Family reported my husband to Adult Social Services

I'm so confused about this post.

My father, mother and sister were all abusive especially my father.

Yesterday Adult Social Services phones me to say my father and my sister had made a report of concern for my wellbeing and safety at home.

my abusive family with whom we have had little interaction with

I don't get it? So your family were / are abusing you? But now they're raising concerns for your wellbeing?

after the breakdown it was like a volcano of rage and anger and frustration coming out for my husbands neglect of me and my needs.

I spoke to my sister about the difficulties which have included my husband's hoarding, verbal abuse (in response though to my anger which has been out of control at times of which I am not proud)

He shouts and swears at me when Ive been angry and full of rage

I never get angry about something he does, like loading the dishes wrong or something like that

Sorry @LucyLoo1972 but with the greatest of respect and kindness, you really need to remove yourself from this marriage and get some serious, intense therapy.

I can't make out who is abusive here and who isn't, or whether it's just a hugely toxic situation all round. But you need to be on your own for a while and work on yourself. Away from everyone else.

Have you considered that your mental health might vastly improve if you’re not living with such a nightmare of a man honestly wake up have a look at your situation. This is totally not normal. You sound enmeshed and codependent and you’re directing your frustration completely in the wrong direction.
Stop confiding in your abusive family

this is utterly toxic

Spot on. I’d absolutely love to hear your husband’s take on things. You sound equally abusive. I suspect more than a little exaggeration on your part to your family.

I’m also interested in why you’re confiding in your alleged familial abusers…

@LucyLoo1972 You are spending a lot of money on therapy.

Why not spend the money and try and live the life you actually want instead? Like you said: A proper car, beautiful home (with the design elements that are important for you), some weekends away, meals out and a new radio!

No amount of therapy is going to fix the fact that you are living a life that doesn't fullfill you in the ways your soul needs to be fullfilled.

I've been through a similar 20 yr relationship where my needs, wants and interests were deemed 'vain' or a waste, resulting in a life that felt fake and was void of joy fullfillment. Your breakdown is telling you tou need to change your life. To make it what resonates with YOU

It's not easy, but being now on the other side of divorce, it is wonderful. It's like someone has put the colour back on a b&w tv.

Honestly it sounds like you’re fixating on the small things to avoid large ones.

To be explosive with rage 8 years on over your DH saying he didn’t want to pay £600 for someone to type up notes is excessive. Particularly as it sounds like you could have paid for this yourself. Ditto - clearing a space (bit the big issue is that the house is in a state where a space needed to be cleared due to the hoarding).

The same with being upset the your family have called social services, rather than the abuse you have suffered from them,

I came to say something v similar - your current therapist has kept you going for the past 8 years and I appreciate you like them and are grateful for their help, but I do think you need a fresh start with someone who will help you move forward in a structured way.

You have the money to move out - even if you just rent a flat for 6 months, I do believe you need some space to yourself both figuratively and literally - the mental stress of living with a hoarder is immense and just giving yourself the gift of autonomy in your living space will lift a massive burden from you.

I think you went into this marriage as an escape from the abusive family situation and whilst your Dh isn’t overtly (to you) abusive., to anyone looking in, it’s a sea of red flags

The first years of your marriage you seem to have ignored and ignored the red flags because it was better than your childhood.

But it’s like death by a 1000 cuts and all those times he says, you don’t need this or that or with holding money for a day or 2 when you need it or the hoarding 1 item at a time is just pressure. And like all build up of pressure you exploded

He has you trained well if you are questioning whether you can have a radio

He would never intentionally hurt me

But he is hurting you every single minute of the day with the hoarding, the financial abuse, the coercion to accept his ways.

Then you are surprised that SS got involved

Why?

Did you answer their questions truthfully or reply with an explanation why he does this or that

Life is for living and going out and travelling and connecting with other people.

You don’t get any prizes for not dressing well or having £200,000 in the bank

The problem with being frugal is it becomes a habit you can’t break when you have the funds to live comfortably and ends up as just being mean

I'm sorry for your abusive childhood.

You need to separate things. It sounds like you had a horrible childhood, but that you and possibly your husband are both also possibly neurodivergent.

It sounds like you hyperfocused on your degree and you are now in burnout, which may take a couple of years to recover from. Are you on medication? What help are you getting with your mental health?

With neurodivergent brains you look for connections between everything for some kind of overarching explanation which is what you are doing. Ruminating on past is also very common as is over thinking.

