Steve, im so sorry you are going through all of this. Have you tried Al-Anon meetings? In many ways that seems like it may be more suited to this situation? I say that, although ive realized i think the Al-Anon 'experts'have convinced my family that i am still doing drugs because i quit on my own. I got a Christmas card mentioning a new baby born 4 months ago, which they 'forgot' to tell me about....in many ways your anger is still from caring, which is something my sobriety lost...my favorite thing about being on drugs was not caring about being ostracized by my family....
I hope you can find peace in that you have a family & a life without needing to numb yourself. I hope that doesnt sound sarcastic. Please get some guidance for yourself & try to shift things. You have reason for feeling this upset, but that may not be the best thing for change. ~♡~

Seeking counseling for yourself is a fantastic plan.
If this counselor is not available to help you please ask them to refer you to someone who can.

Good Luck :)

I did the original post several days ago and didn't look it over before I posted replies. Sorry for repeating some things in them.

I am going to be seeking help for myself from our mother's hospice spiritual counselor. We've already met a few times in the past and he knows some things about the situation. I want to see if I can start meeting him to get all this out.

What I have to get out doesn't have to do with my brother alone. It is also our mother. When she was alive they lived together in the house. He held the hoard at bay for her, but it was a very ugly atmosphere of drugs for him, booze for her, and hatred for anyone they didn't like. Now I loved my mother dearly, but she had a temper that would come when she drank. She never got drunk. She would drink this heavily diluted vodka mix. But it was just enough to get her angry every day.

She hated with a passion any of our ex's. I had an ex and forgave her during the divorce and recreived healing from everything after just a few months. My mother hated my ex for years, and it wasn't even her marriage! She hated the ex wife and girlfriends of my brother, especially the wife. Their marriage blew up because of drugs, but she could never face that. It got so bad my mother attempted to force me to write a letter to her parents revealing an abortion she had years before, saying I should do it to prove I was with the family. I stayed neutral on the whole conflict and refused to do the letter, which they wanted me to type because I have good literary and grammar skills. Turns out the abortion was of an already dead baby. They got someone else to do the letter. It was all a naked plot of ugly revenge that was a blot on our family history.

I'm not saying there haven't been good moments the past 11 years, but the negatives have always been what I've been saying,

So, so sick of it all.

I know I probably sound cynical. Maybe some people on this board who are hoarders might even be glad they don't have me as a brother.

But I hope everyone realizes the level of pain I am feeling. Years ago I had to inform an ex girlfriend of his that he had a crack addiction because she just gave birth to their son and he was preparing to go around with the baby in his SUV high on crack. I protected his own son's life, doing something I was very uncomfortable doing, knowing full well no one else would do it. To this day, although it's not talked about, I know he resents me for that. He is so twisted in his thinking that he looks at it as merely interfering with what he wanted, not with what was dangerous for the baby.

I've been in the passenger seat with him as the driver. He has always been dangerous, even before all this happened. Once a few years ago I had to go a long way with him. He was angry for some reason I don't remember when we left. He clipped the sidewalk on my side and screamed bloody murder at a driver who was just making a normal turn onto our street.

On another occasion we were going to a baseball stadium and he hadn't had enough sleep. He started dozing off at the wheel on the freeway, then his body jolted him out each time. But it jolted him into a violent temper, with him screaming.

Then he had alcohol at the game. At the end I put my foot down and said I was not leaving with him unless I was driving. The stadium was a long way from home so he wade boxed into a corner and he did not like it one bit. Of course we were nearly out of gas. This is a habit of his I have never understood. He likes to drive on empty. He began to complain that he could not feel the pedal to determine if we needed to get gas!!! You could cut the tension with a knife.

He once put strange anti-Semitic writing under a fancy table at his former home in another state, where his ex still resides. It was revenge of some bizarre sort against her, since Jewish friends gave them the table.

