By Andrea Heslip
The children of hoarders spend their most formative years in a space that is off-limits to the outside world. This off-limits space has a unique set of rules, expectations, and demands for survival that aren’t consistent with most of the outside world. When the children of hoarders grow into adults and begin an independent life outside of the hoarder’s household, many find themselves isolated and confused as the effects of their childhood carry into adulthood. In general, people tend to use their early understandings of interpersonal relationship dynamics, external expectations, and basic survival skills to make sense of their adult lives, which is why any form of childhood trauma can drastically distort one’s understanding of the world around them. For the children of hoarders, the idea of overcoming childhood trauma and learning to create healthier habits and beliefs in adult life can be largely inhibited by the inability to contextualize their childhood trauma.
There are several factors that contribute to the inability to establish the contextual footing necessary for recognizing and healing the effects of being raised by a hoarder. First of all, hoarding disorder lacks substantial conclusive research on its causes, effects, and prevalence. This means that there are not widely agreed upon standards of prevention, intervention, or treatment available for the adult offspring of hoarders to make sense of what happened to them, why it happened, or how things could have been any different. This lack of concrete scientific information makes the offspring of hoarders highly susceptible to dealing with dilemmas in their adult life by resorting to survival skills learned in early childhood which were largely informed by the logic and emotional needs of their parent with hoarding disorder. Major factors of a hoarder’s mindset include shame, denial, and paranoia–all of which are mitigated with secrecy. But secrecy as a coping mechanism is what allows the hoarder to continue hoarding, not what promotes genuine healing and progress towards healthier lifestyle habits. When the offspring of hoarders try to confront their struggles by reverting to the survival skills they learned early on, they only find more helplessness as early survival was dependent on providing escapism from reality for the hoarder. The offspring of hoarders cannot heal from their trauma without confronting the reality of their childhood, which was constantly avoided and disguised at all costs. Another factor that impedes the ability to contextualize the offspring’s traumatic experiences is the misrepresentation and the lack of representation of hoarding in media, specifically regarding the child of a hoarder’s experience. Traumatic experiences are often the subject of popular media, and it can be very validating for a traumatized individual to see that other people have experienced the same difficult situations as them and are willing to address these issues publicly. Substance addiction, domestic abuse, abandonment and death, among other traumatic experiences, are abundantly discussed in movies, TV shows, literature, and education. This isn’t the case when it comes to hoarding. Hoarding isn’t entirely avoided in popular media, but notable representations tend to use the visual aspect of hoarding as a shock factor to draw audiences in, which rarely provides insightful commentary on the reality of the affected family members’ experiences and only perpetuates the desire of hoarders’ offspring to avoid association with their own reality.
As the child of a hoarder myself, I fervently believe that developing an intimate relationship with reality is a vital step in the process of the offspring of hoarders healing their childhood wounds and leading a life that isn’t ruled by the disorder that once surrounded them. Cultivating a true understanding of reality requires first understanding the world of illusions one was raised in. This is extremely hard to do because accepting that your only understanding of the world is actually far from reality can leave one feeling defenseless; it means denying your natural impulses, questioning your long-held beliefs, and abandoning your best judgment. But the only way to access the true version of yourself and let that person experience life is to let go of all the fears and beliefs that one thinks are their own but secretly belong to terrified parents who can only cope with reality by combating it.
Secrecy is embedded into the minds of hoarders’ children from an early age and creates a massive gap in the child’s understanding of their place in the world. This is especially true because the secret that these children learn to keep and the reasons for this secrecy are often based on abstract consequences and the flawed perceptions of their hoarder parent. Children of hoarders who bear the weight of keeping a massive family secret can’t fully understand *what* the secret they’re keeping is, *why* they’re keeping it, or *what* the real consequences of not keeping the secret are. Generally, the child’s early understanding is that their family is somehow different from other families, this difference is bad, and they must hide their bad-ness so as to not get in trouble or be humiliated. This ambiguity breeds hypervigilance in children as they never know if what they have to say might reveal their secret or if a catastrophic consequence is just around the corner.
Growing up, not only was I unfamiliar with the concept of hoarding, I was desensitized to the actual hoard itself. To the best of my knowledge, my mother’s hoarding began around the time my parents separated and my father moved out, because I have faint memories of enough carpet being visible for my mother to vacuum, but the hoard had been around almost as long as my consciousness. The mounds surrounding me while I was inside felt as natural to my environment as the trees surrounding me when I went outside.
