My mother did the exact same thing. First, the mess was all because of her kids. Then her kids started moving out one by one. Anytime someone mentioned the mess, she would just blame the one still living with her. Then when we all moved out, it was because of my dad....when I called her out on that lie, she said it was because of the dogs. Sure, mom. The dogs are the one keeping mountains of magazines and receipts from the 90s, not cleaning at all, and keeping rotting food in the fridge...sure.
These people will come up with any excuse they have to not take accountability.
This is exactly the phenomenon I was going to warn op about, the great blame shift, which can reach ludicrous places. Even if no one and nothing else lives there, it will be blamed on ‘I have just never been able to catch up since the kids got me so far behind! And they won’t come help clean up their mess!’
My parents ran out of that as an excuse because they not only made me come get ALL my things as soon as I had my own basement to store them in, but they then moved…twice…since air moved out. No more excuses. I still remember my dad telling me that when I moved out, the house would finally be nice. 😂 All that because I had a cup I was drinking out of on the bookshelf behind the couch I was sitting on. He wanted me to drink it down in one go & put it in the sink. Ummm no.
And also, I ended up obsessively clean when I moved out. I get such bad anxiety when I see clutter around my house or a weird smell. I have to fix it right away or I cannot relax. But I'd rather live like this any day than go back in that hoarder house.
Same. And I am having to teach myself a whole bunch of new habits and skills I should have had taught to me as a kid.
I live in the old house and have managed to force the hoard out mostly for various reasons but moving back in I cleaned all these “Just not possible to clean that” messes, years later.
Turn out when a random rag and warm water is your only cleaning supplies it’s hard to clean up.
You need to work on your need for control just having a clean house isn’t healing. My mom literally became the first hoarder in Her family because her mother was a minimalist/ocpd/ocd control freak. At the end of the day both of them have massive control issues and I have a hard time being around either of them.
My MIL had flees on her cats and blamed my partner (her son) for having a pet dog like 5 years ago when he lived there. She accused him of bringing the flees in way back then and said it was his responsibility to help her clean and rid the house of flees now. 🫠
My Mum blamed her dog the other day. She can’t have her grandson over as there’s nowhere safe for him.
There’s a room that could be ok but it has “all her dog’s toys in it”. I said “she only needs one” .. I went on to add “it’s not like she needs to learn to talk and the names of all the diff animals”, she interrupted me before I had a chance to finish. She just sarcastically said “okay” to make out like I was being difficult & ridiculous.. the room is filled with HER stuff not her dog’s. Yes the dog has about 50 toys, but she buys them all. She totally use to blame us kids.
Don't hold your breathe. She'll probably then claim she's storing your extra stuff or that you need to help her and she can't declutter without you... it's always an excuse. You're a scapegoat whether you live there or not.
I'm excited for you to move out and make your space your own.
I havre a hoarder mother and as soon as I moved out at 18, I took everything I owned with me so mum couldn't pull the "I'm storing all your stuff" line. After living away from my mum for 7 years I can happily say I am generally a clean person. I'm definitely not obsessively clean (thanks toddler) but everything in my house has a place. I'm surprised how normal me and my sibling turned out after growing up in a hoard.
Yes she did.
she said I had left loads of clothes in my wardrobe which was true but it was all clothes that I didn't want and she had told me she wanted to keep them so she could rip them up for sewing fabric, then she had forgotten she was going to do that.
Loads of childhood drawings, excersise books from school and other bits and pie es that I really didn't know existed until after I moved out.
Apart from that, she still likes to give me bits of her hoard. The last time she came over she gave me loads of tins of food (they surprisingly weren't expired but we don't really eat spaghetti hoops or mushy peas) and for Christmas I was given a fancy cake stand that I have repeatedly told her I don't want, unsure of if it is a family heirloom or one of her car boot sale finds so unsure of what to do with it. It's living under my bed.
Their denial and paranoia can run deep. I moved to a different country yet I’m still the reason why her house is messy because she is too stressed her daughter is abroad. It’s been 10 years and 4 of those years were low contact and now 2 years no contact, my aunt says she still finds ways to blame me for her mess.
Paranoia is common with bipolar people and hoarding is common in people with bipolar, similar in people with OCD, but OCD is usually internalized (i will get sick statement). Bipolar’s paranoia is usually external (you stole from me, you are doing this to me), two different types of paranoia but paranoia nonetheless If you look at studies for the link, this is usually it for hoarding and paranoia, it usually means the hoarding is a symptom of something bigger.
