Thank you George. Yes it hurt my feelings that my parents didn’t want me, especially that they continued to blame me for their problems and told me about trying to abort me when I was age 10! And then continued to put the burden of their unhappy and abusive marriage on the fact that I was born and that they were forced to marry. They did not take care of me, they ended up abandoning me and having me take care of them when they were sick and them moved on.

I was on my own very young and too busy trying to survive etc, that it is only now, at 46 years old, as I look at the vulnerability of my children a girl who is 10 and a son who is 15, and I think about what my parents put me through at those ages, and while my father died when I was 18, my mother has just gotten worse and meaner. She is an alcoholic who now revels in my success and takes credit for it but has no interest in my children. I have so much anger toward her, I often dream about beating her up.

I just know how much I loved my children the minute I saw them and I don’t understand how she couldn’t love me. The one person on this earth who is suppose to love me didn’t, and still doesn’t… In fact, she sometimes wants to physically fight me. It still breaks my heart, when I am sick, or in need, and I wish I had a mother to hug or to talk to but I don’t… In fact most people in my family are parasites, so I am better staying away from them. I am tired of being disappointed in people all the time. In my career I represent criminals and I find they don’t disappoint me as much as my friends or family – and they are liars and thieves, but I know what they are, and I have no expectation of them. Sometimes I feel a closer bond to my clients than to people who are in my life.

I want to quit feeling sorry for myself. And I am in counseling – and she told me that as an adult we don’t need love and we don’t need to be accepted and we don’t need friends to be happy… I don’t get that, I thought that love and family and friends is what life is all about. And when I have so much pain and anger, I am not able to be a truly giving person, so I have tried to reverse it and I give and give thinking the giving will make me happy, but then I have done that for 30 years and maybe 2-3 people have not taken advantage of me and have helped me out.

Finally, I am a very good advocate for my clients, but when it comes to collecting money for my services, or advocating for myself, or confronting someone who is taking advantage of me – I feel extremely guilty – like I don’t deserve it, and I get extremely anxious, and I obsess about if I hurt their feelings or offended them, I become a noodle… I am in this bad time right now of stress and financial trouble because I couldn’t say no to people and I’m angry at myself and at them, I expected my friends who I lent money to 2 years ago to step up and help me now especially since I see them traveling to Hawaii and buying new things and they are in a better position now. I am so nice, and I don’t say anything, I expect them to do the right thing, and them one day I just snap and I say something rude and they justify not paying me back because I was rude. Now for about a year I have been struggling and I have done it all alone, all the things I have done for my family and friends when I was making a lot of money, and all the loans I gave, and work I did for them for free and they use to call me all the time when they needed something – now nothing… no calls, no help, and it just breaks my heart.