The natural indifference I felt towards the state of our house became the basis of a growing, very personal shame. I never necessarily assumed that our house was *normal*, I recognized that my relatives’ and friends’ houses looked much different than mine, and through observing my mother’s shameful refusal to let people come inside, I of course learned the unspoken rule that our home was not open to guests. Still, there was no shock that came with this observation–it was not the first abnormality of my family that I had observed. I still sucked my thumb well into elementary school; me and my siblings wet the bed and wore diapers long after our toddler years; when my dad would occasionally pick us up to go to church with him we were the only cousins of our big catholic family whose clothes were covered in cat hair and apparently didn’t count as “church clothes.” I remember wanting to cry seeing the embarrassed look on my dad’s face in our driveway as he asked if we had any “...*other* clothes” after I had finally stopped crying from the frustrating half an hour it had taken to find an outfit that at least didn’t smell like cat *pee*. Anyways–our house looking different than most others’ was not an oddity, but rather one more compounding factor of the ambiguous, uncontextualized, isolating shame that told me there was something fundamentally wrong with the way I am, the people I love, and the place I call home.
My years of early development were laced with social isolation, like those of many children of hoarders. Anything “close to home”–literally and figuratively–felt like sensitive subject matter that needed to be handled with a great deal of caution. I quickly adapted to this demand by developing a series of internal filters to catch any spillage of information or self-expression that might lead to danger or exposure. How I evaluated what content was to never leave my inner world relied on both explicit instructions from my mother and my own careful discernment. Most of my mother’s instructions revolved around ensuring that no unexpected visitors would show up at the house. Mainly, this meant concealing the frequency and duration of time that me and my siblings were left home alone as young children–my personal record being every day of the fourth grade when I was “homeschooled” while my mom went to work–and were punctuated with the age-old warning of CPS, the children-snatchers. As long as we were good kids when we were home all alone–don’t go to the neighbor’s house, don’t invite the neighborhood kids over, don’t tell anyone that your teacher is absent every day–then no one would come poking around our house. This was easy enough. The harder part was the trial and error of learning what else needed to be kept hidden for my eyes only.
The earliest error was when I invited my two best friends over in elementary school. We never had friends over but there were a few instances where the conditions were just right–my mom was feeling optimistic or we begged until she caved–that scarce sleepovers happened. I don’t remember much about the sleepover itself, but I remember a week later when one of the two friends told me that her parents said “I can’t come to your house anymore because there’s a tree inside.” I don’t remember how I responded, but I remember being beyond humiliated and disgusted to discover that I’d let part of our bad secret slip out. The “tree” my friend was referring to was a large branch that spanned the length of our hallway and stretched from the ceiling of one end to the floor on the other, doubling as a “cat tree,” just one of my mom’s ingenious innovations on our property. Now that I am older, I can see that this detail of my house along with whatever other details my friend had shared with her parents had correctly indicated that the state of our house was not fit for leaving their children unsupervised in. At the time though, I didn’t associate the cat tree branch with my mom’s hoarding, I associated it with all of my mom’s other inventions–the slide with a mattress landing on the basement steps; the makeshift cat shelters on our porch for stray cats; the remote finder (a shoelace securing the remote to the coffee table). So I reacted to this feedback accordingly and created a filter to catch any information about the contents of our home unless I was very sure they were natural features of others’ households.
More trial and error ensued until I rarely ever faced errors anymore. I had a polished array of filters–behind which was information about my home, information that sparked questions about my family, information that revealed my emotional state, information that triggered my mother, information that made people sad, and any other information that could possibly indicate a difference between me and others. I clung to these filters as they effectively defended against outside inquiry about anything that might need to be kept confidential. I tended to these filters, kept them closer than friends, and reinforced them with brick and concrete until they were grand, solid, trusty walls behind which I could feel safe. But the sense of safety never came, and I believed this meant I hadn’t reinforced my walls well enough; shame on me. So I blamed myself when I felt unsafe and built my walls thicker and thicker and thicker.
When adult life rolled around and I left home and moved these ginormous brick walls into my college dorm, I was hit with a massive dose of reality, and I hated it. I always knew I was an introvert and didn’t typically enjoy spending time with people, but this was pretty sustainable back home. We had a large yard I could spend my time in and I got more than enough socialization from school and my siblings to not ever feel lonely. College was completely different. There was no private nature reserve just outside my front door, there were long hallways with hundreds of other dorm rooms expanding in all directions. You’re not forced to eat lunch with the same people that you go to class with, attend extracurriculars with, and ride the bus with. You don’t have eight hours of shared school day experiences to base your entire bond with your peers on. Suddenly I was stripped down to my personality, my individual life experiences, and my hobbies to create bonds with others. Another obstacle in this was that I entered a relationship with my current girlfriend just before college started. Before me were the demands of maintaining a relationship and creating a new social circle, but all the things necessary for creating new bonds I had concealed behind my brick walls long ago.
So the inevitable happened, and I felt incredibly alone my entire freshman year. I felt like everything I encountered in life was suddenly trying to demolish these walls that I kept as friends. My roommate’s existence made me feel like my living conditions were being watched at all times, waiting for a slipup, waiting for my side of the dorm to start resembling my room back at home. My girlfriend’s existence made me feel like I was being interrogated half of the time and the other half I felt like a terrible liar. Social isolation became my only resort and it was killing me.
