Telling Secrets

Elaine Dove wrote, "Growing up in a hoarded environment, or being placed into a situation where you have to deal with or clean up a horrific hoard, is enormously stressful and traumatic for both children and adults. I think that part of why this is so is that a hoarded environment is a visual representation of the hoarder's level of mental illness and denial. It's like living in a war zone or a slum--an environment where basic needs around nourishment, hygiene, safety and personal space are never met. However, the additional traumatizing component that exists with many hoarders is that they not infrequently hold professional jobs "on the outside"--many people who hoard are nurses, schoolteachers, or mental health or other caregiving professionals. The stress and trauma the children go through as they attempt to navigate a world that is split between how their parent looks "on the outside" and how it really is at home is inevitably going to traumatize them over and over. The shame and embarrassment a child feels about never being able to have friends over (or in many cases ever let anyone inside the home at all) builds up on itself time after time along with all the lies, secrecy and fear that the hoarder instills in their children so they won't be 'found out.'"



I spent the first eighteen years of my life living in chaos that I had no control over. Once I finally moved out of my mom's house, I didn't have the words to describe what I had been through or how it affected me. In our society, if someone shares that they were raised by, for example, an alcoholic parent, people tend to understand at least on a surface level what that may have felt like. But when I say I was raised by a parent who is a hoarder, no one really knows what to make of that. The few times I've briefly shared that with a friend, it's usually been met with a lack of understanding, or even jokes about their own messy closets at home or the crazy thing they saw last week on the TV show Hoarders. It didn't seem to sink in that I had shared something akin to trauma with them by telling them I was raised in a hoard.


I don't blame anyone who didn't understand what I was trying to tell them. We don't have a mainstream cultural knowledge of the mental illness of hoarding the way we do for other issues. But I'd like to change that, to bring some awareness to the true impact of the trauma that hoarding causes for children.


In this blog, I'll first share some personal essays I've written in the past, at least one of which has been previously published. But I'll also write some new pieces and try to organize my writing into a structure that may - someday! - become an outline for the book I'd like to write.


A huge theme of growing up in the hoard was secrecy. When someone knocked on the front door, I wasn't supposed to open the door more than a few inches so that they couldn't see inside. (Children of hoarders call this "doorbell dread.") Very few people were allowed inside our house and only with lots of advance warning. I wasn't supposed to talk to others about what our house looked like. I was supposed to go out into the world every day and keep my family's secrets, even to the detriment of my mental and physical health. The powerful sway of secrecy and shame is hard to overcome. But I've found so much healing and validation by sharing my story with other children of hoarders in online forums, so I'm committed to not keeping secrets anymore.


Thank you for reading.

Amelia