Anything else about the COH Growing Up experience

COH & ACOA Joined: Jul 22, 2006 Posts: 2031 Location: Cabo

Anything else you feel is important to note about the COH experience for people who visit the COH website to learn about us to know.

(Children of Animal hoarders, have we missed something important to ask about your experience?) Please make any additional comments here:

Now that I'm an adult I often think I should DO better because now I KNOW better. The way we were raised was detrimental to becoming healthy, productive, happy adults.

It's so much more than hoarding. Hoarding is just one manifestation of a whole mess of issues. The experts say it's about control, about not being able to let go of things, about growing up during the depression or in poverty. But it's not so much about those things occurring as it is about how those things are internalized and then used to influence the rest of one's life.

I never saw my hoarder (mother) do anything for herself that wasn't actually for, or in response to, someone else. There were no predictable daily routines that could be used as a healthy model for my own behavior. What I learned from her was to keep my real feelings to myself. To say or do what was expected of me at the time regardless of whether I meant it. Fight about the WAY things are said to avoid having to acknowledge the message behind the words. Control people with guilt. Play the victim to avoid responsibility and get what you want. No- not play the victim, BE the victim. Believe it in your heart that you're a victim.

We weren't close growing up but we are now, and that kind of scares me. I see so much of her in myself. I recognize her behaviors when they're coming out of me. I drift towards her way of thinking about things first, before I can think in a more helathy way. Often times I can dismiss the "wrong" thought (the way she would see something) but I always have to go through the process of seeing it through her thought patterns first, so it's always with me and it's a constant battle that I don't always win.

I'm scared that I will follow her life pattern. It's not that I'm scared I will "become a hoarder", but more that I will waste my life following the same patterns of thinking and behaving that rob life of it's richness, beauty and meaning as I believe it did to her. The quality of life is missing from her world. I feel it missing from mine. I see it just out of my grasp but I don't know how, or am unwilling, to reach out for it. I probably wouldn't trust it or recognize it even if I did find the strength.

I want to have deeper relationships. I want to trust people. Love and be loved. I want to commit to something bigger than myself. I want to feel as worthy to be on this earth as many others seem to. I don't want to be constantly afraid of rejection from other people or live a shallow, meaningless life as I wait for someone to come along and tell me what I should be doing. I don't want my decisions being made for me by someone else, or by default because I can't take a stand.

This is what being a child of a person with no direction of her own, no sense of purpose, no self esteem, and who happens to hoard as part of the package, has done to me. I think- or am I just using her life as an excuse to not be responsible for my own? How do I tell the difference?

But I'm an adult now. I should know better. I know there are literal steps that I can take to break the pattern I'm in and give me the life experiences I think I would like to have. And yet, my feeble attempts are half hearted. The follow through is exhausting and short lived.

And I'm closer to my mother than I ever was before. I don't want to ruin that by distancing myself now, but it's terrifying to look at her and see Myself and see where I'm headed if I don't change.

And another little part of me feels like I'm waiting for her to pass away until I'm free to try to find and be myself....

Thanks for "listening".

COH & ACOA Joined: Jul 22, 2006 Posts: 2031 Location: Cabo

Wow Lisa-thank for sharing all those very very personal thoughts and feelings.

You are entitled to GOOD things. To a quality life. You are valuable and you deserve it. You can break this cycle and start by being really wonderful to yourself and treating yourself now like you would that little girl you found sitting by the tree (in that exercise) that is you. What would you tell her to do today ???

Hope you could follow that.

You were indeed HEARD.

Donna