Dear Needthelight:

Reading the additional information you provided in your last post, seems to me that indeed, you extricating yourself from the situation you are in: spending your time and resources, material and otherwise, on taking care of this man and his two daughters, is what you need to do. You realize it yourself but as you wrote three days ago, “I feel weak every time I think I should ask them to move on. This is my only struggle.”

In your email to him you wrote: “I need your help and not anymore guilt”- in his short email response to you he did not pressure you to stay with him via guilt or in any other way, but maybe in-person he does. I don’t know. Maybe the guilt that you feel is coming from your prior experience alone, as your mother told you, that you are just “‘repeating the same pattern in my life’ husband/ partner not working and I live in stress”- meaning you have done this before.

Where does the guilt come from then, the feeling that it is wrong for you, an offense, for you to no longer financially provide for this man and his daughters?

anita