And please, not to be rude, but preventing murder when one can is not in the category of things that we should just let go of.

Tillie,

When you are a younger brother you look up to the older one for guidance and strength growing up. Even when you get to middle age, as we are now, and live separate lives, there is a psychological imprint of that which, while inactive, still remains. If something like transvestism comes along, that is completely shattered, and the younger brother is suddenly thrust into looking at the entire world differently.

But more than that, there is nothing benign at all with this in this case. When discovered by his girlfriend in high heels and makeup he gets violent. And there have been people tied up?possibly underage?in our own mother's bedroom upstairs to perform unspeakable sexual acts, possibly with a whip, all next to a pile of women's clothing that reaches to the ceiling and is a fire hazard. This is not only a dangerous situation, it is also a great insult to the memory of our parents. And it is extremely dangerous to his soul.

Meth, mushrooms, bottles of rush, all are said to have flowed through our doors.

I myself am a survivor of other forms of addiction. I know the addiction demon full well. I battled and conquered it much earlier in life. When I was 16 years old I had my day of awakening, the first battle against it, which was lost. But it awakened me within a few hours to my reality. I never had denial after that.

Now I know what goes on with hoarders is anosognosia, which is different than denial. Deniers of addiction really know deep down they have a problem. Suffers with anosognosia are impaired in these brain with recognizing it. Still, it is hard to grasp on a personal level how they cannot see it. I see hoarders having responsibility for their family mmbers' pain. And I think those who don't see a problem or refuse to face it need to acknowledge that pain and work to rectify it. That may not sound the nicest, but it comes after many, many years of multiple hells.

The people on this site have realized that their living situation is hurting themselves and the people in their lives.
They are here learning and working very hard.

The people who are not working on it is because they have yet to admit to themselves there is a problem.
Most honestly do not see a problem with the home, the problem is with other people having a problem with it.

I would like you to not be so upset about your brother possibly being a transvestite.
Some guys just like wearing women's clothing and makeup.
99% of them are not pedophiles, homosexuals, deviants or criminals.
They just like the dressing up.
Many, many women walk around in public every single day dressed in men's clothing because they like the clothes.

We all need to choose our battles because trying to fight every battle will cause us to lose every time.

Also, we need to not try to fight battles that we have no way to win.

Change what we can and accept the things we can't.

You could also sit in on a few ALANON meetings to learn the lessons they have for people who have a drug/alcohol abuser in their lives.

Thanks Tillie for your kind words.

I twisted my leg yesterday apparently so I stayed in bed this morning to heal. In a way it was a good thing as I recaptured the sleep I had lost last night. However, I had a horrible dream of his taunting me. I was at some hotel near the house and for some reason he was there. He began to taunt me and I was so tempted to unload on him all I knew, which would have sent him away in a fright, but I held my ground due to his upcoming birthday. I did tell him I knew some things though, with a bit of a challenging smirk on my own face.

I don't know if I will ever tell him I know these things. If I tell him of his writing about "raping kids" and he confirms it was something real (like maybe underage prostitutes), where are we then? I have to urge him to turn himself in, which he won't do, and then where are we at?

Word has it he's stolen from my trust to pay for either hookers, drugs, or both. I bet to pay for hoarded items too, but that's just my guess. He has already admitted to paying for drugs using inherited money. It's just a matter of it's been mine or his.

I sent him a text recently saying he didn't own the hoard, it owned him. I don't care if that sounds harsh or not. Attempting or threatening to burn alive your girlfriend is pretty harsh. He should turn himself in for that alone.

Those of you out there reading this who hoard, OK, it's great that you are making efforts, and I know you probably don't have any of the other craziness that I've seen going on, but do you see the pain your hoarding causes? Don't I have a right to go back to my childhood home and see it cleaned up completely? Haven't I been FORCED AGAINST MY WILL to live with this? Joe always complains about his "rights", his "freedom" being violated. What about my mother's right not to die in a half hoarded home, a home SHE owned at the time? She had to DIE in a half hoarded home because JOE WOULDNT ALLOW OTHERWISE! And he never EVER asked her permission to bring home anything. He FORCED her to accept all the junk. He forced both of us.

THINK about it. WITNESS my pain!! FEEL the anger and pain your family members are probably too afraid to express! Get your homes cleaned and STOP COLLECTING! We don't deserve this treatment!

Obviously none of you are at fault for what happened to me, but you do have responsibility for what has happened to your own families if they suffer from this. You owe it to them to get your homes FULLY, 100% restored. Think about it.

Steve

Hi Steve
Welcome back.

Needless to say, your brother has issues.
Any drug use just exacerbates these kinds of things.

Unfortunately, without any way to get him some help you will just have to wait this out and hopefully he will attract the attention of some agency that can and will help him.

I say go out to dinner with your brother on his birthday.
Remember who he used to be with you, your big brother.
Have mercy and take pity on the person he has morphed into.
Try to reconnect with the little kid you grew up with.

Best wishes

Adding to the whole mix is the fact that I have OCD. So guess what? While he hoards, I get to obsess about his hoard.

But most families of hoarders don't have to worry if someone might, oh, be DEAD of a gunshot wound every night in the family home. So I think I should be given a pass because it's a little hard to concentrate on what's going on around you when you just learned your older brother likes to put on makeup and high heels and tried to burn his girlfriend alive.

