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Dear Philippa

Early February last year, aged 53, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I’m incredibly fortunate – I was on a screening programme because my mum and maternal aunt both died of the disease when they were 67. The tumour was found on my first CT scan under the programme; a 15mm lesion which the radiology report flagged as suspicious but which the wider oncology team recognised immediately as cancer. Nine days later I was in surgery – a Whipple’s procedure, which removed the tumour, along with half of my pancreas, my duodenum, gall bladder and a butcher’s assortment of other bits necessary to make my radically simplified new plumbing work. The results were as good as I could have hoped for: a small tumour, not particularly aggressive, with no spread to the lymph nodes. Nevertheless, I underwent six months of adjuvant chemotherapy just in case any errant cells had migrated beyond my guts. This wasn’t quite as horrible as I imagined it’d be, but I think I was lucky in that the side effects didn’t seem to hit me too hard. It finished in October 2025, and I was moved on to quarterly surveillance scans, the first of which declared me cancer-free.

Don’t worry – we’re getting to the good bit. January 2026 – my second surveillance scan. Huge anxiety over the three weeks between scan and results. My name comes up on the screen and my wife and I enter the consultant’s room. “I’m very sorry – the cancer’s back. You have a 30mm mass in the surgical bed…”. The box of tissues nudged gently towards us as he smiles sympathetically. It feels just like a scene in a film. I press for more information – can they operate again? I’m told that, no, that’s not an option — the assumption is the disease is systemic now. The only treatment is more chemotherapy to prolong life. I ask how long that preservation might be. The median survival for a situation like mine is nine to 12 months. Fuck. We tell the kids; we tell friends and family. I start trying to live more in the moment on the advice of a CBT-therapist, but it’s hard not to think about the very limited future. I write letters and birthday cards for the years I won’t see. I start chemotherapy. A different, more horrible cocktail. All my hair falls out. I obsess over the fatally-wounded assisted dying bill and start to formulate my own plan. I’ve stockpiled enough sleeping pills and Valium to supply a lethal dose when the time comes: I’m not going the way my mum and aunt did. Thanks to work, I have private health insurance. I used this to ask for a second opinion. Not because I thought the diagnosis was wrong, but because I hoped there might be other treatment options (something non-NICE funded? A less conservative surgeon who might remove what’s left of my pancreas and the rot within it?). I saw a charming professor at the Royal Marsden, who told me my current NHS team were doing everything by the book and that there wasn’t anything else he could offer. But he would look at my imaging, if I liked. Two weeks later, the follow up call. “Hello, I saw you two weeks ago. We’ve reviewed your imaging and, er, we’re not seeing what your (NHS) team is seeing. Can you come in for another scan?”

This letter is already too long. The abbreviated version – my NHS team got the diagnosis wrong. A private CT scan and an NHS PET CT scan confirmed what the Royal Marsden thought: no recurrent disease. Chemo stopped immediately. I’m in the clear. Although it took six weeks to get to this information. So why am I writing to you? I don’t know how to move on. I realise that thousands of people are given that awful news every day, but a vanishingly small number of those are then told they’ve been mis-diagnosed. I know that we’re all going to die, but I’m living with the knowledge of what an imminent, inescapable demise feels like. I feel incapable of planning more than three months into the future. I get frequent waves of unbearable/indescribable emotion that take me back into that six weeks – not flashbacks, as such, but emotional aftershocks. I can’t bring myself to throw away the DIY Dignitas kit I built. I’m still seeing my CBT therapist, but it’s not really helping, because the threat is real, not imagined. Do you have any advice? Huge thanks for even reading this.

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Dear Philippa,

I am in my mid-50s, have been married for 20 years and am the mother of one son in sixth form.

My mum died two years ago quite unexpectedly, (my dad many years before that) and I miss her terribly. She lived nearby and helped a lot with bringing up my son, particularly when he was small. She was a wise, kind and calm presence in our lives. I have lost my biggest cheerleader.

My age was already causing some re-evaluation of my life. Now I feel like I am waiting for my own death. I see the probability of more caring for others ahead. I feel unseen and unappreciated and tired. I get on with my siblings, but we are not that close. They are much more successful in life, and both have chosen to be child-free, so we do not lead very similar lives or have the same concerns.

I was arty as a young person but was discouraged from doing that by both parents and school and guided towards something more sensible. However, I am someone who was always top of the class at both school and university, but it did not translate into confidence in the workplace. I was all potential and nothing to show for it. I have been in various low-paid jobs for most of my life. I have never held a graduate job and indeed I do not think I ever had the self-belief to even apply for one. I wish I was more outgoing and had done something more useful with my life.

As a young woman from my teens onwards I had mental health problems and sometimes severely self-harmed. The medications back then were terrible, the shame huge. Today I feel surrounded by younger women who seem proud of their diagnoses and able to speak openly about their issues. Honestly, it makes me feel like a dinosaur from another age. When I was doing my A levels I had a breakdown and was hospitalised for 8 months. I remember watching the Berlin Wall coming down whilst locked up. Since then, I have had further periods of depression, sometimes needing time off work, but no self-harm and no hospitalisations this century. It is manageable. I sometimes wonder whether I would be given a different diagnosis today, but if it were a different label would it necessarily be more accurate?

My anxiety is high at the thought of my son going to university. (Not that he has decided he will yet but seems to be leaning that way). The anxiety is mainly about him getting into what could be lifelong debt when he doesn’t seem especially academic or enthusiastic about a particular subject. I wish I could be happy for him to choose what he wants. I want him to go but also don’t want him to go. I am sick of people who don’t have children telling me that degree apprenticeships are the answer when they have no understanding of how hard it is to get one. I also feel I am not in a good position to advise him as I have not made a success of my life career-wise and at his age I was a disaster. I feel I have failed him in many ways. I was also unable to have more children and worry that he will be alone.

Personally, I am desperate to have some time to myself. I did go away for a few nights to a hut in a field away from everyone else in the spring. It was so beautiful and so needed that when I arrived I just sat and cried outside for a long time. The relief at not having to attend to anyone else’s needs or thoughts. I read books, I made art. I walked in nature. I ate what I wanted and didn’t have to make dinner for anyone else. At the end I did not want to leave. I constantly think about going back. The idea of pilgrimage also draws me. The idea of walking a long way away somewhere and solitude. Every now and then I go to London to look at art exhibitions. It feeds my soul. I have corners of time. It does not feel enough.

I see friends whose children have flown the nest forging ahead into new freedoms and versions of themselves around me. I want to move into a new era for myself but don’t know what time and money I am allowed to spend on myself when there is not much to go around. I feel anything I have ought to go on my son and that I blew my opportunities. He is understandably angry that I got to have a free degree where he has no such luck.

I married someone who earns similarly. He has his own concerns of job and health problems, and his own ill and dying parents. He talks about going part-time before retiring which would put more pressure on me. Currently we both work full-time.

There was not a great deal left to inherit from mum, and it was split four ways. It does, however, give me a little bit of savings in the bank, something I have never managed before. I would like to give myself permission to use a bit of it to do an art course, (not a degree, but something with a qualification), but fears and guilt are holding me back. It has been a fantasy for so long what happens if I turn it into a reality? Maybe the thought of it is just a comfort blanket. I need to change something though.

Thoughts please?

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Dear Philippa,

I’m in my forties and I used to love my job. In more than 20 years of career as an engineer I had changed jobs a few times when I felt like facing new challenges. Then, I was sacked for the first time in my life. The company got into financial difficulties, made up a false accusation against me and showed me the door. I fought and won in court, obtaining large compensation. Meanwhile I also found a new job, with a better salary, in a lovely workplace. So, happy ending, right? Not quite.

Before that unfortunate episode, I used to be enthusiastic, to exceed expectations, to work extra hours voluntarily because I had fun and derived joy from my job. All this has vanished since. Now I just drag myself through my working days, waiting for the weekend, still feeling betrayed and on my toes. Mark Twain said “Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” I used to be one of those lucky few, and now I’m not anymore. This is so depressing. How can I get over my grudge and restore some confidence?

My Reply

I wonder whether you are expecting yourself to have recovered from this experience because, on paper at least, everything worked out. You won your court case, received compensation and found a better-paid job in a workplace you enjoy. The facts suggest a happy ending. Yet our emotional lives do not always keep pace with the facts, and sometimes the consequences of an experience linger long after the practical problems have been resolved.

For more than twenty years, work seems to have been a source of pleasure, challenge and meaning. You describe throwing yourself into it, exceeding expectations, working extra hours because you wanted to rather than because you had to. Then you found yourself falsely accused and dismissed by an organisation to which you had given a great deal of your time, energy and loyalty. It is hardly surprising that your feelings about work changed as a result.

I find myself wondering whether what you are experiencing is something closer to grief than resentment. We tend to associate grief with bereavement, but we can also grieve assumptions about how the world works. Perhaps you believed, quite reasonably, that if you worked hard, acted in good faith and contributed generously, your employer would behave honourably towards you. Then you discovered that organisations do not always operate according to those principles. That can be a painful lesson, particularly when it arrives after decades of positive experiences.

What struck me was that you seem to regard your loss of enthusiasm as evidence that something valuable has gone missing inside you. I am not so sure. It may be that part of you is protecting itself. Enthusiasm requires trust and it requires us to invest ourselves in something without constantly looking over our shoulder. After what happened, it seems that some part of you might be reluctant to do that again. You learned that even when we do everything “right”, we can still be treated unfairly.

I also found myself wondering whether your relationship with work had become entwined with your sense of identity. You describe being one of those fortunate people who never felt they were really working at all. There is something wonderful about that, but there is also a risk. When we derive a great deal of meaning, satisfaction and self-worth from one area of life, a blow in that area can shake us more than we might expect. What happened was not only the loss of a job. It was a loss of faith in a story you had told yourself about work and about your place within it.

I am not entirely convinced by Mark Twain’s quote because even people who love their work sometimes have difficult colleagues, disappointing employers, tedious tasks and periods of disillusionment. Loving your work does not exempt you from being vulnerable. In fact, it may make you more vulnerable because you have more invested in it emotionally.