Start by looking at what positive things you do have that help you to cope, then remove or find workarounds for things that don't help you cope.

If your partner isn't willing to have insight and work on themselves too then the relationship is over.

In terms of your family I'm not sure why you told them, given the abusive history they don't sound like the best support network. Sometimes friends are a better support than family.

Your savings don’t matter for pip.

You have taken many pages to mention the neurodivergence.

It is horribly common for undiagnosed neurodivergence into adulthood to lead to mental health crises.

Assuming that one of the neurodivergence ‘kinds’ that you refer to is autism, have you heard of fight, flight, fawn? The ‘fawn’ sounds like what you were previously doing with your husband, which again is common with trauma background and needing/wanting to gain someone’s love/affection/attention/time/to feel worthy. It’s not his fault, nor is it yours. It’s also common that when things come to a head, you stop masking (and fawning) but this can to the outside world look like a complete personality transplant - when in reality you finally feel safe to be your authentic self rather than pretending to be who you thought someone else wanted or needed you to be.

The flip side of that is that essentially he did marry someone who doesn’t actually exist in terms of nature and personality. I personally think that this should have been the point where you both stepped away - maybe with future possibility of reconciliation, once you had ‘got to know each other’ truly. If you weren’t being your true self, he didn’t know you.

Social services aren’t necessarily the enemy. People so often think a referral is something they ought to be ashamed of or resist but actually there’s a lot that they can probably do that may help you.

It does sound like you need more help to be honest. Have you applied for UC or anything to give you some money so you’re a bit more independent? Or housing element so you can get out of the house whilst you heal then reassess whether your relationship still works once you’re better?

As you say, most of your DH's less than fabulous behaviour has been as a reaction to your anger, your rage and your psychosis over a number of years. He may not have reacted perfectly in every situation but he's still there with you, isn't he? It sounds as if it's been pretty tough for him too. Many would have given up and left long before now, and few would blame them. The whole relationship has become completely dysfuncntional and regardless of what or who caused it, it's outlived its usefulness and only serves to make you both feel worse.

You say the doctors have put the cause of your breakdown pretty much exclusively onto childhood trauma, so why are you confiding in your original abuser about your husband, when he is not the number one enemy here? Why are you not either cutting her out, or challenging her about her abuse?

It sounds as though you still have lots of things to work through in therapy as you still seem very enmeshed with and emotionally dependent on far too many people you see as your abusers.

Why don’t you have an income.

SSP? Pip?

He sounds financially abusive apart from anything else.

I have not read all the posts but in a round about way it sounds like they were concerned about you .
You need a little place of your own. Somewhere calm and controlled by you .
Nc with family for your own mental health.
And maybe try to build on your relationship with your husband . But in separate houses
Living with a hoarder who obviously has their own problems can't be helping yours.
It also may be good for your husband .

I think you are asking the wrong question here.

You are still trying to recover and now you are really caught up in arguing with yourself about whether your husband is abusive. Some of his behaviour does sound abusive including highly financially and generally controlling. Just because someone's behaviour is fuelled by their own needs doesn't mean it isn't abusive. You sound like you are sometimes flying into uncontrollable rages which could be abusive and the reasons for it are really complex.

What is clear is it's really miserable for both of you and doesn't sound safe. So you have the right people involved that you need to get support from. Can they help you make arrangements to live separately with you having somewhere with support? That might not be the answer but please work with them. You haven't got a bad word to say about the professionals involved generally and it's good you were honest. So I would keep working with them and get the help and support you need

Couple of points as a counsellor myself. If I had a client for eight years, I'd have signposted them for further help by now. Are you seeing a counsellor, psychologist, psychiatrist?

One thing I hold very strongly (a very condensed version!) is we can't change other people. Has anyone told you this before? You're doing work on yourself and that's fantastic, but eight years of therapy, I'd have expected more movement. It might be worth looking at who you're seeing and making sure they're the best option. Change you therapist if needs be. There's a lot of emphasis on husband and what he does wrong and how he needs to do things different, but that's just not going to happen. He isn't wanting to go to therapy, you can't and won't change him.

You, however, have the ability to zoom out of this whole story for a moment. Zoom right out and look at the overall picture - you're getting bogged down in small details like carpets and muddling them with bigger details like cptsd. In an ideal world, you would go on a retreat, get yourself straight (however long that takes) and then see who fits where in your life and go forwards healthier. It's hard to sort yourself when you're surrounded by people who might need to change.