He once wrote a message to himself on a fogged mirror at our house, saying how great looking he was. That would not have been so bizarre if it weren't for the fact that HE ANSWERED HIMSELF BY WRITING THANK YOU.

I can't take it anymore. I just can't.

Thanks to all who have responded.

I'm not trying to change him. I abandoned that long ago. Where the line gets blurred is the fact that he is hoarding our childhood home. You see, I'm just supposed to suck up and take that. Even though I own half the house and spent more years living in it than he did, he is living in it now so he thinks he and every right to destroy it.

Of course he does! Gee, how stupid of me. I of course have no rights whatsoever as far as the house is concerned. Never mind the fact that he would be dead or sipping liquid food through a straw for the rest of his life were it not for the fact that I hid a set of bullets the very day before he went for the gun, all because he owed a drug dealer money. He was prepared to blow himself away years ago, and when I reminded him of that in an argument years later, he said "Maybe the bullets were meant for you."

No "Thank you for saving my life.", no "I'm glad you took those bullets away, else I would have done something really stupid." No, all I've ever gotten was a staterment saying he might have thought of killing me instead.

No, from that and a whole lot of other things covering 11 years he doesn't owe me anything at all. How silly of me to think the fact that he breathes without assistance today because of something I did could be cause for me to think I can request him to clean up the house.

Oh, and did I mention we have a legal agreement he signed that erequires him to clean up the house, and he is just flaunting and ignoring it?

I hope I don't sound too angry here. In reality I don't talk this way usually to him. But 43 vile text messages in one shot. Aftet that I am DONE.

Hi Steve :)
There comes a point in our lives when we MUST do what is best for us.
Nobody else knows the whole story like you do and nobody else besides you can make these decisions.
I know it is hard, I have been through this too with a heroin addict.
Many people told me I was wrong but I did what I had to do for my own health and sanity.
Take care of yourself and be confident in your decisions to do so.
Best wishes, Tillie

Steve, my heart goes out to you. I know several people who've dealt with serious mental illness and/or addiction of a family member. It ravages lives. It sounds like you have tried a lot of things and I will definitely be praying for you and for your brother that some kind of miracle and permanent help can be found.

I don't know whether or not forceful solutions work. From what I've heard they don't work very well with hoarders anyway. I know when I was still very defensive about my hoarding I would've resisted pretty strongly. Re other addictions I've heard some people do OK in the rehabs or AA and others actually do better on their own. But with mental illness in there it is so much more complicated.

So I don't pretend to have answers but just want to welcome you to the board - some great people here who will be glad to share their insights and understanding and help you not feel alone.

Wow? Steve, i am so sorry youre going through all of this. I was a meth addict for 11 years, myself. I wasnt a typical one, in that i never lied, cheated, scammed, stole, etc., but thank God my family did not go control freak on me with cops or institutions cuz id be a true mess now. I quit when i was ready. Im not saying im typical at all. Most ex-addicts to well in AA & rehab, but i would not have. I did it on my own. Actually, i originally went on drugs to emotionally survive severe losses that piled up in just a few months. Everyone i loved died or left.
Is there any way you can just go about your life without trying to change him? It doesnt mean you dont care about him? In some ways not having an adversary can stop a certain dynamic, causing the addict to face themself more?

Wow? Steve, i am so sorry youre going through all of this. I was a meth addict for 11 years, myself. I wasnt a typical one, in that i never lied, cheated, scammed, stole, etc., but thank God my family did not go control freak on me with cops or institutions cuz id be a true mess now. I quit when i was ready. Im not saying im typical at all. Most ex-addicts to well in AA & rehab, but i would not have. I did it on my own. Actually, i originally went on drugs to emotionally survive severe losses that piled up in just a few months. Everyone i loved died or left.
Is there any way you can just go about your life without trying to change him? It doesnt mean you dont care about him? In some ways not having an adversary can stop a certain dynamic, causing the addict to face themself more?

Well, I finally had to push the nuclear button. After a rambling set of no less than 43 insane text messages given to me in one shot, I responded calmly by telling my brother that I think we needed to part ways.