I am also not sure that confidence is what you have lost. After all, when you were treated unfairly, you challenged it. You went to court and won, then found another position and rebuilt your career. That sounds to me like somebody with considerable confidence and resilience. What may have been damaged is trust, and trust tends to return more slowly than confidence. It grows through repeated experiences that show us we are safe enough to invest ourselves again.

For that reason, I would be cautious about trying to force yourself back into the version of you that existed before this happened. That person had not yet learned what you now know. The task may not be to recover your former innocence about work but to develop a different relationship with it, one that allows for enjoyment, commitment and enthusiasm while also recognising that employers are institutions rather than families and that no workplace, however good, can guarantee complete security.

You ask how to get over your grudge. I suspect grudges fade when we have fully acknowledged what we lost. What you lost was not only a job but you lost a sense of trust in the world of work and perhaps a belief that dedication would always be recognised and reciprocated and I think that is worth mourning. Once we have mourned something properly, we are often less preoccupied with getting back to who we were before and more interested in discovering who we are now.

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Hi Philippa,

A couple of years ago I ended a five-year relationship with someone I adored but was always trying to rescue. He was fun, chaotic, dishonest and left me with debt in our joint names. I was devastated and moved cities, changed careers, paid off the debt, survived loneliness, serial dating, and periods of depression, and slowly built a life I was proud of. I discovered creative writing, got fit, made friends and felt as though I was becoming myself.

Then I met a lovely man. Things moved quickly and before long I was living with him and his young daughter. He is everything my ex was not: kind, reliable, thoughtful, calm and emotionally available. We communicate well, share values and genuinely enjoy each other’s company. His daughter is wonderful and calls me Mum. We are, for all practical purposes, a family.

The problem is me. One day I feel grateful, happy and excited about our future. The next I feel trapped. I miss freedom, spontaneity and having time that belongs only to me. I look at friends without children and feel envious. I worry about the age gap between us. My partner is 50, I am 33. I imagine myself caring for him when I am older and panic. I wonder if I have skipped straight from a chaotic twenties to sensible middle age.

I love them both. I cannot imagine leaving. I also cannot stop fantasising about running away.

Part of me wants a home, another baby, dungarees and Earth Mother energy. Another part wants to travel, write, stay out late and make reckless decisions.

I feel as though I am trying to control every possible future and want to guarantee I won’t regret my choices. My mood changes daily and I no longer know which thoughts to trust.

How do I know whether I am mourning a previous life, resisting commitment, or ignoring instincts that are trying to tell me something?

I’m in knots about it all.

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Hi Philippa!

I (35F) have been with my partner (39M) for over a decade. He came out to me as bisexual a couple of years ago, and I’ve been fully supportive.

He’d been in the closet up until that point, and has been trying to accept himself (he comes from bad parents....)
He’s never been with a man, and is - completely understandably - curious! I have said that I would be very open to him experimenting with another man, as it would be sad for him not to have had that chance in life (very much assuming we’ll be together forever). I first said that a few years ago, and whilst we discussed it on a few occasions, he hasn’t taken that step.

More recently, he’s expressed to me that ideally he would like to find a man that he enjoys spending time with, who he could maybe go and see once every month or two for sex. He said that in this theoretical situation, they wouldn’t be friends or partners, and they wouldn’t see each other or speak between these times. He’s explicitly said he’s not looking for a romantic relationship with another person.

I’m feeling a little less sure of this, but definitely not automatically against it. I trust him, and I know he wouldn’t do anything without us agreeing first.

Now... the question I actually have is that I floated the idea of more of an open relationship, which would then also leave me to have similar experiences (most likely with a man, but perhaps a woman). He got a bit upset about that. I think he’s broadly fine with the idea of me being with another woman, but he is clearly not happy with the idea of me being with another man.
He said that it’s different for him, because he feels like he has a sexual need which is not currently being met in our relationship. The unspoken implication, I presume, is that my desire would just be... greedy? I think I hurt his ego.

I understand his reservations, and I’d definitely feel way more uncomfortable if he was asking to see another woman!
All that being said, part of me feels like it’s unfair if he gets to go out and have fun, but I’m not?
I can’t work out if I actually want to (although I think I would, it sounds like fun) or if I’m just being childish and going “well if you’re doing it, I want to do it too!” ... or third bonus option... maybe I feel threatened by this proposed new scenario of a ‘regular guy’, and I feel like I’d feel better about it if we were even…? Does that make me a bad or selfish person?

Do you think his view (that he should be allowed because it’s a sexual ‘need’, and I shouldn’t because it’s a sexual ‘want’) is valid?

Whatever happens, I wouldn’t let anything I do overshadow his genuine need to explore this part of himself. I’m fine with that taking priority so he can focus on his own feelings, and is not overshadowed by having to deal with any other relationship changes happening at the same time.

FYI - we’ve also spoken about other alternatives (like threesomes/foursomes/couple swaps), which I’d be very interested in, and like the idea of - but he would want this in addition to his ‘regular guy’.

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Dear Philippa

I would very much appreciate your thoughts on how much of one’s personal life you can/should share with your adult children and how much (if anything) you should leave for them to discover after your death.

My situation is this: my husband and I have been married for decades. I was a widow when I married and had young children and he was divorced with three teenage children. The marriage has always been difficult though we have had some happy times and have managed to achieve a pretty successful blended family over the years. My husband is an emotionally immature man, self centred, unable to reflect on his behaviour, lacking in empathy, unwilling to accept responsibly for his actions (everything is always someone else’s fault) highly sensitive to even the mildest criticism and given to explosive outbursts and temper tantrums when challenged or when things don’t go his way. He can be controlling and domineering and sometimes very verbally abusive to me. He was jealous I think of my children but things improved when they left for university. One example of his behaviour : a few years into our marriage he had an affair with a work colleague which came to light when her husband found out and wrote to me about it. He also phoned and was very abusive and threatening. My husband and I worked in the same field, so I think many of our colleagues and friends probably knew what going on which was humiliating apart from anything else. It turned out that my husband was planning to leave us and was persuading this woman and her small child to move in with him a flat he was renting at the time. His own son’s marriage was only a few months away so I really don’t know how he thought it was all going to work out but in any case the affair collapsed once the woman’s husband knew. When I tried to talk to my husband about it all his response was that it was my fault because I hadn’t been treating him very well. He has never accepted his responsibility for any of it. Or apologised.

I now see (with the benefit of hindsight and therapy) I was ‘love bombed’ into a marriage he very much wanted and which happened after only a few months after the death of my first husband and my children’s father. I was traumatised and hardly knew day from night, my sole concern being to provide stability and care and to protect my children. I think I must have seen the marriage (if I thought about it at all) as a safe haven, a retreat from all the confusion, grief and trauma I was living through. Of course it turned out to be anything but that.

In any event we have battled on because for many years I didn’t have the strength or emotional resilience to do anything but stay and I wanted to give my children a stable home and not uproot them again after so much trauma. I will probably never leave now. I have financial and economic stability. A good circle of friends and activities and interests I enjoy. I have learned how to distance myself from him and set boundaries so his behaviour doesn’t impact so much.

The other side of this coin is that everyone thinks my husband is a great chap. He can be sociable, cheerful, friendly and always helpful if friends or family need anything at all. Even my children think he’s ok (he has been very helpful with the DIY as they’ve acquired their own houses and need work doing) and his own children are his biggest fans. I resent this deeply given what I have had to live through. I have a lot of stuff, paperwork mainly - my diary recounting my feelings and some of the worst episodes and all the letters and emails from the wronged husband after the affair. I could leave all of this for everyone to discover after our deaths, but would this be fair, given I wouldn’t be around to answer all the inevitable questions. Or I could share it with my children (and friends?) now so we can discuss it together. It feels like I want to take my revenge on him for what he has put me through and also that I want to be finally heard and my experiences acknowledged. Somehow it feels like he is the one ‘getting away with it’ and I have been belittled and just suffer in silence.

What do you think?

My Reply and Her Response to My Reply

Revenge is a satisfying feeling AND if you are still living with the person you want to get revenge on you might want to think how it would pan out.

You describe the strange position of being married to somebody whose public self and private self, appear to be far apart. The charming, useful, sociable man admired by family and friends exists alongside the man who blamed you for his affair, who could be verbally abusive, explosive and controlling, and who left you carrying not only the pain of what happened but also the burden of keeping quiet about it.

I wonder whether part of your resentment comes from feeling that you have had to protect a version of him that he himself created. You have held the knowledge of the affair; the humiliation; the emotional cost of the marriage; while he has continued to move through the family as the dependable and generous figure everybody feels grateful to. That can create a lonely sort of bitterness because silence can begin to feel less like dignity and more like participation in a story that no longer feels true.

You ask whether your children should discover all this after your death, or whether you should tell them now. Perhaps before deciding that, it may help to think about what you want the telling to do. Are you hoping to feel less alone with your experiences? Do you want your children to understand you differently? Do you want your husband to be seen more fully? Or do you want relief from carrying a secret that has sat heavily with you for years?

I also wondered whether there is room for a conversation with your husband before any conversation with your children. You could tell him that you no longer wish to help maintain the idea that the marriage was something other than what it has been for you, and that you feel tired of carrying the silence around his affair and the difficulties between you. You could ask whether he wants to speak to the children himself about his unfaithfulness before you decide what, if anything, you may wish to share.

His response might tell you something important. Some people become more thoughtful when they realise they are no longer protected from the consequences of their behaviour. Others cling harder to denial. You know him well enough, I imagine, to have some sense of which direction he may move in.

Your children are adults now and adults are often capable of holding complicated truths about parents, though it can take time. A father may have been loving, practical and supportive towards his children while also being hurtful towards his wife. Families are rarely arranged into heroes and villains as neatly as we might wish.

You write movingly about the state you were in after the death of your first husband. Grief, shock and trauma can leave people longing for certainty, shelter and somebody who appears willing to take charge. Looking back with hindsight can sometimes tempt us into judging the choices we made while overwhelmed and frightened, but hindsight is calm and orderly in a way real life seldom is.

I found myself thinking too about the diaries and papers. Perhaps they are not only evidence against him but evidence for you. A way of recording your own reality over the years so that your memories did not become worn down by blame, denial or minimising.