Another dose of reality hit one night when my girlfriend and I were hanging out alone in my dorm and suddenly she brought up something she had heard from her sister. My walls were air-tight by then, but the one vulnerability that I constantly feared was someone hearing something about me from a friend of a friend. I never truly believed this day would come. For context, at this time my girlfriend’s sister was dating one of my close family friends that I had known since childhood. My girlfriend had heard from her sister who had heard from her boyfriend, my childhood friend, that my mom was a hoarder. “Is that true?”
I felt pathetic in my response. I was panicking and I felt like my girlfriend could tell, but I needed this moment to be over as soon as possible before all my hard work building these walls came crumbling down. I spit out some vague, fabricated explanation that my mom had some issues with clutter when we were little but it’s gotten a lot better and no, that’s not true. (*I promise you it’s not true, I promise you and I beg that you believe me, and please, please don’t tell anyone about this and please tell your sister not to tell anyone and please just leave me now so I never have to look you in the eyes again.*)
My first time actually engaging with reality came months later, when I finally, drunkenly, broke down to my girlfriend and told her the truth. *Yes, my mom is a hoarder. Yes, this is my biggest secret and I never wanted you to know. Yes, I am drowning in a world of shame that I’ve kept hidden from you. It is all true.* My girlfriend comforted me and soothed my shame and reassured me of things I had never yet considered: *This isn’t your fault. You did nothing wrong. You have nothing to be ashamed of.* I had never before experienced the feeling that followed. The brick walls were crumbling and for the first time I realized that this was lifting a massive weight off my shoulders. For the first time, I was starting to wonder if I was ever supposed to be carrying those walls around in the first place. For the first time, I was wondering what life outside of those walls might be like.
Telling one person about my mom’s hoarding did not heal me, but it was the very first contact I had with a reality bigger than my own; my first glimpse of what it felt like to be honest. In the years following, slowly and with plenty of difficulty, I told my therapist, some more friends, and classmates. I started discussing childhood memories with my siblings that I had avoided reviving by previously failing to keep in contact with them. The first handful of conversations I had about the reality of my childhood left me feeling wary, uncomfortable, and apprehensive of the abstract consequences I had always feared would take form. I had to sit with this uncomfortable feeling to see for myself what would come, and I’ve learned that there’s nothing to fear. There is no reward that comes with finally telling the truth about your family secret, there is no instant clarity or alleviation of the trauma, but there is room. The walls around you start to give and you can take a step beyond them and feel the breeze on your skin again, you can smell fresh air that had been stagnant for much too long. You suddenly have a choice in what to spend your mental energy on because it isn’t being sacrificed to fortify the walls you’ve been hiding behind. You can stop being the hider and start being the seeker. You can explore the world and realize that it doesn’t have to stay the same forever.
I don’t have all the answers for what life will look like moving forwards, but I think that unpredictability in my life is what I had been simultaneously searching for and running from this whole time. Growing up in an off-limits space made me believe that safety was only possible if no one could reach me. I huddled up behind my walls with everything near and dear to my heart, everything I was afraid of, everything I wished for, everything I felt, everything I knew. We were unreachable. I thought I was quite well prepared for life. Relationships would come easy as long as I continued to hide my bad-ness and kept the focus on the other person’s needs to deflect from the existence of my own. I thought I could meet others’ expectations well; with my walls up, my social identity was a blank slate, I could be molded as one pleased. I thought I’d survive just fine, what with all the predictability my walls brought me. Everything was so predictable with my walls up. Every social interaction was the same, every friendship was the same, every single day felt the same. I drained my energy on keeping it all in, all together, all hidden, and it didn’t matter how I felt throughout the day because at the end of it, at least I was safe behind my walls, my secret unknown to the world.
It took a lot of suffering and therapy and facing my fears and feeling terrible before I reached a point where I even began to consider the possibility of my belonging to the world outside of my walls; before I realized that I had tried to absorb my family’s secret into my identity so that it could be safeguarded forever and die along with me, safe and sound. But that’s not my identity. That’s not the only thing that’s been behind these walls. I am a highly opinionated individual, I have sensitive emotions, I have stories to tell, I have a passion for writing and learning, and I am fascinated by my own history and future. The most fascinating part is the unpredictability. I’m still in the process of upheaving my reliance on predictability. I still cringe when I fear I’ve said too much; I am moody and anxious when I can’t plan out my day down to the minute; I struggle with social interactions because I can’t control how people feel about me. But I’ve experienced so much liberation from confronting this unpredictability. In times that I’ve felt I said too much I’ve actually encouraged vulnerability in others that has brought me closer to people. When I fail to plan my day out I usually experience far less anxiety about getting everything done right. I’ve come in conflict with others from sharing emotions that I’m used to keeping inside, and these conflicts were scary and seemed to be ruining my life, but in the end they brought me closer to those that care about my real emotions and helped me distance myself from those who preferred when my emotions were malleable.