Ha ha, there is a smiley cap! I have nothing scheduled today and am really excited about this. I've been good about not *reading* those emails, even if I am checking them occasionally. And I'm scheduling separate meetings without the CEO to talk about the service stuff. I just can't believe their reaction - they could save more than they pay me in a year.

Maybe once you start a business and get a significant enough client base, you can coast??? Or maybe you just have to make enough good decisions to balance the bad ones? I really would love to understand how it works.

And sometimes the crazy *does* catch up to them. I worked for a company a few years ago that had one owner who was pretty insane and always making bad decisions. I've heard they are winding down operations now.

Your parents do sounds pretty negligent, letting your brother run rampant like that! The thing where they want to be best friends now that you're an adult is truly aggravating. My father does that and I'm just ... you have to be kidding me. My parent's divorce agreement said that my mother would pay 25% of my medical bills and my father would pay 80%. I started having to pay the 75% myself when I was 15 and got my first job because my father wouldn't give me the money and my mother refused to pay.

So, yeah, they want to be best friends after putting their own self interest ahead of their child's interest when the child did not have the resources to make up for it? Whatever. I just wonder what happens when they get old. Am I going to be expected to take care of them when they didn't take care of me?

What learning is that if I don't respond to my father's messages or comply with my mother's unvoiced desires, nothing really happens. Maybe it annoys them, but there's no real downside for me. They just don't contact me as much, which is a good thing!

Wow, if you've finally found a good therapist, that's hard to give up, even if it's pricey. It sounds like some of your others were *really* bad, taking things personally. Don't they cover that early on in their training????? Have you had a really specific conversation with him about where you want to be in a given time frame or what a successful experience for you *would* look like?

LOL, this is not the same thing at all, but it kind of is. I'm trying to decide if I am going to continue with the pottery. The classes I've been taking are very focused on functional items. I've been doing them for four months now and STILL don't have anything functional that's free of significant flaws. Am I just talentless? I don't know. It's a kind of expensive way to acquire misshapen bowls and unusable plates. I was at an event at a high school the other night and noticed that the HS students had stuff that was a lot nicer than anything I've made so far!

So, yeah, it's hard to tell how long it takes to make visible progress and whether or not you are just wasting your money and time... but if this is the first therapist you have found who you seem to click with... and what about taking a break or a reduced schedule?