I’ll tell you a story that I often encounter. I regularly encounter similar manifestations of psychological problems; they almost always have a similar beginning. And the completion depends on how successful the therapy was. So - a woman of about fifty years old, Irina. (Permission for publication has been received) There is a family, two children. Despite two higher educations, Irina was a housewife from the age of 23. She cooked, cleaned, raised her son first, then her daughter was born. When she turned 42, her husband suddenly left her - the support of the family, a strong businessman, thanks to whom neither the children nor she herself needed anything all these years. She had to get a job, since alimony from the official income of a successful businessman was miserable. And then it turned out that the woman had problems not only with her husband. The son, who soon graduated from university, did not work. He continued to live with his mother, eat her food, and play games. A son with a good education, an excellent student, for whom there was so much hope, became rude, began not to ask, but to demand money for growing needs. Actually, it was because of problems with her son that Irina came to me. What to do? How to re-educate the “child” who is already 26 years old? What conclusions can be drawn from the above? I would draw one main thing: ✅ you cannot completely dissolve in the people next to you, no matter how close they are. You always need to feel your own self, to separate yourself from others.❗So in this case, we did not focus our efforts on re-educating our son or returning our husband. We worked to make Ira realize that she was not responsible for either one or the other. The result was that she was able to exchange her two-room apartment for two one-room apartments, leaving her son in one, and moving into the second with her daughter ( my daughter, by the way, is a great girl and, as they say, “mom’s assistant”). Irina found the strength to make new acquaintances and realized that she could build her own happiness in life. She began to meet men, and it turned out that at her age it was possible to find a worthy candidate for the role of a spouse. Awareness is the most important weapon of any psychologist. We cannot make decisions for the client or outline a plan of action for him. But we help to understand the problem, to see ourselves and the people around us. And based on the knowledge gained, the client himself makes a decision: to change something or leave it as is. Moreover, even the decision to leave the situation unchanged, if it was realized, will be correct from a psychological point of view.