Google street view

[gottawonder]

These are of my sister's property, so you have some idea of what the scale is.

That garage is FULL. Look how big it is. It is FULL. Of boxes of books, dishes, bags of clothing and toys and furniture and garden stuff. Old tires, you name it. Full.

This is also a few years ago, before her partner died. The outside actually looks pretty tidy compared to how I've seen it since. The ring of stuff is a lot wider now.

The trailer is also full. Not necessarily of garbage or filth, but just full of books and clothes and decor items.













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Comments

[sherlockishere]

That is scary. Really.

[gottawonder]

It's so desolate out there. She is living in what used to be a small prairie town, but it is completely abandoned out there. She is surrounded by empty houses full of raccoons.

There is no town water so she has to haul it, and when she can't she can't do dishes or wash clothes etc.

There's no gas station so she has to make sure to have a full jerry can of fuel in her vehicle, but often she's too broke and has to really watch the fuel gauge.

In the winter there is a serious risk of her being completely snowed in because she doesn't have any way to clear the snow in her yard herself, she relies on other people to come clear it...when they are able.

There's just nothing for her there, except her pile of crap.

[sherlockishere]

That's really awful, but the person I feel for is you. I know her lifestyle has to be wearing on you. Honestly, hoarding is one condition that I absolutely just can't wrap my head around.

[gottawonder]

I actually do understand it, because I keep way too much stuff too. I understand that acquiring things is fun, and that some things have a lot of meaning, and other things represent "you" from the past, or a "you" that you hoped you could become.

It bothers me that she's ALWAYS suffering, and that she has been her entire life, and yet she won't seek help.

I am starting to be more firm with her, to stop being sympathetic, and to always remind her that she is there by choice.

[ratunderpaper]

What I don't understand about hoarding is:
1. the haphazard heaping of items (as opposed to an organized collection that has gotten out of hand)
2. the inability to differentiate between items of value and garbage
3. failure to maintain decent hygiene or clean storage
4. obsession with control (i.e. not allowing anyone to touch their stuff or, at times, even see their stuff)
5. how childhood fits into it - I think it does, but I'm unsure why

[gottawonder]

Haphazard heaping: Lets say you have a garden shed. Maybe you just moved there, and you put a whole bunch of boxes in there "for now", only there will never be room in the house for those things. You keep getting stuff, and there really isn't room for it, and you just set it at the front. Then you get something else, and you just stuff it in there wherever it will fit.

After a while you don't even know what's in the original boxes, you don't need it, you already bought something else to do the same job because you couldn't be bothered to dig through the whole shed to find the box that had the canning jars. You never go looking for them again.

Apply this principle to every space you can imagine. Repeat.

Value vs. garbage: Box of canning jars is theoretically useful, but not accessible because they are literally buried. Bag of clothes is theoretically useful, but also buried. Soon will be full of mice, but not removed because it is buried. After a few years, just about everything that WAS on top of the pile will be buried, and probably ruined, but you'd have to go through it all to know.

Most of the time, this stuff is not garbage, but once anything is buried you can't get to it, so you will never use it. You end up buying more of it, because you can't access what you already own. You don't even know what you own. The piles of stuff become more like...a landscape than an ordered, useful system.

Failure to maintain decent hygiene and clean storage: Once things are in piles in a garage, you get mice. You can't get rid of everything because it's too much work. It all gets full of mice.

The house gets full of mice.

You can't clean the house because you can't clean piles of stuff. You can't clean the floor if there is stuff two feet deep on it, and you are picking your way through the room like a mountain goat. You can't clean a bathroom if the tub is full of rotten food that you put there because you wanted to dump out the food into the toilet and wash out the jars, or if it is full of wet clothes that you were trying to wash, then gave up on and left them there. OR dead house plants.

At some point, the toilet fails, or the sink, or the whole septic system, but you won't allow anyone in to fix it, if it is even accessible for all the piles of stuff, and you are too ashamed to allow anyone in your home. You'd rather shit in a bucket than let a plumber into your home (have you ever actually watched a hoarder show all the way through?).

Control is how they got there.

Childhood: sometimes it's childhood (emotional neglect from parents can mean forming attachment to objects and animals instead of people) child hood poverty, parents who kept everything, sometimes it is trauma anywhere along life, where you lose someone, were in a horrible accident, got very ill and can't keep up, depression, many other mental illnesses like OCD or ADHD or Schizophrenia, addiction, self-harming. It's not limited to one thing. No single cause.

It's not worse than heroin addiction, anorexia, bulimia, alcoholism, self-sabotage, issues with rage and other emotional imbalances, anxiety (which can be an issue), paranoia, rebelling against authority (which she does). I don't know that it is a "choice" any more than these other issues, but the choice is whether or not you recognize the problem and seek help and take responsibility for it.

[ratunderpaper]

I suppose there are as many complicated reasons for hoarding as there are hoarders. The ones I have known have had no shame, but they didn't want any intruder near their private stash of stuff.

They both had weight issues. Is that a coincidence?

They both valued things from the past, which was, to them, a golden era that never could be matched.

They both collected toys and comics from childhood - only one of them excessively.

At least one of them had strict parents.

Neither of them started out neatly organising their stuff - right from the get-go they threw their accumulations in piles.

Mental illness? I don't dare speculate; I'm not qualified. But at least one of them has admitted to high anxiety.

I understand pack-rat mentality, and collecting that gets out of hand, but not to the point of goat-paths and failing to keep a property maintained.

All this pseudo-analysing is knocking the stuffing out of me. I'd better go and check the wee puppy and a late-night batch of cupcakes I decided to bake for the sous chef's contribution to some social thing tomorrow. (He planned to do it and... fell sound asleep.)

[gottawonder]

As far as my sister goes, the analysis isn't too pseudo.

She's an alcoholic, smoker, pain killer addict that for a short recent time has ceased consumption but likely not the issues that go with them.

Our Dad died when she was not quite twelve, and left her with our Mom who shut down emotionally because she had to finish raising nine kids and take care of the farm.

Trainwreck has discussed possible sexual abuse from peers and maybe old men, and shadow rumors that she terminated a pregnancy at about the age of twelve.

She got married at 15, divorced by 18 with a child, and moved to the city and proceeded to go absolutely crazy for several years, and was pretty much just prostituting herself for food.

To condense; she had lots and lots of relationships, lots of sex with many inappropriate people, had a few somewhat committed relationships, two more kids, and the hoarding, smoking, drinking, and so on kept going.

So, draw your own conclusions.

[ratunderpaper]

Your TW sister has had a most unfortunate past.