Dear lostcloud:

Learning about people is not wasted time, the more we learn about others the more we understand ourselves. I will be away from the computer for about ten hours. If you want to learn more about him, you can tell me anything and everything that he told you about his mother, about his father, about his childhood at home and at school,  having been bullied and so forth.

What his mother told you doesn’t matter, it is likely to distort understanding of what really happened. All that matters is what he told you and what you observed when spending time in his home: who said/did what, as objectively as you can.

anita