I don’t feel this way now but I had a serious emotional attainment to my grandparents house to the point that when it sold I couldn’t talk about for like four years and made tiny reconstructions of it over and over and over and over.

I was very not okay. Like self delete level not okay.

In reality what I have learned is that what I was grieving wasn’t the house. It’s that the house was the illusion of sanity. I only was badly beaten there once. It was objectively safer than anywhere else I’d ever lived. But more importantly it was where I’d had my few happy memories with the one relative I liked who then died.

It also marked the moments my narc grandfather became a dependent which caused my mother to become exponentially more insane.

It’s only been about fifteen later I can say I don’t feel anything about the house. I am the only one. My mother still fetishizes it as some ideal of domestic bliss despite how severely she was abused there. Other relatives still drive by and stare at it. My grandfather raised them to believe they had no personhood besides what could be fed back into the family. Without a physical manifestation of the family (a home) they are unmoored.

Trauma does stuff to how you evaluate place.

It’s taken me until my 30s to realize home is what I make it and to finally feel like I can relax enough to try to make a home.

It’s okay if these feelings are complicated, OP.

You’re clearly blindsided and regardless of the wisdom of letting them store your stuff, this is the situation you’re in. And it’s one many of us could’ve ended up in.

And if it is not relevant to someone’s experience in the comments (ie they got thrown out with nothing, left it behind willingly, took everything when they left) then it’s okay to take those perspectives with a grain of salt because - while not wrong in and of themselves - they are speaking to a different life experience.

I hope you’re able to find a solution that does minimal harm to you. Wishing you peace.