Oh, did I tell you that a few months ago the cops got called to our place and he had six guns drawn on him? Or that the same happened again a month or so later? Or that the first time I didn't find out until two days later?

What about the voodoo hex he admitted to putting on a rival, asking for physical harm to come to them, after he found a book on the subject?

Anxiety attack, anyone? Some sheer horror and terror on the side? A little psychotic insanity to finish things off?

The great irony in all of this is that 25 years ago I was the one in psychiatric institutions for OCD, the problem child of the family while he was healthy and successful. Now Im 48, he's 50, and it's all reversed.

Well, it's been a while. I'm back from India everyone.

For those of you who don't know, I have a fairly colorful story of being the sibling of a hoarder who is destroying our family home. But hoarding is only one of his severe problems.

My brother?lets call him Joe?has threatened to murder people before. He nearly killed a man by strangling him in a drug deal gone bad many years ago in another state. He threatened before me to kill his ex-girlfriend a couple years back if she stayed at the house much longer. She herself was completely crazy, a hoarder with bipolar disorder who claimed she could "go all Satan" on people if they provoked her and "people would be dead".

Now he is hooked up with another gem, a woman who has anger issues, has smashed windows at our house, and cut him on the side of his face, causing blood to streak down it. Once, according to her, he locked her in a room and attempted to set it on fire in a murder-suicide.

Also, he collects women's clothing. I have learned that he wears these for sexual grattification. He has been caught by his girlfriend in high heels and makeup, and gets violent when she sees him like this.

In the past couple years he "graduated" from crack cocaine to meth.

Apparently in some personal writing he wrote about "raping kids" while being cross dressed (words of his girlfriend to me). I did not see the actual writing so I have no idea the context or even if it exists. There are no known kids involved. I tried calling CPS anyways but they said there was nothing they could do.

He has guns in the house. I can legally have them removed in my state but that's a complicated, painful process and will be seeking to compromise with him on it. Otherwise it's going to court with all this and virtually destroying before a judge what's left of our relationship.

The cross dressing has virtually destroyed what was left of my looking up to him as the older brother. He continues to deny he cross dresses but the evidence is overwhelming and includes two witnsses who don't know each other independently texting me, saying the same thing two years apart. There is also other evidence, including an inadvertently sent text message from his phone saying directly that he cross dresses (he denies this text, saying his girlfriend was framing him by posing as him). And he admits to collecting the clothes, but says it is for reselling. He is a 50 year old man who collects women's clothing. Right.

There have been in our late mother's old bedroom upstairs chains and ropes tied to chairs to bind prostitutes. MALE prostitutes I hear. These were brought in by his drug dealing "friends". In fact, by his own admission a group of about 15 various riff raff have come to live in our home since our mother's died in 2015.

Last October, in writing to himself, he stated that a rival of his and his own girlfriend would die. He wrote in chilling detail "I will see this through. He will die. So will she."

For certain reasons there is no going to the police. I am told that without hard evidence of a crime they would just blow me off anyway. I can believe that because they've already done that?four times, for his drug use. In my hometown the police aren't interested in cleaning up the crack cocaine, even if you tell them it's crack cocaine.

And the hoarding. I hear it has reached the ceiling in my mother's bedroom. I'm sure the garage is full. He's got a few hoarded vehicles on our very small street (meaning the vehicles are part of the hoard), and the hoard out front has invited thousands in fines and the hatred of neighbors.

And to top it all off, last year when I finally felt I was putting this all behind me in the place where I now live, another hoarder moved in! He's a lot nicer and doesn't have the psychotic behaviors my brother does, but where I live now (one hour away from my family home), my home is no longer a refuge from hoarding. I got away from hoarding, and as if it were some kind of intelligent demon it followed me here. Of course, the people handling the property are making all the mistakes one makes with a hoarder, forced cleanups and all, even though I've told them this is the wrong approach. I told them I've been through this war once, I'm not doing it again. They haven't listened and do the forced cleanups anyway. I've left them to learn from experience as I did and don't get involved.

Now in a few days is Joe's 50th birthday. Somehow I've got to be with him somewhere (NOT at the house!) for a few hours in this bizarre, surreal situation of where I know about what has gone on and he doesn't know I know. He know I suspect cross dressing, but he doesn't know I know about the attempted arson, the "raping kids" statremtnt, etc.

I want with my whole heart and soul for him to be safely arrested and transported to a psychiatric facility for long term residency. I know this sounds insensitive, but the only way you are going to break the hoarding habit with him is by locking him up so he can't do it for months at a time. That way his body would begin to heal by reestablishing a normal sleep-wake cycle again (he spends nights searching in dumpsters) and he would detox. And most important of all, he couldn't act out his terroristic threats to murder. And I could finally return home and save what's left of the family residence.

I respect the hoarders who come on here because they know they have a problem and are trying to fix it. But as anyone knows from my previous posts I don't have much respect for those who don't. I don't say this to him, but here on this board, for his collection alone, I will call it what it is?SICK, DISGUSTING, AND PATHETIC!

How do I deal with this? How do I in a few days time celebrate with him his 50th, knowing what I know? And him not knowing I know it? The whole "raping kids" text from his girlfriend, even though it's no proof of anything, will make the mere sight of him revolting. Yet I'm going to have to smile through it all. How can any human being do that without vomiting?

Steve