I feel terrible about this. We have been brothers for 46 years. But the last eleven have been nothing but drugs and hoarding, drugs and hoarding, drugs and hoarding. Everyone has their own story of this disease, but ours is so much more than what you see on the reality shows. If only hoarding were the only thing. We've had crack cocaine, a suicide attempt, threats to kill other people, assaults, drug dealers, abandoned children, an attempt to kill someone through strangulation, alcohol, one arrest for drug possession, threats to punch all the faces of a de-cluttering team as well as damage to a truck of theirs, serious anger issues, I could go on.

Now I will do only two things. First, get in touch with the secondary trustee for the house. He has the power to petition a court for removing my brother as trustee. Second, due to his violent threats and actions I intend to petition the county for involuntary outpatient treatment. This is publicly controversial, and not everyone would likely agree who is reading this, but a law was passed in my state a few years ago allowing counties to have a program where family members could petition for compulsory treatment for mentally ill individuals who do not lived in a safe home environment and can be considered a danger to themselves or others. I just discovered this and discovered the county where he lives has opted in to the program. I don't know if he fully qualifies but there is only one way to find out.

I am more worried about the secondary trustee going for control. It is a very ugly situation. My brother has put in a tremendous amount of work on non- hoarding related repairs to the home over now considerable time. It can't just be all yanked from under him. However, he has also hoarded it up nearly completely and has pretty much lost his mind in regards to that. It is a danger to him and the neighbors.

As for myself, I am done. I am completely DONE. There is so much that has happened over 11 years that it would take writing a book to explain it. Just this past year I endured another hoarder he was in love with moving into the house, learning about it three weeks after it happened. This occurred right after he signed a legal agreement with me to declutter the house. Yep, sign a legal agreement to declutter, right after bring in another hoarder! Brilliant! And one who had bipolar disorder to boot! Great, so things can REALLY explode! And bring in her three pit bulls so they can defecate everywhere and nearly kill our dog!

Well things did explode. Big time. But after she left who filled her place? Two drug addicts, one of whom was a heroin abuser. The latter is finally out of there, long after he promised to be, but not before doing considerable water damage upstairs.

Ten years ago I gave up my job and all of my life here to spend time on a volunteer experience with a drug rehab community in another state that I literally hoped was the answer to our prayers. I was gone for nearly a year in hopes that he would follow. He almost did. We had a plane ticket for him the next day, but he gave it all up out of fear that a girlfriend at the time, who did drugs with him at least once, would not wait. They ended up breaking up in a few months anyways.

I'm tired of all this. I'm tired of the hoarding. I'm tired of the drugs. I'm tired of the threats to murder or be "on the 6 o'clock evening news" (do I even have to say that??? How many on this board say that??) I have my own life with its own direction.

But it hurts. It really hurts. Part of me wants to find him and embrace him and tell him it is going to be ok, and the other, well...let's just say doesn't. I want to go off on my own and put this behind me as best as I can. No more drugs and hoarding for me. Ever.

I'm no saint. I was once an addict for other things myself. I say once because, after nearly 30 years in recovery, about a year ago I came to believe the idea of once an addict always an addict is not true for everyone. I have also had OCD. So I have been through parallels of what the has endured. I had my own eleven years, a long time ago. But I got out of them. I survived. I don't understand why he wallows in it all, unwilling to change. So if I come off sounding superior, please note I am not trying to be. Heck, from 1986-1992 I tried killing myself 18 times, not just once. The ironic thing was all that experience helped save his life many years later. I saw the suicide look in his face, knew what it meant, and later hid the bullets. The next day he went for the gun.

I saved his life that day. But I never got a thank you for it. No, what I got years later in an argument was a "Maybe the bullets were meant for you", said with a smile.

He is my brother and for that I will always love and pray goer him, but I cannot endure this any longer. I've soldiered through it for eleven years. Now I want to be FREE.