You say you will probably never leave. That may be true. But remaining in a marriage does not necessarily mean continuing to protect every silence within it.

Her response to my reply

Thank you for your speedy reply. When I first read it I was disappointed and cross because you hadn’t told me what to do! But then of course that’s not your job is it.

So I started to think about your questions.

A conversation with my husband is out of the question. He would instantly retreat into denial, blaming and worse. It would be very destructive.

So - the other questions

I don’t need the relief from being alone because there is actually one other person who knows all about my situation - a life-long friend - we are of a similar age and very close. We talk and share most things. Her marriage is also challenging. We give each other support and help and understanding. It’s a relief not to be alone with all my feelings and resentment.

As I think about it more I’m not sure what the point would be of unmasking my husband to friends and the wider world either. What would they do with all the information about his awful behaviour? Shun him? I doubt it. They wouldn’t want all the messy details anyway would they. Perhaps their marriages are difficult too.

As for my children - do they need to see me more fully? They love me and respect me and I love them. They are all kind generous hard working lovable people. They don’t need my extra baggage.

So, for the time being I’m continuing to consider all of this. I still have the diaries and paperwork because, yes, they are my evidence of the reality of my situation and what I have experienced.

Thank you for the prompts and the questions. I will hopefully continue to edge towards some answers as I keep thinking about them.

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Dear Philippa,

I have been with my husband for 10 years now. He is diagnosed with ADHD. We have a child together. We can share a lot of laughs as we have a similar daft sensibility. We are also capable of supporting each other through very difficult times - like the loss of both his dad and my mom and my health issues. But, and this is getting worse, there is conflict and heartache.

I mentioned the ADHD diagnosis because every so often my husband flips his lid at me. He may be experiencing Rejection Sensitivity Disorder. I know that doesn’t excuse verbal abuse, but it explains a lot. The verbal abuse has taken place within ear shot of our child. He’ll call me horrid names and criticises me in a fiery and vicious way - there’s no stopping it for several hellish minutes. I will try to get him to go for a walk, but while the rant is still coming, I’ll put my fingers in my ears and curl up in a ball. Afterwards, he is devastated and apologises profusely. He’ll then be more helpful and considerate than usual for a bit. But only for a bit.

He will also (and this is where I feel like we might be really screwed) tell me about his past traumas and his struggles with his ADHD - even if only an hour before he was verbally abusing me. It’s like he’s looking for me to make him feel better - after making me so upset, it takes me a long time to recover. I can’t just forget it because I’ve felt very frightened and overwhelmed.

What triggers his outbursts is various stressful situations, like when I was I’ll, bed ridden and his dad was dying he just turned on me. Or last week he was awful to me for saying to my sister she can spend one more day on holiday with us. He has also had outbursts at other people (his mum, his dad, a poor member of staff in his dad’s care home), and then feels awful about it. It happens maybe when he feels he is not a priority.

Day to day, he has offloaded on me a lot. It’s been the same stuff for years - wanting a more exciting life - and feeling down.

Overall, he’s quite an anxious and unhappy person. He’s trying hard to work on himself with therapy, exercise and meditation. He is addicted to work as a distraction from his feelings.

I have done a lot of therapy over the past few years. It has dawned on me how I looked after everyone else’s feelings in my birth family, and that’s probably why I was drawn to someone that needed quite a lot of reassurance and taking care of emotionally. I was the peacemaker - it contributes to me overthinking and trying to anticipate the needs of others.

Some days, maybe most days, it’s okay being with him but my gut tells me this dynamic is bad for both of us. I also feel like I’m living in his shadow. He earns good money, I am barely working. Conversations are mostly about him. I know I am done carrying his stuff and I can’t see myself supporting him for another 10 years while he figures out how to be happy.

How can I navigate the next steps and keep my sanity? I am afraid to tell him I need space or even a trial separation.

I am not working at the moment due to fatigue. My nervous system needs calm, but the stress of separation or divorce is daunting.

Many thanks,

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Hi Philippa,

Your recent article on responsibility, has prompted this email. I loved the article, thank you. This is something I’ve recently been thinking about.

Last month my baby was stillborn at 34 weeks. It’s been a traumatic and devastating time for me and my family.

My typical response to the how are you question is “I’m not ok right now but I will be OK”. I knew I had to be ok from the moment I heard those awful words from the sonographer. I have to be ok for my older children, I have to be ok for the memory of my little baby who didn’t get the privilege to take a breath on this earth, I have to be ok for my family.

The bit I’m feeling stuck on is that I maybe could have done things differently to change the outcome for my baby. The bereavement midwives say this isn’t my fault, but I know enough to know that there is a chance that something I did or didn’t do could have tipped the balance in favour of my beautiful baby surviving this. I also know that it’s possible that nothing could have helped, but the not knowing is unbearable. If the post mortem results come back without a clear cause that couldn’t have been my fault (I.e a genetic condition), then it will be so hard to accept that I couldn’t have done anything differently. How awful I feel hoping for a certain result on a post mortem just to make me feel better. When my thoughts are at their worst, I feel like I am an awful horrible person and a terrible mum. I have to be ok, like I said before, but I’m worried I won’t be able to live with this overwhelming guilt long term. I need to be able to live with myself and find peace with myself for my children.

I think I struggle to take my own advice. Recently a friend messaged saying she felt guilty because she fell over and accidentally injured her child. My response was “don’t beat yourself up over this, it was an accident”; I truly meant it. I always find the kind thing to say to reassure others. I wish I could take my own advice here, I wish I could talk to myself like I talk to my friends and believe myself when I say those things to myself. But I don’t believe my own advice when I say them to myself. It’s like I can talk the talk but not walk the walk of self-kindness. I can want it for others but can’t do it for myself. You wrote in your essay “excessive self blame is often just another form of self-sabotage”. What’s excessive when it comes to self-blame? Is it possible to have a locus of control that is “too internalised”? How do I find more balance here? How do I live with this impossible sadness?

How do I follow my own advice? How do I find self-kindness here? How will I live with the guilt that I could have possibly done something differently that meant my baby survived?

I have begun counselling, but I worry that i won’t be able to move on from this guilt and self-blame.

Thank you for all your words of wisdom. I so appreciate your responses to other questions, particularly recently where I have found such comfort in your words.

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Dear Philippa,

This feels like such a small problem compared to many of the letters you receive, but it genuinely causes me a great deal of misery.

Before I explain, I wanted to say thank you. I read your book, The Book You Want Everyone You Live to Read, last year and many of your ideas helped me enormously with what I would describe as general social anxiety. In particular, learning to shift my focus away from myself and onto the other person, and to assume that people are generally pleased to see me rather than judging me, made a real difference to how I move through the world. I have to make a conscious effort to do it, but it’s definitely helped my confidence.

Yet there is one area where I seem completely unable to apply those same lessons.

Most people would describe me as confident. I have a responsible job, I can hold conversations easily, and I often put myself forward for things that matter to me. Yet being put on the spot to speak in front of a group fills me with dread.

If I know I have to give a presentation, speak at a meeting, even just introduce myself, or make a short speech, I can spend weeks or even months worrying about it. The event itself might last only a few minutes, but beforehand I seem unable to think about anything else. I rehearse endlessly, look for ways to avoid it, imagine everything that could go wrong, and feel physically sick with anxiety.

A few years ago this culminated in a full panic attack before I was due to present online to a board. I simply couldn’t do it. I couldn’t breathe properly and I couldn’t log in. My manager stepped in and gave the presentation while I pretended I was having technical difficulties. Once the spotlight was off me, I was able to rejoin the meeting and answer questions perfectly normally.

That’s the part I find so confusing. If I choose to contribute to a discussion, I can often speak quite confidently. It’s the feeling of all eyes being on me, and of being expected to perform, that seems to trigger something overwhelming.

The problem seems to have become worse as I’ve got older but it’s always been there. I wonder whether perimenopause has played a part, and I now work entirely from home, so I have fewer opportunities to practise these skills. Instead, each occasion feels bigger and more frightening.

I am writing because I have been offered an opportunity that I would genuinely love to take. To put myself forward, I may need to say a few words in a meeting next week. Rationally, I know it will probably be fine. Nobody is asking me to do anything extraordinary. Yet my heart is already racing, I feel shaky, and there is a constant knot of dread in my chest.

What troubles me most is that I know my fears are disproportionate, but knowing that doesn’t seem to change how I feel. I can’t reason myself out of the anxiety. The more I tell myself that it’s ridiculous, the worse I seem to feel.

Why can something so ordinary provoke such a strong reaction? Why does it seem so different from ordinary social anxiety? And how do I stop this fear from limiting opportunities that I genuinely want?

My Reply

I get it! There I am in another bookshop, or at another literary festival and I’ve got to talk to 20 - 1000 people about either my books or psychology or philosophy and sound compos mentis and control my head’s propensity to wobble and not be an idiot. Knowing full well that I am an idiot and that my head has developed a wobble when I concentrate.

What do you know about yourself? You say other people think that you are “confident..have a responsible job…can hold conversations easily”. Sometimes we have to suspend our own beliefs about ourselves and take on other people’s beliefs about us instead. If we’ve been booked to make a presentation, if they’ve agreed to let us speak, then let’s not think of them as deluded idiots. We may not be enjoying confidence in ourselves but let’s have confidence in them.

There are certain tricks I’ve learnt that make it easier. The main one is breath. Before you go on count for four in your in breath and five on your out breath and breath slowly. Sometimes just just being aware of your breath is enough. Two, be aware of how you are talking to yourself. Observe those messages but don’t take them in. Three, your audience isn’t 20 people or 1000 people it is one person times 20 or times a thousand. You are just speaking to one person. That person is friendly and is on your side. Four, if you lose your train of thought in the middle of a sentence, ask the audience or the group for help, “what was I saying? Oh yes, thank you”. It’s actually difficult to mess up because of the audience being on your side. Who is your biggest champion, maybe an old teacher, or your dad, or a friend, imagine you are talking to them. If you feel panic rising, take your awareness back to your breath and slow down. And, what’s the worst that can happen? You can forget what you were saying? It’s okay you can ask the audience. You can dry up completely. You can tell the audience, I seem to have dried up completely. Let me breathe for a moment. Nobody is going to die. Messing up isn’t the worst thing in the world.

