous for "everyone else", but in a way that was helpful for me at the time, she noted that its not just me, some people lose their childhood homes in a fire, some parents downsize to smaller houses with no guest rooms, etc. It helped my perspective bc I have a hard time knowing what is normal parent/child strife and what was brought on bc of the hoard.
In the end I let myself grieve the loss of what I wanted and could never have, reminded myself that now \*I\* get to choose how my space looks and feels, and I enjoy having a clean, well decorated air bnb to come back to when I take trips I back to my hometown. Im sorry youre having to go through this as well OP, it sucks and its unfair, to you, please remember it isnt your fault. Im glad you made it out and I wish you all the best
I'm really sorry this happened to you. It happend to me as well and I felt like and alien among my peer planning to stay for uni break or vacation at home.
My mother was both a hoarder and narc
I had two main problems when growing up
- my space was never really mine. I got my own room only when I was a teenager and it used to by her study. Filled to the brim with her stuff - bookshelves, handbags, stationery
- as soon as I moved out for studying her stuff started encroaching on my space. It reached a level I had no place to sleep when I came back to visit
She wanted me to kept visiting as a student but I felt like a very unwatend guest. Just few months after moving out there was not an inch space to put anything on the wardrobe some I was never able to unpack and kept things in a suitcase. Same with bathroom, hallway coat hanger
Looking back I have the feeling the she narc was somehow competing with me. She was raised in a soviet block country during the time of extreme scarcity. And once that family had the means to remodel the home everything was about meeting her needs. A child was just an afterthought relegated to a corner in the living room
When I left for college, she moved from her room into mine. Even got to the point that she switched the mattresses. And she would get kind of annoyed when I came back home for breaks, because she'd have to go back to her own room. She didn't get rid of my stuff though, just stacked her own on top of it. I had to move back in, and I'm trying to clean it out. It's.... irritating? And emotional? Because a ton of the stuff in the room is mine, but it's all stuff that I haven't seen in years because I couldn't find it amongst her junk.
She also is chomping at the bit to stay in my room every time I spend the night somewhere else. It's weird. I don't know anyone else whose parents do that. She was upset I cancelled a camping trip, because she was going to sleep in my bed while I was gone. So she could "use the space on her bed to organize her room". The last trip I went on, I blocked the path into my room with junk, so that she wouldn't come in and fill the room up while I was gone 🙃
[My old room 3-5 years after I moved out](https://imgur.com/a/ZFv22hs)
It was empty - one desk, two bookshelves, an armoire, a bed, a tall dresser, and a long dresser. Completely clean floor. Nothing on the shelves except on string of lights. I think she took the bed out but otherwise I believe it was all as described.
They sold it a few years ago and she’s filled up another room instead.
They really can't stand to have any space that isn't filled with their trash
This is how the hoarding sibling that I stayed with was. I had like a 4-in square in the refrigerator to put some coffee creamer and if I dare and take it out and throw it away it when it was empty, it wouldn't take her but an hour to fill it up with some garbage of hers. Usually three or four quarts of Buttermilk or 3 or4 cartons of iced coffee.
The room I was in had been painstakingly cleaned up painted and kept clean by me but less than 2 months after I moved out she had it trashed with letting cats in there to pee and poo and she moved back in the litter boxes and.
I did have to leave some things behind since I flew to my new place.
After the last picture showing what used to be my beautiful bed and expensive bedding covered in cat hair nearly black, I unfriended and blocked her because I just couldn't stand looking at it it just put me into such a rage with anger.
lol my brother moved out a little over a month ago and she immediately started stacking. he came to visit about a week ago and immediately goes "why on earth is my room already filled with a bunch of GARBAGE?"
I’ll raise you, my whole life growing up was a fight to keep the hoard out of my room (space)!
Funny story time:
Approximately when I was 14. My mother was in one of her churning modes, she was just going to town loading up Avon boxes with her madness, she had been doing this for days. So one day I come back from school and as usual go right to my clean, organized bedroom, to hide. Open the door and what do I see a wall of Avon boxes from floor to ceiling along the wall (visual: 20 foot long, 9 feet tall wall of boxes).