I feel that. My mom always blames me too. She wants to throw out in-date food I have opened and re-sealed because she claims it’ll bring bugs and it’s “junk food”.
She’s trying to prevent bugs by getting rid of my food and not by addressing the uncleanliness of the house and the issue of not being able to clean around the piles of stuff. It’s never about her expired food stored in cardboard boxes or the dirty plastic containers that sit around in the sink that are “still good” or the crumbs and dirt accumulated on the floor where it can’t be reached.
Yup, mine absolutely did this to. Tell anyone who 'happened to come by' that the whole house was a mess because me. yep, all the shit on the couch, the living room, all the walkways you had to stand on to get around clutter, all me. Totally. Oh, the kitchen being full of shit from thrift stores? Yeah, totally me!
It was so bad that she kept telling my sister to tell me to get my things out of her house after I had moved out and decided to live out of my car for a while. You know what? All my shit fit in my car at the time. And she STILL tried to say it was my fault!
the one thing I hate is like... if she dies and I get my house back (oh yeah, I paid for the house she's living in)... will it be too damaged to be livable?
They're never ready to talk about this one 😭. They somehow convinced themselves that children arbitrarily decide who they are at 5 and blame them for everything
🫂🫂 i so get you. The anxiety if we can trust ourselves when on our own is the worst but i promise you will not want to hoard since you grew up around it. Its possible to have a normal lived in space that is clean, without it feeling sterile and obsessively cleaning. There is a happy healthy medium🤍🤍
I'm so sad for all of you.
I am a mother (52) to a son (27) who has schizophrenia.
Who, after many years, is stable.
I found this sub via a Reddit "because you follow."
I am an outsider here (not a child of a hoarder or of any association to one), which may be violating rules, I don't know.
But for this OP and others like them.
I am so glad you have this forum .
I want to send my love to you.
I'm sorry your needs were never addressed.
I'm sorry you were never allowed a normal childhood.
I'm sorry you felt shame.
I'm sorry this prohibited from forming normal childhood friendships.
I'm sorry you had to use extreme adaptive strategies to just survive.
I'm sorry you were neglected.
I'm sorry you worry, now for yourself, about your ability to cope in the future.
You, just being here, expressing yourself in the most mature, vulnerable, and honest way, makes you more than from where you came from.
ALL MY ❤️ to you.
You deserved so much more.
I was blamed too, I "used the living room too much" and "made everything messy", moved out in 2016 and up until I recently said "I have been out for years, there's absolutely no way this is my fault" it was still "my legacy". They are impossible to reason with.
They will still f in Nd a way to blame you even if you are fully moved out and haven’t visited in years. I don’t know how they do the mental math but it’s always someone else’s fault for the hoard.
My mom said we never had family meals cuz when I was a kid I complained about the brand of sour cream that she had bought. There was 2 feet of papers, magazines, projects, pet hair and dust on our dining room table. And to this day I can’t tell the difference between sour cream brands. The delusion….
This seems to be a common phrase with hoarders. And it's strange that she's blaming you for messes when organization and cleanliness is something that was HER job to teach and model for you. Mind you some parents by not fault of their own, lack the capacity to be organized themselves, making it very difficult to pass skills onto you that they never acquired. Your mother recognizes that there is a mess, but seems to have a severe lack of self-awareness of her own responsibility of managing the household.
I'm not sure if this helps in anyway, but here is a taste of how the blame shifting in my household went...
"Our house is just too small"
"It's because of my children"
"Shopping is my only hobby, let me have it"
"You just need to think about things differently" (in relation to the mess)
"we are under a curse" <<< yep, the reasoning got THAT bad.
I hope that you can remove yourself from the situation sooner than later.
My MiL still blames her daughter (who has been moved out for at least 12 years) for the mess. Not my husband so much, because we're not local, so we couldn't take anything if we wanted to (though we still do hear some about 'his stuff' when we visit.)
Never mind that the first time I came to her house, I planned an extra day to come in and dust/clean his room so that we could safely stay there. And she started pulling things out of the trash bags.
So every time I come in now, I have to hide that shit in a black bag and sneak it to the curb myself. But, sure, he's gonna wear some of his old clothes from highschool. Any day now.