You’ve already made great strides in getting more confident in general conversation by concentrating on the other, but being on stage either in real life or virtually, is also a relationship- feel the relationship with the audience. They are on your side or they wouldn’t be there.

Another one of my tricks, and I made a whole stage show out of this, is asking the audience questions and asking them early. You don’t have to know all the answers either. You can ask the audience for help. This technique started for me in 2019. I went to Waterstones in Milton Keynes with my book, The Book You Wish Your Parents had Read and I didn’t bother give a speech at all. I just asked, what do you want to know, and took it from there. It worked out brilliantly - audiences are great. I sometimes turn a presentation into a workshop, by asking a question, getting the audience into groups and getting them to discuss the question and then feed back to the room. You don’t have to just preach at a load of faces and hope it’s going in.

I have every confidence in you that you can do this even if you feel nervous and the more you do it the less nervous you’ll become. It’s okay to be nervous and it’s okay to reframe nervousness as excitement. Tell yourself you are excited about this opportunity.

I’m going to put your question out on Monday morning so you get more feedback in time for next week’s opportunity. We’ll ALL be on your side. Your email will be read by 1000’s of people too. So you’ve already addressed a large group this week. It’s okay to feel fear, just don’t let the fear steer the ship.

Let us know how it goes,

Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway ~ Susan Jeffers

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Dear Philippa,

I have had the most ridiculous crush for the best part of 10 years. I have never been so physically attracted to someone, but never had the courage to act on it.

In the intervening years I have, whilst admiring my crush from afar, established a comfortable and broadly happy relationship. We are due to marry in the autumn. Sexual intimacy has always been an issue in my current relationship, we are very much in love but have sex infrequently. We are however a very good team, and I do love them very much.

My crush has now revealed that the feelings are, and have always been, reciprocated. I am torn, part of me is desperate to act on the crush. What my partner and I have now is good, but I can’t help feeling it could be better, I worry I’m destined for a life of perfectly serviceable intimacy. On the other hand, acting on the crush would be taking a huge gamble, what if it transpires that all we have is attraction, without any deeper connection? I also know that if my partner was to discover any infidelity, not only would our relationship and life together be over, but they would be deeply hurt.

I think what worries me most is the fact I’m even considering cheating on my partner, I worry that surely this means I shouldn’t be marrying them.

Any advice would be kindly appreciated.

My Reply

Ten years of a crush is a long time. The fact that you have not acted on it until now, now that a wedding date has been set, and your future has become more concrete, caught my attention. For years this crush has remained safely in the realm of possibility. Now you are facing the prospect of making a lifelong commitment to one person and all the roads not taken are suddenly coming into sharper focus.

I wonder whether your crush has become about a question that was already present in your relationship. The question of whether your erotic life feels rich enough to sustain you over the long term. I also wonder whether the crush has become attached to another question: whether part of you is frightened of commitment itself.

For ten years this person has occupied a place where everyday life has never had the chance to intrude. There have been no discussions about money, no negotiations about whose turn it is to clean the kitchen, no family tensions and no disappointments. Desire flourishes where reality has not yet arrived. Fantasy allows us to imagine attraction without compromise, excitement without responsibility and passion without the ordinary demands of life together.

The timing feels important. For a decade, your crush could remain a possibility. A wedding date changes the nature of that possibility. Marriage involves a kind of surrender. Choosing one person means accepting that other possible romantic relationships will remain unexplored. Choosing one future means letting go of others. I wonder whether some of your anxiety is connected to that reality.

You ask what you should do. Perhaps a more useful question would be: what sort of person do you want to be? What values do you want to guide you?

What struck me most in your email was not the crush itself but the secret. You are preparing to make a lifelong pledge to someone while carrying something that has become increasingly significant. You know that sexual intimacy has been difficult, or at least you remember that it is when the possibility of consummating a long-standing crush appears. You know that another person occupies a great deal of space in your imagination. Your partner does not appear to know any of this.

I wonder how it would feel to build a marriage while keeping that secret intact. Neither sexual nor emotional intimacy thrive on secrets.

Many people avoid difficult conversations because they fear the consequences. Yet relationships often become fragile when important truths remain hidden. Openness can be painful, and secrecy has costs of its own. Secrets create distance, they prevent both people from responding to what is actually happening.

I am not suggesting that you sit your partner down and provide a detailed account of every fantasy you have entertained over the past decade. I am suggesting that if I were in your position, and I am not, I would feel an obligation to talk honestly about what is happening for me now. Your partner may feel hurt. They may feel frightened. They may decide that the relationship is no longer right for them. You may discover that the two of you want different things. There are no guarantees attached to honesty. Yet if you are going to marry, surely these are conversations worth having before the wedding rather than after it? I’m asking that as a question, it’s for you to answer, not me. Don’t you think that your partner has a right to know what questions you are wrestling with? Wouldn’t you want the same courtesy extended to you? Again these are questions for you to answer, not me. But were I in your position before I did anything or nothing about my crush, I would turn towards the relationship I already had and I would tell my partner what is going on for me. Often, speaking about a crush reduces its power but sometimes it does not. I offer no guarantees. It is merely something I have noticed over the years. And the reason I would do that because it would align with my values. You must choose your own values.

One of the challenges of adult life is developing a tolerance for uncertainty. We often want certainty before we act. We want to know whether the crush would become a great love. We want to know whether the marriage will work. We want reassurance that whichever choice we make will turn out to be the correct one. Life rarely provides that kind of certainty. What it does offer is the possibility of acting in ways that are consistent with our values and support our hopes. I see your question, not so much “Which Path do I Choose?” but more as “How do I behave when I am uncertain?”

I am also left wondering whether you have thought carefully enough about what love is. Your email focuses on attraction, longing, temptation and possibility. Those experiences are powerful, but they are only part of the picture. A long partnership is sustained by how we behave as much as by how we feel.

Loving someone involves paying attention when you would rather be distracted. It involves listening when you have heard the story before, making room for another person’s needs alongside your own, sharing responsibilities, tolerating frustrations and celebrating successes. It involves being interrupted, filling the fridge, changing the sheets, holding their hand, listening to worries, sharing joys, becoming a consoler and a cheerleader. It involves becoming so familiar with another person that sitting beside them in silence feels peaceful.

Love also asks something of us. It asks us to surrender to a commitment. By surrender, I do not mean giving up your individuality. I mean accepting the limits that every meaningful choice imposes. We become part of something larger than ourselves when we commit to another person. There is risk in that. There is also growth.

Perhaps the question before you is less about choosing between two people and more about deciding how you want to conduct yourself in the face of uncertainty. There are no guarantees in this life, but there is living honestly, treating people with respect and behaving in ways that reflect your values. Responsibility is how we respond to our circumstances, more than how we feel. Whoever you choose, choose the person who you want to be, because that person is, in the end more responsible for your happiness than anyone else.

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Hi Philippa

I’ve been in a relationship with my wife since we met in early 1993. However at the time I was infatuated by another girl I’d only had a couple of brief encounters with but due to my own timidness and not being able to remember her name hadn’t pursued. I fell into the relationship with my wife partly as a result of not wanting to be rude and hurt her feelings as she struck me as the kindest, most gentle person I’d ever met, and over time grew to love her.

I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to be what my own father was not, being faithful and trying to be a good father.

I’ve thought often of the other girl and the missed opportunity to get to know her and still harbour a sense of guilt that I didn’t explain to her why I never got in touch.

For some time I’ve been harbouring the notion of hiring a private detective to try to find her to give me an opportunity to explain. I don’t expect they’d be able to find her given the scant amount of detail I can remember. But either case might help me to move on.

I still love my wife. I did mention some of this to her some time ago but she was dismissive of the significance this has for me. Can you please advise, am I being ridiculous?

Thanks

My Reply

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Could you please do a post about finding love later in life (55+)? I’m 57, accomplished, have a wonderful friendship group and full life, emotionally aware and intentional in dating. However, recently I have had a couple 6 month relationships where, after them having acted “all in” they withdraw from what would be a more real relationship with a future (this is despite them saying that’s what they want as well and lots of early filtering, good boundaries, and clear communication from me). It’s a whirlwind in the beginning - all weekends away, fine dining, etc but when I ask for more meaningful integration and normal everyday life, they withdraw - like it all has to be heightened and the fantasy. How do I find a relationship that can live outside the “bubble”? My long time married friends think I’m crazy for not loving the constant excitement but, while I enjoy that to a point, I want a loving, reciprocal relationship that can exist in the real world too 🤷‍♀️

My reply

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Dear Philippa,

My partner and I have been together for two years, and recently moved in together. It’s the first time I’ve moved in with a partner, and I’m really happy and thankful to be with someone who I love and who makes me feel safe and cared for, and who I care for.

However, I also think that our sex life, and my feeling of desire and of being desired, has taken a nosedive. Sex has felt like a burden for a while, like something I should do -- I often find advances difficult to deal with and a little invasive, which I think more to do with me than my partner.

I also feel like I dont want this to be all of my sexual life -- I do still have crushes on other people (someone at work for example, which is entirely in my head, and sexual, not something I would want to replace what I already have). I find the thought I can’t act on similar feelings ever again depressing. I do love my partner, and I think I’d like to consider an open relationship. I feel that exploring my sexuality outside the relationship might help my feelings about sex inside the relationship, and that the safety I feel with them would help me to be more exploratory outside.

I have two worries: one is that I’m being duplicitous, and actually just trying to get the best of both worlds, or dealing with an insecurity I have about commitment by trying to escape half-heartedly. The other is how to bring this up in a way that isn’t hurtful. I don’t what it to seem like my partner isn’t enough, but also I can’t help thinking this is something I need to do.

Do you have any advice?

My reply (and their response to my reply)

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Write to me with any problem or dilemma at AskPhilippa@yahoo.com Subject to Terms and Conditions

Warning: This letter may be upsetting to read because the writer has been mistreated and has been through a lot.