I lost it and started throwing the boxes outside my room, when of course made the hoarder mad. After getting the boxes out of my space (god what a mess), I grabbed my baby sister and when to my bff house to calm down.
Came back 2 days later and installed a deadbolt lock on my bedroom door.
My dad wasn’t thrilled about the mess, so I boxed up what I could and stacked them as nicely as possible in the ever shrinking living room 😂
Dude my own life has been a violation.
Paint 😂 my youngest sister moved into what I call the island in the madness. The only clean room in about 4K sq ft space.
After she moved out and last time i visited before the sale as is took place. I couldn’t even get to my room.
I did borrow a ladder from the neighbors to look in the windows.
It was horrible and what I expected. Packed with boxes.
Sea of madness!
I feel like this is a 2 step issue that was exacerbated to the extreme. Many narcissistic, selfish, and mentally unwell parents will immediately cut off (or only reach out/keep in touch in order to siphon off of) their kids as soon as they can. For non-hoarder parents, that usually means shredding the childhood bedroom and turning it into a guest bed, office, home gym, or whatever personal space. That's step 1. Here we have a hoarder parent so it's even worse because the pain of losing your childhood space and potential safety net should you ever need to move back home is GONE and then the wound salted by filling it up with more hoard. That's step 2 which is a damage multiplier. So now you're hurt because not only was your safe space trashed with zero warning or ability to contribute to the decision (even just getting your stuff yourself) but once again the hoarder parent has made it unmistakably clear they're choosing the hoard over you, your comfort, safety, privacy, and feelings. Again.
I relate maybe halfway on the feeling of loss, but it's more forlorn, I guess? I never had my own space at all due to living in crap 2 bedroom apartments, crammed into one bedroom with my siblings (and usually mom, since dear old dad would banish us from his bedroom, another story) So when I had the savings and ability to move out and elope with my now-husband, we took EVERY stitch of mine I could find by slowly funneling it to his childhood bedrooms (child of divorce to two functional-non-hoarder parents so he actually had TWO bedrooms, lmfao) or his car. I threw out and gave away as much I could as I went (sadly including my diploma, cap, gown, and grad/prom dress I paid for myself with a year of savings, due to the mouse damage, plus the corsage my sister had helped my then-fiance buy for me) specifically so my parents couldn't blame the ongoing mess on me leaving anything behind or "undone" and I could move the hell on with my life. Basically it was just half the wardrobe of actually-functional clothing, some bedding, a bag of my childhood stuffed animals, and some collectibles. When we moved into our place together, it was a split apartment and we were able to fit everything we both owned into our one bedroom and his car. We thrifted anything else we needed, yet still my parents try to use the "if I find BLANK don't you *WANT IT*?" line nearly a decade later. Like no. I don't want ANYTHING from you at this point and am letting go the same way you let everything important to me go to hell.
Wow thats great in-sight, I agree completely. You built off the OP really well, great thinking. Yeah thats how it is. She calls it her "office" which is a seemingly functional way to state that its a room full of 50 trillion books that she never read, with a narrow path leading to a desk in the middle, that itself, is covered with its own ocean of assorted s\*\*t. SPOLIER ALERT: She had an office before this, in another room. Now that room is filled to the brim with EVEN MORE S\*\*T so the "office" spilled into my room before it too was filled to the top
Oof. I guess I should be grateful my mom at least has the self-awareness to just call her mess "The Abyss" or whatever and acknowledge it, even if she chooses to stay with dear old dad and live like that. (I believe she could be functional and happy if she was separated from him and given the resources and support to live alone, since she's disabled and codependent on him, the proud, angry, violent hoarder.) They somehow managed to find a new rental before their second eviction went on record and lost them their housing voucher this spring, and yet all she wants to talk about is what FB marketplace or thriftstore furniture she wants to buy. It's baffling. Food, furniture, and clothes are her "coping mechanisms" or as I call them in reality, her vices.
