u/sellardoore

Been friends with this girl for almost twenty years. Mid level hoarding situation with her and her mom. It’s getting worse and there’s a 2.5 year old in the situation.

Some rooms in the house upstairs are completely packed full. But the main living area downstairs is walkable if you watch where you’re going. You’ll trip on things like shoes or toys but it’s mostly smaller debris and trash on the floor.

When you walk in, it smells like old food and moldy/dirty dishes, dirty diapers, laundry, BO. There is barely room to set anything down on surfaces. Fast food will sit on the coffee table for days. Cups go moldy, things get spilled and don’t get cleaned well.

The toddler (almost 2.5) will dump out a bag of chips, of hair ties, of makeup brushes, whatever she can find and it will stay there for days. It doesn’t matter if my friend cleans one mess up because parenting/discipline around cleaning is just not occurring nor is it really being modeled. Trash doesn’t get taken out and boxes and wrappers will be discarded where ever something is opened. I think my friend (overweight, has asthma, and mental health issues) doesn’t move from the couch much.

She sometimes won’t shower for days. She has super long hair and me and her other friend take turns every couple of weeks detangling it for her.

I know this woman is not doing everything she can. She has mental health issues but she drinks and smokes everyday. She’ll start drinking early.

She doesn’t work. Her mom provides for her completely. Enables her weed and alcohol issues... Her friends (myself included) and entire family are all being incredibly enabling because she has multiple people who are willing to do favors for her or give her money or help her out, and it seems like everyone’s scared to say anything to her because she can be an extremely defensive person and doesn’t take criticism well.

She is making herself unwell physically with the drinking and smoking, she’ll have a GI issue of some sort multiple times a week, but she is in denial, and has been for like a decade now, that the drinking and smoking are NOT helping her.

I can relate to her. So much. We have been through many, many similar trials in life and so I get it. I’m not a hoarder but I have depression and I have definitely let my house get in a bad state. It just doesn’t stay that way.

I’m getting ready to call CPS because I don’t think that she will be receptive to me or anybody else talking to her. She gets defensive, anxious, has panic attacks when she feels criticized.

An open CPS case and the fear of them just showing up at any time would motivate her to get it together. She loves her daughter, I KNOW it would help. And her child isn’t unwell, she’s a happy child, full of energy, meeting all her milestones. So I just don’t believe they’d take her daughter away. Not even temporarily.

I just don’t know what to do. Something needs to be done. Either I need to get her other friends and family together to stage an intervention or CPS needs to be called. Because nothing will change unless one of those things happen.

I’m torturing myself. One year out. With rumination. Looping. Replaying past events. Asking myself over and over again if it was my fault or if I could’ve prevented it by being a better girlfriend/wife.

Meanwhile these recently uncovered memories replaying on a loop in my head center around his abuse of me, the dogs, whatever. Not gonna get into it but there’s too many memories and they all make me sick.

But it’s just like why am I torturing myself trying to prove he’s an asshole. We’ve uncovered the thirty or forty suppressed memories like 5-6x now since the divorce. Im bored, and retraumatized. Let’s move on.

And like. I’m in therapy. Yes. Trauma informed CBT, have been for a while now, and just started ART sessions very recently, 2x a month. And I know healing can be slow. I also know the whole healing thing is being drawn out by the fact that I have to deal with my narc daily in coparenting our 3 year old.

But it’s like. My brain really gets so, so stuck. On the memories. On the why. On the “I can’t believe he did that and that this memory is real, that this happened to me.” I know I should distract myself but it’s hard sometimes.

My friends and loved ones are telling me they’re frustrated, they say I’ve worked hard and done a lot of growth in the past year but I still let him get to me. And they reaaaaally can’t stand him, could never understand to begin with why I ever wasted my breath on him, generally speaking. So, ya know. They’re concerned for me, understandably, and probably annoyed and tired of me crying over this really nasty and mean and abusive and unkind man.

So. Yeah. I had an argument with him today (coparenting related) called one of my friends afterwards crying and she said “he does this/treats you this way because he knows how to upset you. He’s being manipulative to get what he wants. He’s always been this way, he knows it’s always worked on you.”

I’ve had a few others echo this belief and at this point, I’m very inclined to trust my friends’ and close relatives’ judgements, heed their warnings, when it comes to this.

And I’ve accepted he lacks empathy. And has self/esteem and image issues.

But it’s REALLY hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that he treats me badly on purpose because he was like, idk, repeating a pattern that worked??

Like the idea that someone is being purposefully manipulative, being malicious and engaging in DARVO that’s been proven to work before to win an argument, like… he wouldn’t do that? Please tell me there’s another explanation.

But it’s like. That’s what he’d do. He’s literally just be mean, insult me, degrade me, disparage me. DARVO. He’d just be mean. That’s how he would argue. That’s still how he argue. And it worked, and my friend is right — it’s like, if I know it works, and she know it works, how the fuck could he possibly not know that it works? When he knows his argument sucks so he just resorts to trying to make me cry, and succeeds?

I’ve had two different iPhone 16 Pro Maxes in the last few years. Lost the first one a couple weeks ago and received a replacement under insurance, but the replacement device is facing the same issue I faced for months with the original.

I have Face ID set up for a few apps (photos, Reddit, etc) as well as for unlocking my phone, accessing passwords, using my wallet. Several times throughout the day, an app will prompt me for Face ID, and absolutely nothing happens. No little green or orange light appears at the top of the screen signaling a face scan is occurring.

I can often get around this by locking my phone, tilting the phone away from my face so it believes I’m not looking at it anymore, and then unlocking my phone with my Face ID. Doing this will bypass the failed scan of my face for whatever app I was in, so I can access a password, pay for something — whatever it is I was trying to do. This works 90% of the time, but sometimes I have to completely restart my phone to get the Face ID to work again. I feel like I don’t go a full day anymore without facing this issue at least once.

Anyone else facing this issue with their “older” (heavy eye roll) iPhone, and/or know of a fix?