Dear Philippa,

I have a strange dilemma and I don’t know what to do.

Sorry, this is a long one.

I’m in my mid-40s, a recently-divorced single mum. I have a successful career as a self-employed creative and I support myself and my 5 year-old daughter financially.

My parents are both in their 80s and are in ill health: my father has dementia & my mother suffers from multiple physical health conditions (including cancer & heart conditions). I live an hour away from my parents, in a different county.

In 2023 my father - who had been in denial about his worsening dementia for a number of years - had to be sectioned for his own & my mother’s safety. He was suffering dementia-related paranoid delusions which made him try to kill himself and my mother; and also try to “drop a bomb” off a local railway bridge onto passers-by below. At the same time my mother underwent heart surgery which went wrong, she nearly died, and was in intensive care for several weeks.

At the same time, my husband was away for work for months, so I was working; solo parenting our then 3 year-old and spending my days driving between hospitals/secure units.

All of a sudden I had to become the advocate and carer for both my parents. I visited both of them daily; organised their care and treatment; got my father out of section and into an elderly care home with a locked dementia ward near my home; and got my mother into a care home for rehabilitation near her home (an hour away). Within a month, my mother developed cancer, and I continued as her carer, driver and companion as she underwent diagnostics, treatment, surgery and recovery. Meanwhile I was also visiting my father several times a week & taking him out of the care home so he could have some time out, as he was very depressed. During this time he also suffered several strokes.

By December 2023 both parents had recovered well enough that they could return to their marital home, which was what they wanted. I did my best to support this, even though I had my reservations about the plan of my mother being my father’s carer, because I saw my role as facilitating the old age that they wanted.

Whilst all this was going on, my marriage fell apart, and I separated from my husband. It was an absolutely dreadful year. I survived by giving up alcohol; leaning heavily on my wonderful friends to support me and attending weekly therapy with a fantastic and compassionate counsellor.

Once they were both home, in 2025, mum & then dad had heart attacks in separate incidents. Mum didn’t tell me she had hers - I found out a week later. Dad was blue-lit to hospital & rushed into surgery - I wasn’t told until the next day. There have been other emergency health incidents which I have heard about through my mother’s friends - never from her, despite me begging her to contact me if she or dad were taken ill.

I live an hour away, and am now solo parenting my young child, which makes “popping over” to check on my parents’ welfare quite difficult. My mother said she didn’t want me calling every day on the phone and also refused to consider wearing one of those emergency pendants which you press when you’re taken ill. I have talked to her at length about all this, but she is determined to do things her way.

I’ve gone from being heavily involved in their lives and their care to being basically sidelined and dismissed. I’ve struggled to keep up with the whiplash effect of this, but I am coming to terms with it. Ultimately I see my job as to help facilitate the old age they want, even if I don’t approve of their decisions.

This role reversal of the parent-child dynamic has had reverberations through me in other ways, less dramatic on the surface but actually much more devastating.

Having deliberately not looked at my own childhood, as a result of this period of time I have needed to begin unpacking several things which happened to me when I was a small child.

I won’t list them all here, just the main headlines which I’m struggling with:

My father didn’t want a baby, so when my mother fell pregnant with me there was huge tension in the house. He immediately went and got a vasectomy before I was born. My parents had (and still have) a very codependent relationship, and she was afraid he would abandon her for keeping me.

When I was born, my mother devised a system where she could keep both her baby and her husband. Each day, when my father was due home from work, I was locked in a room in the house & left there until my father left for work the next day. So, in effect, I was locked away from 5pm until 8am every day. If I cried I was left to cry. If I was ill, or had a nightmare, or was hungry, or soiled my nappy, I was left until the morning.

I remember the room. It was a small box room with a mattress on the floor, a pillow & a blanket. No furniture; no toys. The only colour in the room were the bright 1980s curtains: green woods with a repeated pattern of a teddy bears’ picnic. These bears & their woodland picnic was my whole imaginative world, my only company, my childhood happy escape. I remember talking to them; and telling little stories about and with them.

I have very few memories of my childhood. A handful of snapshots only, and they are almost all… strange, lonely, unsettling somehow. I disbelieved a lot of them in an “oh this can’t have actually happened” way, only to finally face them now. They did happen. And I don’t know what to do with them.

I remember standing on the windowsill of the box room, aged maybe 2, banging on the window trying to attract the attention of passers-by in the street below because I was lonely and afraid. My parents’ reaction was an angry telling-off about the danger I had put myself in; and then to put bars on the window.

My mother laughs that my first childish sentence was “Get friends” and “you were so desperate to have friends!” as if this were a surprising and silly thing.

Once my parents went out for the evening, and a babysitter was engaged. My mother laughed at her anxiety about the fact I was locked in my room. “She insisted on sitting outside your door on a dining chair all night,” she said, “How silly!”

At weekends when my father was home, I was allowed more contact with him but I was not allowed to eat my meals in the same room as him, because he thought children eating was disgusting. I would eat on my own in the kitchen, while my parents ate in the dining room. Honestly I barely remember my father at all from before the age of 7 or 8.

We moved house when I was 4 years old, but the teddy bear curtains stayed behind. I remember being hugely distressed seeing them still in the window of my old room as we drove away to the new house. Mum reminds me of “the terrible fuss” I made on moving day about the curtains, and I’ve always laughed along - “oh what a silly child I was!” I can see now that those curtains were the only spot of light and joy I had in the room I was locked inside for 14 hours a day. They were my friends; my play world; my everything. Of course I was distressed to be leaving them behind.

My mother makes light of dozens of things like this that happened in my childhood, and I have always treated them likewise as “lighthearted family lore” but I see now they are actually quite upsetting things. When I try to talk to her about them she dismisses me saying “you were very sensitive”, and that I “would cry and cry” as if it were my childhood reactions which were the problem. It makes me very sad to hear this.

At an older age, probably about seven, I went to a friend’s house to play, I refused some cake which the friend’s mother offered me. When she came to collect me, my mother was so embarrassed by this that she sat me down at their dining table and force-fed me the cake. I remember her hands pushing the cake into my mouth as I was crying, gagging, the cake and saliva choking me and falling back out of my mouth and onto the plate. I remember feeling deeply shaken and ashamed. In fact I had re-labelled this memory in my mind: for decades I believed it was my friend’s mother who did this. It was only recently that my mother brought the incident up, and reminded me that it was she, not the friend’s mother, who tried to force-feed me the cake.

When I was 8 years old I was repeatedly raped by 2 boys aged 10 & 12 - newly-adopted children of my mother’s friend with whom I was encouraged to play, to help them “fit in” at school. Who knows what had happened to those little boys, but over the course of several play dates they repeatedly raped me, choked me, held pillows over my head while they did it. I didn’t really know what was happening but I knew it was wrong. When I told my mother what had happened she said, “well you don’t have to play with them anymore” and that was that. We never spoke of it again.

As I got older my mother used me as her confidante. She repeatedly told me many critical, disparaging, awful things about my father. He “never supports me”; he hated women and only thought they were good for sex; he had slept with prostitutes and infected her with STDs; he was cold, cruel; he was an alcoholic, a depressive (these last two were at least measurably & objectively true). At the same time she told me often (and still does) that “you are so like your father”. I felt caught between them, sad and ashamed, somehow needing to be the glue which held the broken pieces of the three of us together by being good.

As an older teenager I would say, “Please just leave him if you’re so unhappy! We can get a flat together, we’ll make it work!” but she would angrily round on me saying, “Of course not! I could never leave your father!” I have never understood this.

I had an older half-brother (from my father’s first marriage) who was 13 years older than me. I saw him a fair bit as a child, and I remember him as a quiet, gentle boy who was kind to his much-younger half-sister. He got into drugs as a teenager. When he was 23 and I was 10 he went to prison for possession of class A drugs, and our father disowned him. He and my father never spoke again.

My brother died of an overdose in 2015. He contacted us sporadically over the intervening years - the occasional birthday or Christmas card - but his life was chaotic. He developed schizophrenia; and was in and out of prison and secure psychiatric units for most of his adult life. I wanted to reply to him, but my mother deemed it best that we not write back to any cards we received. I feel so guilty that I didn’t disobey her. I wish I had kept in touch with him somehow.

I spent my life being explicitly told that I had better do things my parents’ way or I would be disowned. I believed it, it had happened to my brother, after all. “If you ever get into trouble, come to me, not your father,” my mother told me. She and I would argue in my teenage years - usually about me wanting to go out with friends when she thought I should be studying. She would wear me down by following me around the house shouting at me; bursting into my bedroom; turning on the lights after I had gone to bed, crying, “…And another thing…!”. She wore me down until it was easier to do whatever she wanted. I always ended up staying home and studying.

I never really rebelled. I did as I was told. It was too much trouble to rebel and I wanted to keep everyone happy. I was academically hot-housed by my mother, I think to fulfil her own feeling of “lost potential” - she talks often about how she was “very bright, and could have gone to Oxbridge”, but didn’t. I worked incredibly hard at school (almost giving myself a breakdown at exam times) - I got straight A*s at GCSE, straight A’s at A-level, got into Oxford University to study my BA, & left there with a 1st class Honours degree. In many ways it was only then that my own life - dictated by my own needs and my own choices - really started.

In other ways, my parents were good parents: as a child I was always fed, clothed, had a bed (or at least a mattress) to sleep on. My mother is very glamorous and chatty and sociable - everyone loves her - and my father was a respected member of the local community. I worked hard at school and did very well academically. From the outside we looked like a good, successful family. On the inside I felt like I was trapped in a lonely, confusing prison. My father avoided me entirely; my mother dominated me entirely. I had no idea who I was.

I wish in a way that things had been worse. If they had beaten me or hurt me physically, I could more easily say, “yes, that was abuse,” & feel justified in taking a definite position against it. This strange abandonment by one parent; the un-boundaried domination by the other; & a daily diet of emotional & physical neglect was so strange it was hard to label it as “bad”. It was weird & strange, but it was home.

For the first time now I see how damaging my childhood was. Thanks to my counsellor & a few close friends I have been able to articulate these memories of my childhood - and in seeing their horrified reactions I realise that what I went through wasn’t just “weird” or “strange”. It was horrible and sad.