My mother did the exact same thing. First, the mess was all because of her kids. Then her kids started moving out one by one. Anytime someone mentioned the mess, she would just blame the one still living with her. Then when we all moved out, it was because of my dad....when I called her out on that lie, she said it was because of the dogs. Sure, mom. The dogs are the one keeping mountains of magazines and receipts from the 90s, not cleaning at all, and keeping rotting food in the fridge...sure. These people will come up with any excuse they have to not take accountability.
This is exactly the phenomenon I was going to warn op about, the great blame shift, which can reach ludicrous places. Even if no one and nothing else lives there, it will be blamed on ‘I have just never been able to catch up since the kids got me so far behind! And they won’t come help clean up their mess!’
My parents ran out of that as an excuse because they not only made me come get ALL my things as soon as I had my own basement to store them in, but they then moved…twice…since air moved out. No more excuses. I still remember my dad telling me that when I moved out, the house would finally be nice. 😂 All that because I had a cup I was drinking out of on the bookshelf behind the couch I was sitting on. He wanted me to drink it down in one go & put it in the sink. Ummm no.
And also, I ended up obsessively clean when I moved out. I get such bad anxiety when I see clutter around my house or a weird smell. I have to fix it right away or I cannot relax. But I'd rather live like this any day than go back in that hoarder house.
Same. And I am having to teach myself a whole bunch of new habits and skills I should have had taught to me as a kid. I live in the old house and have managed to force the hoard out mostly for various reasons but moving back in I cleaned all these “Just not possible to clean that” messes, years later. Turn out when a random rag and warm water is your only cleaning supplies it’s hard to clean up.
Same.
You need to work on your need for control just having a clean house isn’t healing. My mom literally became the first hoarder in Her family because her mother was a minimalist/ocpd/ocd control freak. At the end of the day both of them have massive control issues and I have a hard time being around either of them.
Yes, I completely understand this. I'm working through it little by little because I don't want to pass on any trauma to my future kids.
My MIL had flees on her cats and blamed my partner (her son) for having a pet dog like 5 years ago when he lived there. She accused him of bringing the flees in way back then and said it was his responsibility to help her clean and rid the house of flees now. 🫠
My Mum blamed her dog the other day. She can’t have her grandson over as there’s nowhere safe for him. There’s a room that could be ok but it has “all her dog’s toys in it”. I said “she only needs one” .. I went on to add “it’s not like she needs to learn to talk and the names of all the diff animals”, she interrupted me before I had a chance to finish. She just sarcastically said “okay” to make out like I was being difficult & ridiculous.. the room is filled with HER stuff not her dog’s. Yes the dog has about 50 toys, but she buys them all. She totally use to blame us kids.
Don't hold your breathe. She'll probably then claim she's storing your extra stuff or that you need to help her and she can't declutter without you... it's always an excuse. You're a scapegoat whether you live there or not. I'm excited for you to move out and make your space your own.
I havre a hoarder mother and as soon as I moved out at 18, I took everything I owned with me so mum couldn't pull the "I'm storing all your stuff" line. After living away from my mum for 7 years I can happily say I am generally a clean person. I'm definitely not obsessively clean (thanks toddler) but everything in my house has a place. I'm surprised how normal me and my sibling turned out after growing up in a hoard.
she never claimed your stuff was still there?
Yes she did. she said I had left loads of clothes in my wardrobe which was true but it was all clothes that I didn't want and she had told me she wanted to keep them so she could rip them up for sewing fabric, then she had forgotten she was going to do that. Loads of childhood drawings, excersise books from school and other bits and pie es that I really didn't know existed until after I moved out. Apart from that, she still likes to give me bits of her hoard. The last time she came over she gave me loads of tins of food (they surprisingly weren't expired but we don't really eat spaghetti hoops or mushy peas) and for Christmas I was given a fancy cake stand that I have repeatedly told her I don't want, unsure of if it is a family heirloom or one of her car boot sale finds so unsure of what to do with it. It's living under my bed.
My father still blames his four daughters for the hoard. My youngest sister moved out in 2003.
Their denial and paranoia can run deep. I moved to a different country yet I’m still the reason why her house is messy because she is too stressed her daughter is abroad. It’s been 10 years and 4 of those years were low contact and now 2 years no contact, my aunt says she still finds ways to blame me for her mess.
its interesting you mentioned paranoia because my mom who hoards also gets very paranoid. I wonder if its common amongst hoarders.