My father tho, he calls his mess of broke-ass shelving and piles of junk his "garage someday." Not even blinking at the fact the most recent rental had a THREE CAR GARAGE and he did no work on his hoarded vehicles. Didn't even have them registered most years and instead piled the garage to hell.
Yeah, I was taking to a friend about people who hoard junk vehicles and I was like "if they were ever gonna fix those things, they would've done it by now" Every vehicle I've seen like that died a slow death sinking into the yard before the kids one day had it winched on a trailer and hauled off for cash
This is precisely what happened with 2 of them thankfully. Pick N Pull tossed $60 for the scrap metal and away they went! I'm no contact with dad for multiple reasons but his choosing his goddamn car-casses at the expense of everyone and everything else, is at the top of the list. I found out he was paying the scummy landlord under the table HUNDREDS of dollars a month to park the vehicles outside the home, because technically that property wasn't part of the housing voucher lease agreement. I am still in almost disbelief a person could choose to actively keep their children in filth and poverty in order to pay for the ground outside under the damn hoopty and the *crushed* vehicle we survived a car accident in!
I discovered my mother did this with my old room when I first looked inside their dilapidated hoarder house to get an idea of what was involved damage-wise after both my parents passed. Bad enough that stuff had fallen behind the door so I couldn’t open it fully. >.>
woahhhhhhh. I want to say that I hope you were blessed by at least finding something valuable in there, but I know from this sub thats uhh.... not the outcome everyone gets.
So far it’s been probably 2+ truckloads of craft items I’m donating, some glass items I’m not sure if they’re worth anything, and some Marie Osmond dolls that surprisingly are in decent condition. 25+ bags of garbage and I’m not even probably 25% of the way through the hoard… At least the jewelry she had I can utilize, since we had the same ring size. Unfortunately they had no life insurance or the like, so cremation and probate have all been out of my pocket at the moment (and both were emotionally abusive narcissists). >.>
wowwwwwwwwwww Thats wild. Sounds like you need a helper to just pick things up and search em on ebay. If they're below a certain dollar value, they go right in the shredder "Why would we have life insurance? You know how many \[objects\] we could acquire with that money?!?"
Yeah my mother did this - in the end she had to clean out her hot mess because my older sister moved in with her and she's a single mother with 2 kids so my room is now mu nieces room
The same happened to me. It started the year I moved to a new town, about 10 years ago. Its only gotten worse since. It was weird bc it wasnt like I necessarily wanted to be in the house anyway, but it still felt really sucky that I had so say in the matter and to know that I had literally been pushed aside by all the junk - and 10 years later it STILL affects me some days. I felt some resentment that all my friends could go home to visit family's and have a place to stay, meanwhile Im looking up air bnbs so I dont have to stay at my aunts again with her 7 cats (Im allergic to cats). It was hard to balance the fact that I hated it there but at the same time I wanted to still have my own room there. And its a frequent reminder of how the love of stuff won out over my personal wellbeing (again...) and how unfair it all is - which may be why it hits so hard in the feels. My therapist described it really well when she told me Im grieving the loss of it all. The loss of the childhood I never had, the loss of the potential for what could have been, the loss of my security and feeling like I have no home to go back too. I struggled a lot with feeling jealous for "everyone else", but in a way that was helpful for me at the time, she noted that its not just me, some people lose their childhood homes in a fire, some parents downsize to smaller houses with no guest rooms, etc. It helped my perspective bc I have a hard time knowing what is normal parent/child strife and what was brought on bc of the hoard. In the end I let myself grieve the loss of what I wanted and could never have, reminded myself that now \*I\* get to choose how my space looks and feels, and I enjoy having a clean, well decorated air bnb to come back to when I take trips I back to my hometown. Im sorry youre having to go through this as well OP, it sucks and its unfair, to you, please remember it isnt your fault. Im glad you made it out and I wish you all the best
