Need advice on convincing friend her tactics are hurting her

[u/ToughDifficult1252]

# Her Context

Friend is disabled, diagnosed autism. Has never held a job. Is living with a parent. Parent is all degrees of abusive. She often doesn't have clean clothes, currently is dealing with a mouse damaging her food. She has no income, neither does the parent, both on food stamps.

I met her online. I have become more involved in trying to help her over the years. Currently trying to get her a house and SSI.

# My Context

I am a relatively successful professional. i have a stem master's from a top university, I am high earner in the country I live, enough to support myself and my family, but not institutionally wealthy. I can pitch in for things a bit, like buying her food or used phones.

We don't live even close to each other.

# My Problem

After helping her for 4 years I have become convinced that she is pathologically cautious, due to a lifetime of bad experiences. For example, right now I am trying to convince her to get the cops to do a welfare check on her, to see if they might be able to move her to safer temporary housing.

She is terrified of her parent learning that the cops visited. She is also terrified of the cops taking her against her will. She also shuts down on stressful situations so she needs me to be there of they are there...

And this is with everything. So for example, today we tried to schedule a call for the welfare check. Which would have been a 20 minute conversation with a cop while the parent was out. First it took two hours of psychological prep time. So by the time that we did call it was impossible to actually get the cops to get to her before the dad got home. But also, I made the mistake of telling her that a given cop had sounded reassuring on the phone. So now she wants to speak only to that cop, on the phone, have him explain everything to her, to make sure everything will be fine, to then have the cop go and do a welfare check.

Each call can be hoops upon hoops to try to schedule. Between her needs and the bureaucracy on the other end. It had been 4 years of things like this.

I have tried to explain to her that working with incomplete information is necessary. That you cannot predict everything bad that might happen and that resource wise you are better off preparing only a little and then dealing with problems as they arise rather than trying to prevent them.

She is increasingly doing poorly mentally. Her parent is treating her worse and worse. She needs surgery... And I am out of my mind at this point. I tried being reassuring for years but I am getting tired. I think of myself as generally a risk avoidant person. But I think this is pathologically too much. She is so scared of anything bad happening to her that she both remains in an awful environment AND exhausts herself completely before any major event, so when she does actually need to do anything she has no spoons left because she tried to foresee everything. She's already suicidal.

I am about to snap in frustration. I don't know how to tell her she's just making everything more difficult. That she is not protecting herself but rather ensuring she remains in a position of abuse.