Tillie,

Thanks for posting. My brother hasn't done drugs I believe in over a year. There are certain signs which he cannot hide which have not been present for a while. His girlfriend has not seen them either.

While the drugs have for nearly ten years been co-morbid with the hoarding (I used to believe they were related), the hoarding did not begin until he was kicked out of his house by his wife due to the drugs. The breakup of his marriage caused his mind to snap and he began hoarding almost immediately. He was living in another state at the time. I had to help him move back, which I fully believed was a mistake but I did it anyway as I felt I had no choice. But I couldn't have possibly foreseen all the damage that would come to our family and home.

Hi Steve :)

I sympathize with your frustration.

Hoarding seems to be just another annoying/aggravating aspect to your brother's personality makeup.
Drug and alcohol abuse sound like the root cause of his antisocial immature behavior.
Most people who hoard have experienced some sort of trauma in their past and use hoarding as a cocoon to try to protect themselves from further harm.
Other than the hoarding they are perfectly charming, intelligent and wonderful people to know.
Some people are just mean and nasty, some of them hoard and some don't.
What I am trying to say is that your brother's hoarding and his destructive and squalorous behavior seem to be symptoms of his drug abuse.
If he would get treatment for that the other issues could then be addressed and more easily taken care of.
Unfortunately, as we all know too well, getting a drug addict to change is almost impossible.
My advice to you is to get a lawyer and protect yourself financially and legally the best you can.
Maybe you can have better control some how over the family home to protect it from being totally destroyed or taken by the city due to unsafe conditions.

Good luck and best wishes
Sincerely, Tilly

P.S. always copy your posts before posting because many times they don't post with the first try and we have to paste and try posting them again. :)

Ok, I suppose I will come off as being pretty angry, and in fact I am. If I appear judgmental it is because my family has suffered from the twin attacks of a brother's crack addiction and hoarding over the years.

I should preface this by saying that, for any hoarders out there who recognize and honestly struggle with this disorder, I feel for you. But for any who don't recognize it and don't care about the suffering they put their families through, well, if I wrote the words I think about all of you I would probably be banned from this site.

I have a brother who lives in our first family home with his girlfriend, who is also a hoarder but is more aware of her problem and wants to get rid of it. Both our parents are deceased. My father died decades ago and mercifully never saw any of the hoarding or crack addictions. But my mother died just last year and saw them to the end.

She died in a half hoarded house, one that had a drug dealer's car parked out front and a bunch of his stuff in our garage. This loser was put in prison for a while and so my brother, wanting to placate the wishes of this stupid idiot over his own family, brought all this guy's stuff over without even asking our mother's permission. Our mother was the sole owner of the house, but she deferred to him because he was the oldest, even though I had shown a clearer competency all through these twin ordeals. He lived at home with her and didn't pay a single dollar in rent, yet he hoarded up our garage, a mini-apartment, and the side of our house.

Now that our mother has died he is doing exactly as I feared--hoarding up the rest of the house. OUR house. The house I half own. The house we spent nearly all our holidays in growing up. The house we have owned since 1972. The house that is like another family member, if that makes any sense. The house of our childhood, with so many memories.

I wonder at times if he WANTS to destroy it! Ok, the anger is coming on now so be warned. You know what hoarding is? It's PATHETIC! It's STUPID, IDIOTIC, just downright PATHETIC! What kind of a person would destroy their own childhood home??? What kind of a person would put a family member through such torture as seeing all the clutter destroy the beauty of their childhood home? The slow buildup reminds me of Chinese water torture.

Now here is another reason why I am so angry. This brother of mine literally owes me his life. Eight years ago he tried to blow himself away because he needed money to pay a drug dealer and couldn't take it anymore. I had the intuition to hide the bullets the previous day. He went for the gun the next day and found no bullets. At the time he said it would have been an easy way out.

But he has never thanked me for saving his life and instead has treated me like dirt. When I reminded him of this a while back in an argument he said "MAYBE THE BULLETS WERE FOR YOU!" That's right. He insinuated he should have tried to kill me instead. That's what I got for saving his life.

Every breath he draws he owes to my intervention, without which he would be either six feet under or sipping food through a straw. Yet when I try to get him to clean up his hoard, he erupts in baby talk (he is 47 years old and I am 45 and he argues to me in sarcastic baby talk, as if we were still kids!). He calls me things like a f***ing idiot and does things like drops his drawers, like he did the other day.

He has done crazy things like write messages to himself saying how great a guy he was in a mirror and RESPONDING TO THEM. The other day his girlfriend cleaned out his mini-apartment and we discovered a SIX FOOT TALL PUNCHING BAG IN HIS BATHTUB. Not just in the bathroom. The bath TUB.

I am currently in the middle of a process of trying to prevent $16,600 of MY money from being transferred to the state government because of his hoard. How is that possible? Well, it seems that even though I gave the bank years ago my current address one of their offices decided to use the old one to send me a very important notice. This notice got put away with other mail and was never looked at. I came over and picked up weeks ago a package of mail that had gotten lost in his hoard twice. I assumed that was all the mail I had, but it wasn't. This mail said I hadn't done anything with the account in a while so they were going to declare it abandoned (which it wasn't) The deadline for responding passed weeks ago.

Well, I tore into him like nobody's business. To all hoarders reading this, you see what hoarding does? You see how it screws with other people's lives??? You see how it is NOT all about you and your stuff??? That is $16,600 of MY money, and no matter how easy it is to get it back from the state I shouldn't have to go through the process! The bank knows my current address, I was there to pick up mail like this at the right time, and he failed to give it simply due to his disorganization and clutter!

And if that isn't enough, in that package of mail that I was given was a Christmas card (I received that package in April! Remember it was lost twice in the hoard, and it is very difficult for me to go to the house as I live an hour away and can't stand the sight of it anymore!). That card was from my nephew, one of two sons of his that he abandoned for his drugs. In it was a large, beautiful silvery Christian cross. I never thanked my nephew for it because it took months to receive it and I couldn't apologize because to do so I would have to explain his birth father is a hoarder.

How do I forgive all this? How do I forgive the destruction of our family home by my older brother, one who was trusted by my mother to take care of it when she made the mistake of making him the executor of the will many years ago? Why would a sibling who grew up in that house destroy it?

And I don't mean just bringing in trash. I mean he damaged the mini-apartment where he was living so much the doorknob is half busted, the shades are a mess, there is damage to the walls, he destroyed an inner door that connected the place to the rest of the house, and yes, even the drop stains of alcohol from a drink he assaulted me with during a forced cleanup in 2013 are STILL ON A WALL 2 1/2 YEARS LATER.

I wonder if hoarding is his only issue. Between it and the history of crack and powder cocaine I wonder what the heck else might be going on up there.

Ho do you forgive? How do you forgive the destruction of your family home by your own brother, who seems to almost take a glee in doing it?