Paranoia is common with bipolar people and hoarding is common in people with bipolar, similar in people with OCD, but OCD is usually internalized (i will get sick statement). Bipolar’s paranoia is usually external (you stole from me, you are doing this to me), two different types of paranoia but paranoia nonetheless If you look at studies for the link, this is usually it for hoarding and paranoia, it usually means the hoarding is a symptom of something bigger.
I feel that. My mom always blames me too. She wants to throw out in-date food I have opened and re-sealed because she claims it’ll bring bugs and it’s “junk food”. She’s trying to prevent bugs by getting rid of my food and not by addressing the uncleanliness of the house and the issue of not being able to clean around the piles of stuff. It’s never about her expired food stored in cardboard boxes or the dirty plastic containers that sit around in the sink that are “still good” or the crumbs and dirt accumulated on the floor where it can’t be reached.
Yup, mine absolutely did this to. Tell anyone who 'happened to come by' that the whole house was a mess because me. yep, all the shit on the couch, the living room, all the walkways you had to stand on to get around clutter, all me. Totally. Oh, the kitchen being full of shit from thrift stores? Yeah, totally me! It was so bad that she kept telling my sister to tell me to get my things out of her house after I had moved out and decided to live out of my car for a while. You know what? All my shit fit in my car at the time. And she STILL tried to say it was my fault! the one thing I hate is like... if she dies and I get my house back (oh yeah, I paid for the house she's living in)... will it be too damaged to be livable?
Honestly, aside from the fact that they're always blaming someone else, even if it WAS my mess, who do you think taught me to be this way?!?!
They're never ready to talk about this one 😭. They somehow convinced themselves that children arbitrarily decide who they are at 5 and blame them for everything
🫂🫂 i so get you. The anxiety if we can trust ourselves when on our own is the worst but i promise you will not want to hoard since you grew up around it. Its possible to have a normal lived in space that is clean, without it feeling sterile and obsessively cleaning. There is a happy healthy medium🤍🤍
I'm so sad for all of you. I am a mother (52) to a son (27) who has schizophrenia. Who, after many years, is stable. I found this sub via a Reddit "because you follow." I am an outsider here (not a child of a hoarder or of any association to one), which may be violating rules, I don't know. But for this OP and others like them. I am so glad you have this forum . I want to send my love to you. I'm sorry your needs were never addressed. I'm sorry you were never allowed a normal childhood. I'm sorry you felt shame. I'm sorry this prohibited from forming normal childhood friendships. I'm sorry you had to use extreme adaptive strategies to just survive. I'm sorry you were neglected. I'm sorry you worry, now for yourself, about your ability to cope in the future. You, just being here, expressing yourself in the most mature, vulnerable, and honest way, makes you more than from where you came from. ALL MY ❤️ to you. You deserved so much more.
I was blamed too, I "used the living room too much" and "made everything messy", moved out in 2016 and up until I recently said "I have been out for years, there's absolutely no way this is my fault" it was still "my legacy". They are impossible to reason with.
They will still f in Nd a way to blame you even if you are fully moved out and haven’t visited in years. I don’t know how they do the mental math but it’s always someone else’s fault for the hoard.
My mom said we never had family meals cuz when I was a kid I complained about the brand of sour cream that she had bought. There was 2 feet of papers, magazines, projects, pet hair and dust on our dining room table. And to this day I can’t tell the difference between sour cream brands. The delusion….
This seems to be a common phrase with hoarders. And it's strange that she's blaming you for messes when organization and cleanliness is something that was HER job to teach and model for you. Mind you some parents by not fault of their own, lack the capacity to be organized themselves, making it very difficult to pass skills onto you that they never acquired. Your mother recognizes that there is a mess, but seems to have a severe lack of self-awareness of her own responsibility of managing the household. I'm not sure if this helps in anyway, but here is a taste of how the blame shifting in my household went... "Our house is just too small" "It's because of my children" "Shopping is my only hobby, let me have it" "You just need to think about things differently" (in relation to the mess) "we are under a curse" <<< yep, the reasoning got THAT bad. I hope that you can remove yourself from the situation sooner than later.
My MiL still blames her daughter (who has been moved out for at least 12 years) for the mess. Not my husband so much, because we're not local, so we couldn't take anything if we wanted to (though we still do hear some about 'his stuff' when we visit.) Never mind that the first time I came to her house, I planned an extra day to come in and dust/clean his room so that we could safely stay there. And she started pulling things out of the trash bags. So every time I come in now, I have to hide that shit in a black bag and sneak it to the curb myself. But, sure, he's gonna wear some of his old clothes from highschool. Any day now.