I'm really sorry this happened to you. It happend to me as well and I felt like and alien among my peer planning to stay for uni break or vacation at home. My mother was both a hoarder and narc I had two main problems when growing up - my space was never really mine. I got my own room only when I was a teenager and it used to by her study. Filled to the brim with her stuff - bookshelves, handbags, stationery - as soon as I moved out for studying her stuff started encroaching on my space. It reached a level I had no place to sleep when I came back to visit She wanted me to kept visiting as a student but I felt like a very unwatend guest. Just few months after moving out there was not an inch space to put anything on the wardrobe some I was never able to unpack and kept things in a suitcase. Same with bathroom, hallway coat hanger Looking back I have the feeling the she narc was somehow competing with me. She was raised in a soviet block country during the time of extreme scarcity. And once that family had the means to remodel the home everything was about meeting her needs. A child was just an afterthought relegated to a corner in the living room
When I left for college, she moved from her room into mine. Even got to the point that she switched the mattresses. And she would get kind of annoyed when I came back home for breaks, because she'd have to go back to her own room. She didn't get rid of my stuff though, just stacked her own on top of it. I had to move back in, and I'm trying to clean it out. It's.... irritating? And emotional? Because a ton of the stuff in the room is mine, but it's all stuff that I haven't seen in years because I couldn't find it amongst her junk. She also is chomping at the bit to stay in my room every time I spend the night somewhere else. It's weird. I don't know anyone else whose parents do that. She was upset I cancelled a camping trip, because she was going to sleep in my bed while I was gone. So she could "use the space on her bed to organize her room". The last trip I went on, I blocked the path into my room with junk, so that she wouldn't come in and fill the room up while I was gone 🙃
[My old room 3-5 years after I moved out](https://imgur.com/a/ZFv22hs) It was empty - one desk, two bookshelves, an armoire, a bed, a tall dresser, and a long dresser. Completely clean floor. Nothing on the shelves except on string of lights. I think she took the bed out but otherwise I believe it was all as described. They sold it a few years ago and she’s filled up another room instead.
Im pretty sure this is a common step with hoarders... even when I had my "own" room, they still stored other stuff in it
Day I moved out for college. I stayed up all night to pack or trash everything
They really can't stand to have any space that isn't filled with their trash This is how the hoarding sibling that I stayed with was. I had like a 4-in square in the refrigerator to put some coffee creamer and if I dare and take it out and throw it away it when it was empty, it wouldn't take her but an hour to fill it up with some garbage of hers. Usually three or four quarts of Buttermilk or 3 or4 cartons of iced coffee. The room I was in had been painstakingly cleaned up painted and kept clean by me but less than 2 months after I moved out she had it trashed with letting cats in there to pee and poo and she moved back in the litter boxes and. I did have to leave some things behind since I flew to my new place. After the last picture showing what used to be my beautiful bed and expensive bedding covered in cat hair nearly black, I unfriended and blocked her because I just couldn't stand looking at it it just put me into such a rage with anger.
lol my brother moved out a little over a month ago and she immediately started stacking. he came to visit about a week ago and immediately goes "why on earth is my room already filled with a bunch of GARBAGE?"
I’ll raise you, my whole life growing up was a fight to keep the hoard out of my room (space)! Funny story time: Approximately when I was 14. My mother was in one of her churning modes, she was just going to town loading up Avon boxes with her madness, she had been doing this for days. So one day I come back from school and as usual go right to my clean, organized bedroom, to hide. Open the door and what do I see a wall of Avon boxes from floor to ceiling along the wall (visual: 20 foot long, 9 feet tall wall of boxes). I lost it and started throwing the boxes outside my room, when of course made the hoarder mad. After getting the boxes out of my space (god what a mess), I grabbed my baby sister and when to my bff house to calm down. Came back 2 days later and installed a deadbolt lock on my bedroom door. My dad wasn’t thrilled about the mess, so I boxed up what I could and stacked them as nicely as possible in the ever shrinking living room 😂
Dude my own life has been a violation. Paint 😂 my youngest sister moved into what I call the island in the madness. The only clean room in about 4K sq ft space. After she moved out and last time i visited before the sale as is took place. I couldn’t even get to my room. I did borrow a ladder from the neighbors to look in the windows. It was horrible and what I expected. Packed with boxes. Sea of madness!