I can totally relate. I'm staying in a house my father used to live in. He now lives with his girlfriend. But all his junk is still here & I'm not allowed to get rid of any of it. Okay, there's an extra bedroom, (what would have been my bedroom, had I not moved out when I was 12) it's filed wall to wall, floor to ceiling with boxes, of mostly useless office supplies, like floppy discs, paper clips, and pens with dried up ink. There's also a refrigerator in there that doesn't work. There's even empty boxes in there. That's just that room. In the kitchen, there's no cabinet space. There's cups that fill an entire wall of cabinets & when they're all clean, a sink full will not fit in there. There's no surface anywhere in the house that's empty. My father has collected about everything in his entire life. The room I'm staying in has three dressers in it. There's no reason to have three dressers in one room. You can not hardly see any wall space in this whole house, there are things up against every amount of wall there is. This really makes me sick. And the feeling that you can't breathe in the house of a hoarder is right on. You feel claustrophobic. I really can't deal with it anymore. My father comes by maybe once a week if not less usually. One day, I started throwing a bunch of these cups in a box, bc I can't fit them all in the cabinets and it drives me nuts. I can't have all clean dishes at one time. I was going to throw them away, I'm sure with all this junk he has, he would have never noticed. Then my father just happened to walk in and he's like "What's in the box?" I said junk. He looked in it. He said "You worry about all your s*** in this house, don't worry about mine!!!!"

In my opinion, I don't think my father will ever change. He's always been like this. I started throwing away and giving away a bunch of my stuff, because I couldn't fit it all in the room I'm staying in with all his stuff in there to. I asked him one time a long time ago if he thought he was ever gonna get a bigger house to fit all this stuff in. He told me no, he's gonna get a garage. This is no way to live. I hope your mom isn't as stubborn as my father. I hope maybe she'll listen to you. But I agree with Squaw and she would know. I think hoarders feel empty inside, so they fill their homes, because they can't fill themselves. It is in the same way a person would self-injure to see the pain they are feeling on the inside. Their emptiness and pain will still be there, that's what you need to help find, what is missing in your mom's life.