Despite this, I know that my parents did the best they could. They themselves had horrible childhoods, replete with anger, violence, neglect and abuse. I genuinely think they did the best they could with me, and I no longer feel overwhelmingly angry with them. I feel sad for them.

My problem now is… I don’t want to keep being in touch with my parents. I truly wish they were dead. I feel so guilty saying that, but it’s true. I just wish they would die & be gone. It would be easier than this.

My mother keeps offering to look after my young daughter, which I absolutely cannot allow and it makes me upset even to consider that she might treat her in the same way she treated me as a child. I encourage the relationship between them & my daughter, but I feel very conflicted about it and I would never leave her unattended in their care.

I also live in fear of the day (surely coming any time now) when one or both of them need caring for again.

No-one outside of my close friends and my therapist know the truth about my childhood. Extended family & family friends only know us as “a good family”.

To estrange myself from my parents now, when they’re both very ill & in their old age (both are into their 80s) feels cruel. I also have no idea how I would explain it to my parents; to my young daughter; to family; to extended family friends…

I cannot talk to my parents about this. On the few occasions I’ve gently tried, my father absents himself from the room, and my mother says something like, “you’ve always been so sensitive - I’m so worried about you” and I end up having to justify myself and assuage her feelings. They don’t understand my point of view or my feelings. My father’s dementia is so bad now that he doesn’t know who I am. He has never told me he loves me or is proud of me. The heartbreaking thing is that he is much nicer to me now that he doesn’t know who I am, and I am a stranger to him.

I’m not sure what I’m asking here. I suppose I still feel overwhelmed by confusion, grief and guilt. I feel isolated & freaked out. I would be so grateful for your point of view, and that of your readers. What should I do now? How should I navigate these last few years of my parents’ lives?

Thank you so much for reading this. Thank you for listening & hearing me. That in itself is a huge help to me.

My reply

I was shocked when I read your letter.

Not because of any single incident, although there are several that are shocking enough on their own, but because of the accumulation of them, and ones you say you haven’t mentioned. The loneliness of the child in the box room. The force-feeding. The dismissal of what happened when you were sexually assaulted. The burden of being made responsible for managing your mother’s feelings and her marriage. The loss of your brother, and the pressure to accept that loss without protest. Then, years later, becoming responsible for two very ill parents while your own marriage was collapsing and you were raising a young child and working.

As I read, I found myself returning to the image of the teddy bear curtains. You describe them so vividly. It seems to me that those curtains became far more than curtains. They were companionship, comfort, imagination and escape. When you cried as you left them behind - it must have been something like, you were being made to leave your only safe place, your only friends behind. They had helped you survive. I feel so angry that how you felt was never, ever considered by your parents. It still isn’t, not really. Your father apparently just wished you didn’t exist and your mother’s priority was always your father, an automatous adult, and never you, a vulnerable baby and child.

One thing that struck me throughout your letter was how often your experience has been reinterpreted by somebody else. You were lonely and frightened and were told you were sensitive. You were distressed and were told you were difficult. You were hurt, sexually assaulted and were expected to move on. Even now, when you try to speak about your childhood, your mother responds with explanations, dismissals or concern about your “sensitive” feelings rather than curiosity about them. It’s so frustrating and lonely making to be gaslit like that.

Any feelings of shame that come from this dreadful upbringing belong to them, not you.

You weren’t beaten, no, it was more insidious than that and more subtle but just as harmful, you coped in a different way to your brother, you managed to push your upbringing away until your psyche could cope with it. He was made differently to you. I’m sorry for what happened to him and if the law was cleverer your father would be made partly responsible for his death.

I wonder whether part of what has been so painful about revisiting these memories is not only what happened, but the fact that there has never really been room for your version of events.

You write that your parents did the best they could. That may well be true. Understanding that they were shaped by their own difficult childhoods can bring compassion. But compassion does not require us to ignore the impact people have had on us. A person can be doing their best and still leave considerable damage behind them. They are responsible for that damage.

With regards to your present and future relationship with them, I wonder if you are imagining only two options: carrying on exactly as you are, or cutting contact completely.

Might there be other possibilities? Less contact. Different contact. Contact that happens on terms that feel manageable to you. Contact that recognises that your first responsibility is no longer to your parents but to yourself and to your child.

You describe living in fear that you will once again become responsible for rescuing them. Reading your letter, I found myself wondering whether the fear is not only about practical caring but about being pulled back into a role you have occupied for most of your life: the person who absorbs, manages, rescues, understands and accommodates.

You write that you wish your parents were dead. I expect many people have thoughts they are frightened to say aloud when caring for elderly parents. And parents who have never taken your feelings seriously. Who treated you with contempt and cruelty. What I heard in that sentence was not a wish to harm them but a longing for an end to an emotional struggle that has lasted almost your entire life. I think I understand it.

You also seem to be carrying a great deal of guilt. Guilt about your parents. Guilt about your brother. Guilt about wanting distance. Guilt about not wanting your child left alone with them. I wondered what would happen if, for a moment, you treated guilt not as evidence that you are doing something wrong but as evidence that you are doing something unfamiliar.

The thing about guilt and to some extent shame is that a child who is completely at the mercy of her parents is frightened because her parents are not lovingly caring for her. To feel less frightened a child will think if only I was better, this wouldn’t be happening to me. That thought makes her believe she has some control where she had none. You have done nothing wrong. Not then, not now. And if you decided to have nothing to do with either of them ever again you still would have done nothing wrong.

Your parents may never understand your experience of your childhood. Your father’s dementia may make such understanding impossible. Your mother may remain unable or unwilling to see things from your point of view. That is a painful reality to contemplate because many of us hold onto the hope that if we explain ourselves clearly enough, one day we will finally be understood by the people who held and continue to hold so much power over how we think about ourselves. They have abused that power.

But the question is not whether your parents agree with your version of events. Perhaps the question is what sort of relationship, if any, allows you to live with the greatest peace.

You ask what you should do now. I think I would begin by becoming curious about one question.

If guilt, obligation and fear of other people’s judgement were not part of the picture, what level of contact with your parents would feel right for you?

And your mother is not asking for help, she seems to be continuing to push you away. It’s a battle I’d be tempted to let her win. Let her push you away. Maybe she knows deep down, really she has no right to your help. But however awful, and they have both been really awful, I also understand you may feel attached to them. However little they deserve that attachment.

I believe every word you have written. I felt every word. It is A LOT. And your marriage also didn’t survive. You are carrying a lot. Keep talking to your friends and your counsellor. And knowing this Substack community as I do, I think they will see your version of you too.

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Dear Philippa,

My dilemma feels so trivial, and yet it impacts so much. I’m a working mum with a solid, relatively senior career, a career that pays well, is stable and socially respected. My work environment is quite hierarchical, and my ‘grade’ gets mentioned more frequently than I like, which only emphasises that others probably want it a lot more than I do. I like the security it offers, but I’ve increasingly felt disconnected from it, and felt that it really is not for me, to a point where a few years ago I had to take a career break. I simply hit the wall - the burnout felt so real. My life was a never ending juggle of being a mum, doing my best to spend time with my kids whilst also not having energy to ‘enjoy’ them; running the house & all life admin (almost all jobs at home are on me & we have no family nearby), and all that with a stressful job that drained me. We were very fortunate to be in a position for me to pause and find my balance again. My husband wholeheartedly supported me taking the break too; in fact he insisted I do it seeing how depleted and unhappy I was. I resisted quite long but gave in eventually. I feel it important to mention that he takes care of all-things-finances and all-things-car and house-maintenance, so he does his share, but the intensity and relentlessness of his responsibilities are different.

It took me a year to slow down and not feel guilty for taking a break. I’ve a very strong work ethic and started working full time while in my 1st year of university, and never stopped apart from maternity leave. I felt very out of place, restless, and really searching for identity again. So I started to look for ways to reconnect with what I enjoy.

I’ve always been interested in psychology, in nuances and complexities of human mind, our relationships and behaviours. I love reading about it, debating, searching for new perspectives. It was my guilty pleasure, my escape which really supported my sensitive nature and one of my key values which is growth, learning and connection. It supported me in my work, but I realised I wanted to be a therapist, someone working to support others in uncovering their values, understanding themselves better, trying to live a more authentic life. I had so many people, coworkers and friends appraising my people skills and empathy; many of them still seek council with me when they find challenges they need support with. This is quite far from my job - all focussed on numbers, finances, and capital. I didn’t have the courage to start a new degree (my core degree is in a completely different field, which would not allow me to use any credits), and frankly I felt too old to completely change career (I’m 45). So I found a compromise and enrolled in a diploma course in coaching, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I got my accredited qualification, but the course is now finished, and it left me with wanting more and probably feeling even stronger about the counselling part. I reached the end of my career break too, so I returned to my old job, which - again - offered security, but nothing beyond that.

I can’t help but feel like I failed myself in trying to find a way of feeling a bit more fulfilled in (work) life. I am only 45 after all, and yet I feel like it’s too late for me to make big changes. I fear I will end up hitting the same wall very soon, because really I have made a full circle and returned to what felt safe, familiar and ‘stable’. I reduced my working hours so at least there is some capacity carved out to still be there for my kids and keep their afterschool care to minimum, but it really feels like ‘my stuff’ got packed up in a box up and placed neatly on the shelf, again. Why going after what I feel I am born to be doing feels so unattainable? It’s costly, it’ll take many years of study (and I never cut corners, I either do it properly or don’t do it at all), so I feel this ship has sailed for me. And it makes me sad, defeated almost. My coaching co-students all set up their businesses, and found ways to source clients to work with. I framed my diploma, and went back to familiar, soul crushing job, which I’m good at and do diligently, but it gives me no joy and I have no interest in.

How do I navigate and unpick all this? How do I model to my kids that we should do what we love and it’s never too late, when I don’t believe it for myself? Is it right that I’ve given up already?

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Dear Philippa,

I have a problem I don’t feel able to discuss with anyone, because it’s largely my fault and would be very destructive if my friends or family found out.

