A few years ago, a coach asked me a very simple question. "What do you want?" I'm a psychologist. I ask people questions for a living. And I sat there with absolutely nothing.

A reader wrote to me last week. She's doing the work, properly doing it. Boundaries created, old roles being questioned, the whole deprogramming process in motion. (Woo hoo!) And the people around her are not loving it.

Grief for every scrap I have spent my life accepting and calling enough. Scraps of love. Scraps of belonging. Scraps of kindness. Scraps of tolerance - being tolerated, rather than wanted, and somehow filing that under fine. Scraps of money, taken and made to stretch, while telling myself I was being sensible rather than small. Scraps of scraps, if that makes sense. The scrap of the scrap. That's how deep the habit goes.