My husband and I are both in our early 40s and we’ve had an incredibly stressful few years. I think we’ve been in ‘survival mode’ for a long time and we’re no longer physically intimate - he suffers from erectile dysfunction, which (as much as I know it’s not necessarily about me) makes me feel lonely and unattractive. Nonetheless, we’re good friends who care about each other and share three gorgeous children. We’ve been together 13 years.

I didn’t think too much about it until recently, because the rest of my life was so full-on. Then, late last year, I got chatting to a guy at a work-related function and gave him my number - genuinely, for totally innocent reasons. We started texting and he seemed likeable and funny, as much as I wasn’t quite sure what he wanted.

That soon became clear though. The conversation became flirtatious, then sexually explicit. He explained that he had a great relationship with his wife but wanted to try new things - group sex, parties etc - which she wasn’t keen on. They’d discussed it and she said it was fine, as long as it didn’t affect the marriage. Like us, they have two kids.

My husband would never have agreed to anything like that, but I liked the idea of recapturing my adventurous youth. We were going through a particularly difficult patch in our relationship and I was actually quite angry with him, so I didn’t even feel bad about it.

By this point, I thought of this guy as a pretty good friend. We seemed well-aligned in terms of interests, taste and sense of humour and, partly because I hadn’t thought of him as a potential mate, I was very relaxed around him. So I agreed to embark on a purely sexual affair, with no expectations of exclusivity or commitment.

He became a pleasant distraction from my various day-to-day stresses. In fact, he made me happy in a very uncomplicated way, which was something I hadn’t felt for a long time. We spent one evening together, had sex and I really enjoyed it. He’s still the only person I’ve had sex with in my 40s.

For about a week afterward, everything seemed fine. Then he started making excuses not to communicate, until it was clear that he just wanted me to go away. When I brought it up, he told me he ‘didn’t want to hurt anyone.’ We agreed to stop speaking - this was a few months ago and I haven’t heard from him since.

Part of me thinks I probably deserve it, but I am so hurt by the whole thing. He threw me away, like I was nothing.

The good news is that - because it was so out of character - the affair made me realise how unhappy I was in my marriage. We’re now having couples’ therapy and we’re getting on better than we have in a long time. I’m still hoping we can eventually rebuild our sexual relationship. I still don’t really feel guilty about what I did, but I do feel guilty about not feeling guilty, if you see what I mean.

Sadly, I still think about my affair partner every day. I’ve done all the ‘right’ things - deleted his number and any reminders etc, removed him from social media. How can I move on from this experience?

Many thanks,

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Hi Philippa, I'm stuck with a dilemma that I can't see my way around. I have been with my husband for seven years and married to him for two. When we met, I was at the tail-end of recovering from a severe eating disorder and was moving away from my emotionally hurtful and unempathetic family for the first time. I had never had a proper relationship or intimacy. I was an introverted teenager both in high school and university where those first experiences usually happen. My upbringing and social experiences (or lack thereof) conditioned me to believe that I was incapable of inspiring love, warmth, or attraction in anyone. I came to believe that love would always be conditional, because there was something fundamentally wrong with me. When I met my partner, I was so happy to find what I felt I had been craving and not getting my whole life: someone who could express affection, warmth, and desire for me, and be proud to call me theirs. For the first time, someone didn't treat loving me as an obligation or homework. I was the happiest I had ever been and finally felt seen, wanted, and loved. More importantly, I found immense security and reassurance in someone expressing all of those things to me and letting me know I was valued. I began to believe that maybe I wasn't unloveable after all. But as time went on, my partner reverted to what I now realise is his actual personality: aloof, extremely pragmatic, and perhaps unusually unemotional and distant. I think what I perceived in him as warmth and expressiveness in the beginning was just the usual excitement at being in a new relationship. For the past few years, I have been treated like an inevitability or furniture by my partner: he never seems excited by me anymore, and doesn't seem capable of expressing genuine enthusiasm for any part of our life together. I am always the one planning holidays and evenings out together, and putting thought into how I look. I was the one asked to move in together and I was the one who proposed. I feel like I'm always being eager to please and get closer, while he always pulls away. I crave romance and keep trying to create it, but he never meets me halfway. What's worse is that my husband keeps saying that he loves me, and refuses to listen when I explain that I need to have that love expressed if I'm to feel safe and secure. He always falls back on logic and doesn't seem to want to understand my emotional pain; he treats it as childish. He seems bored and unhappy, but doesn't seem to want to change our situation or leave me, either. Any time ending our relationship has come up, he's the one who insists we keep going. I feel indescribably hurt and betrayed, because I feel like I'm back in a world without warmth or passion. I feel like it hurts even more because I briefly got to enjoy those things before I lost them again. I feel like my partner's not pulling his weight and that he thinks functional relationships just happen by magic. I now know that I can't be happy without a warm, unembarrassed kind of love: a kind of love where I'm the centre of someone's universe and made to feel special every day. Maybe that's deeply selfish, but I'm terrified of going through my whole life without it. We have friend couples who have this kind of relationship I crave. Watching them, I feel like a thirsty person for whom a glass of water is always visible but just out of reach. We're at the stage now of seeing a marriage therapist, and I'm increasingly tempted to end the marriage and seek out a partner who can provide that kind of expressiveness and emotional intelligence. On the one hand, I'm scared of resigning myself to a lifetime of never feeling fully loved. But, I'm also afraid that I'm about to throw away a comfortable marriage and put myself through extreme upheaval only to find that my notion of real love is idealised and doesn't exist; or worse, that it does but I'm incapable of earning it. I feel like I have a choice between two equally terrifying options, and I feel miserable, despondent, and trapped every day. What should I do? Is there a right choice?

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I wonder whether part of what is happening here is that you are asking your husband to continue providing the intensity that belongs more naturally to the beginning of a relationship than to the middle of one.

Early love often feels consuming because it is fuelled by discovery, uncertainty, projection and longing. We are flooded by attention and possibility. Then, if the relationship survives, something else usually begins to happen. Loves becomes woven into ordinary life. The excitement of being chosen can gradually become the quieter experience of being accompanied.

That quieter stage can feel disappointing if what we most need from love is reassurance that we are wanted.

Reading your letter, I was very aware of how deprived of warmth and affirmation you felt growing up. You describe believing there was something fundamentally wrong with you and that love would always be conditional. Then you met your husband and suddenly experienced desire, attention, affection and emotional safety. I can understand how this felt transformative. But I wonder whether part of the panic now comes from feeling that as the intensity has quietened a bit, the old terror of being emotionally abandoned has returned.

Your husband says he loves you. I wonder whether the difficulty is here is because perhaps part of you still equates love with emotional intensity and visible enthusiasm, you can’t believe him when the first flush of infatuation has passed. For some people love is expressed through excitement, romance and constant verbal reassurance. For others it is expressed through staying, reliability, shared routines and continuing commitment. Neither style is morally superior, though mismatches between them can feel painful.

And because this is your first long relationship, you may not yet have experienced the stage where couples stop trying to make every interaction special and instead begin sharing ordinary life together. Sometimes people mistake this transition for the death of love when actually it is the movement from infatuation into companionship.

You seem to long for emotional expressiveness and romance and it is important that your husband tries to understand that rather than dismissing it. Equally, I think it may help if you become curious about whether no amount of reassurance from him could ever fully settle the deeper fear that you are not lovable enough unless constantly emotionally reflected back to yourself. This is what concerns me about your case.

I also noticed that you compare your relationship to other couples. Be careful with this. We rarely know what exists underneath another couple’s presentation. Some relationships that appear passionate externally are brittle privately. Others that look undramatic from the outside contain depth and loyalty.

It sounds hopeful to me that your husband wants to stay and that you are both attending couples therapy. Perhaps this is less about deciding whether the marriage is right or wrong and more about understanding the emotional dance between you: your reaching for reassurance; his retreat into pragmatism; your fear that love is vanishing; his feeling that he is being asked to perform emotions in a way that does not come naturally to him. In relationships there is something called “The dance of Intimacy” it’s about the more one partner chases, the more the other retreats, then the chasing partner gets fed up and gives up, then the retreating partner eventually becomes the chasing partner.

And I wonder too whether your longing to leave and find another partner may partly contain the fantasy of returning to that first intoxicating stage of love again. But if you did find another relationship, eventually that one too would leave the realm of infatuation and enter ordinary life.

The question may not be “Does perfect love exist?” so much as “What kind of love can sustain an ordinary life, and what wounds and expectations do both of us bring into it?” Hopefully the couples counselling will help you understand your marriage in different ways.

Types and Stages of Couple Love but not necessarily in this order:

1. Infatuation: the intoxication of being chosen and desired.

2. Idealisation: imagining the other person will heal old wounds or complete something missing in us.

3. Reality: discovering they are an ordinary flawed human being, not a fantasy. And they discover the same about us.

4. Attachment: building routines, trust, shared history and emotional dependence.

5. Friction: negotiating differences, disappointment, power, closeness and distance.

6. Companionship: love becomes more about mutual recognition, humour, caring, tenderness and surviving ordinary life together.

7. Legacy: shared memories, shared language, shared visions, shared history but retained individual viewpoints.

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I’m going on BBC Radio Four’s Free Thinking programme soon. Subject: responsibility. So I thought I’d better write something to clarify my thoughts about responsibility to give myself a chance of being able to articulate what I feel about the subject.

There is a version of modern life that encourages us to think of ourselves as permanently wronged. Sometimes this is justified. People are betrayed, neglected, abused, discriminated against, unlucky. Terrible things happen and some people are handed far heavier burdens than others. Acknowledging suffering is not self indulgence, it is often the beginning of healing. But there is a difference between recognising what has happened to us and building our identity around it.

We psychotherapists sometimes talk about an “external locus of control”, meaning the belief that our lives are largely directed by forces outside ourselves: fate, bad luck, difficult parents, bad bosses, manipulative lovers, governments, algorithms, economic conditions, other people’s choices. To pretend those things don’t influence us would be absurd. Yet if we locate all power outside ourselves, we can end up feeling as though we are merely passengers in our own lives, waiting for rescue, fairness, recognition or revenge. I’ve been known to say to a client or people writing into my Substack: when are you going to get into the driving seat of your own life? People have dreams about driving and whether they can steer or not. Someone I know had a recurring dream he called, “the handlebars of life.”

When people feel trapped in this way, in the back seat, to continue with the metaphor, they often become preoccupied with blame. The mind circles endlessly around who caused the damage and who should apologise for it. Sometimes blame is entirely accurate. But even justified blame can become a place of psychological residence. Energy that might once have gone into adaptation, rebuilding or risk taking is redirected into prosecuting a case. We begin collecting evidence for our own powerlessness.

There can also be rewards for inhabiting this position, because sympathy is soothing, low expectations can feel protective. If we convince ourselves that nothing can change, we are spared the terror of trying and failing. This is known as “learnt helplessness”, a state in which repeated disappointments teach us to stop acting on our own behalf because we no longer believe our actions matter. The tragedy is that the less agency we practise, the weaker it becomes. Like a neglected muscle, it starts to waste away.

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I sometimes notice this in therapy when people speak as though their feelings arrive from nowhere and dictate behaviour entirely. “He made me angry.” “She ruined my confidence.” “My childhood destroyed my ability to trust.” There may be truth in all these statements, but they can conceal another truth too: that between what happens to us and what we do next, there is a space. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, writing after surviving concentration camps, described this space as the place where our freedom lives. Between stimulus and response, he argued, there is the possibility of choice. Response - ability!

Choice does not mean omnipotence. We cannot choose not to feel grief after loss, fear after trauma or hurt after betrayal. We cannot think ourselves out of structural injustice or illness. But we can influence what we do with our experiences. Responsibility, in its most useful sense, is not about blame or moral superiority. It is about response. The ability to respond.

An internal locus of control does not mean believing we can dominate every outcome. It means understanding that our actions, habits, interpretations and decisions exert influence over the shape of our lives. It is the difference between asking, “Whose fault is this?” and “What can I do now?” One question keeps us fixed to the scene of injury but the other begins movement.

Some of us were raised in environments where initiative was punished, confidence mocked or dependency encouraged. Others were protected so thoroughly that they never developed much tolerance for frustration or failure. Responsibility can feel frightening because it asks us to relinquish fantasies: the fantasy that someone else will eventually repair everything for us, the fantasy that certainty exists, the fantasy that safety lies in never risking change.

Yet responsibility is tied to freedom. The more responsibility we take for our responses, the more authorship we experience over our own lives. This is not the same as becoming harsh with ourselves. In fact, excessive self blame is often just another form of self sabotage. Responsibility is more practical than that. It’s more: this is where I am, this is what happened, and now I must decide what I am going to do with it.

People sometimes fear that moving away from a victim identity means minimising suffering. I think the opposite is true. When we are able to acknowledge pain without making it the organising principle of our personality, suffering becomes something we can work with rather than something we must endlessly prove. We stop waiting for life to become fair before participating in it.

Perhaps maturity involves recognising two apparently contradictory truths at once: we are shaped by what has happened to us, and we are not only what has happened to us.

Now, what else should I be aware of by Tuesday when the program is being recorded?

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Dear Philippa

I feel devastated.

I met my husband at university and we have been together for 35 years.

For the first 30 plus years we were, on the whole, genuinely happy together. My husband is funny, intelligent, curious, attractive, kind and a good person. We have two adult children who are happy, well adjusted, have purpose in life and meaningful relationships.

I have a lot of very supportive, kind friends- middle aged women know how to show up. I have also spoken to a counsellor for periods of time over the past six years.

I was diagnosed with primary breast cancer. I had surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy - mostly during the pandemic. My husband and children were all wfh and my husband was practically and emotionally supportive. Although I would have preferred him to have spent more time lying in bed with me watching Selling Sunset rather than making shepherd’s pies.

I went back to work toward the end of 2020 (I worked as an accountant in industry before I had children, I went back part time after my first son, then had five years off after my second son. When my younger son started reception I got a part time job l. This worked well for us as a family. When I went on maternity leave with my eldest son I earned more than my husband. I don’t regret staying home with the kids.

I slowly recovered, got on with my life and started to feel optimistic that the cancer wouldn’t return. In fact the cancer had given me a new appreciation and gratitude for life and I found myself taking more pleasure out of everyday activities.

Post pandemic my husband became increasingly senior at work. His job became all consuming.

My breast cancer surgeon did annual breast cancer blood marker tests along side my annual mammogram.

December 2023 the marker was raised. I then spent an absolutely torturous 11 months having blood tests and scans until in November 2024 a scan revealed the breast cancer had metastasised to my liver. Those eleven months sent me nearly insane. My husband kept saying it wasn’t coming back (which he described as thinking positive) when the science was obviously indicating otherwise. I felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall. It was actually a relief when the oncologist told me they’d found it.

To be honest though, our relationship had already started to deteriorate between 2021 and December 23. My husband’s career was his top priority. We also lost his mother to breast cancer in early 2022. We hadn’t been able to see her as often as we would have liked during the pandemic and were too detached from her care. Watching her die was horrendous. I think that we are overly protected from the reality of death. My husband was still working while visiting his mother on the palliative care ward. He will not accept any criticism of his work ethic. Any criticism is met with claims that his family, friends and I do not understand the demands of his job.

The treatment for my primary breast cancer had also negatively affected our sex life. I hated how my body looked post surgery and the chemo and hormone drugs plunged me immediately into menopause.

I feel that my husband saw me differently post cancer. As a failure. A failure for getting cancer, a failure for letting it cause me sadness, anxiety and fear, a failure for not bouncing back. A failure for working part time and not having the wizzy career I used to have. He would deny this. He says this is how I feel about myself.

Anyway, fortunately the cancer was in one place in my liver. I had surgery to cut it out. Eighteen months later there is no evidence that it has returned. I take chemo tablets and hormone drugs. To look at me you would not know that I’m being treated for cancer. I’m sure that you understand, that while the cancer is now treatable, it is not curable. I’m in a place now where I’m thinking, like Chris Hoy, of the best case scenario- that I can live with it for some years.

I took the minimum amount of time off work post surgery on my liver. This was my choice not my employer’s. I wanted to be ‘normal’ again. Throughout all my treatment, work had been a positive, fun, safe place that was a good distraction. However things at work slowly deteriorated when I went back. I fell out with a married colleague who was having an affair with another married colleague. They both have young families and the male colleague had a history of flings with women at work. This is not like me at all, I still don’t understand why it bothered me so much. I almost became obsessed with it. I recognise it was unhealthy. Was I jealous? Did it feed into my fears that my husband could do ‘better’ than me? A woman with two breasts? I’ve never fallen out with people at work. I’m still friends with girls I went to school with and women I worked with in the 90s.

Work became so awful that I handed in my notice and left early this year. (I appreciate it’s a privilege to be able to do this). I wrote a bucket list (not in a morbid way, in a realistic way that my health/treatment could change at any point and then I wouldn’t be able to do these things). I’m writing this email from a hotel in Greece. I’m currently Greek island hopping solo. My husband couldn’t/wouldn’t take the time off work.

I think that my husband is going to leave me. I believe he is depressed. I recognise that he has been through a lot. My health, the pressure of his job, losing his mum, having to provide more support to his dad. I’ve suggested that he speak to the GP and/or a counsellor - he says he can sort it out himself. I’ve asked whether we can talk to a relationship counsellor together - he said no.

He stopped telling me he loved me a year or so ago. He offers me no physical affection or touch (hand holding and hugs) and hasn’t for probably 18 months. I’ve asked whether he is leaving me, whether he loves me and he won’t answer. I don’t want him to stay with me just because I’m being treated for cancer. I am once again full of sadness and fear - this time fear that I will be alone and will die alone. He says that he hasn’t met anyone else and I tend to believe him.

I acknowledge I have spent a lot of the past 6 years wrapped up in myself, sad, depressed and anxious, but not all of it. Both times I did recover physically and mentally.

I’m not even sure how I feel about him anymore. I love the old him, I love him as part of our family unit. I’m not sure that I even recognise him now. He has closed down and shut me out. I feel like his behaviour (as in lack of love, affection and confirmation of our relationship) toward me is cruel. I feel that things got too hard and I changed and he’s abandoning me. I feel lonely, vulnerable, exhausted and sad.

As I read this back I think it is obvious that he has fallen out of love with me. I’d like to think it isn’t too late to work together on our relationship and his mental well-being but I can’t break through his ‘shell’. What should I do?

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Dear Philippa

Aged 17 I went to University and met a boy, we became close very quickly and soon we were completely and utterly devoted to each other. We did everything together – moved in together, ate together, studied together, went to the library together, we were rarely apart. We socialised as part of a larger group but it was always me and him, starry eyed and glued together – complete co-dependency. We even got married as soon as we graduated, we were so sure it was me and him 4ever and we didn’t care what anybody said, we were loves young dream. Anyway, the bubble burst and after only a couple of years of marriage we divorced. Once out in the big wide world of having to work and not be slovenly students anymore, it was clear we had needed each other once as an emotional crutch but we no longer did and all the hopeless devotion was actually quite sickening and childish.

So I moved on I grew up, had a nice few years as an independent woman then met another man and we have been married 20 years, all good (no hopeless devotion thank God).

Anyway, fast forward to now and my youngest daughter is in her final year of school and has had a boyfriend for about a year. Again devotion, hopelessly in love etc. They do the same subjects at school and even when she is at home she is usually messaging or talking to him on her phone constantly. It is now coming to the time to make decisions for her future – where and what does she want to go and study in further education? She is umming and ahhing and all because (I am certain) she is waiting to see what the boyfriend wants to do. She thinks they can continue on and go study together. I am so overwhelmed, she is going to make the same mistake I did. I look back with regret at my time at uni. I could have done so much more, met more people, taken up more opportunities, got better results even if I hadn’t spent all my time mooching round dopily “in love”. I can’t believe my daughter is basing her entire future on the decisions of a boy in the same stupid way that I did. Of course any attempt to explain to her is met with the same contempt I would have given anyone trying to explain to me the foolishness of it all back in the day. How can I get through this love blindness?

Many thanks,

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