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Dear Eric: My older sister, with whom I’ve never been close, is in her 80s and highly dysfunctional with money and life. She can’t make ends meet despite being a real estate agent and a substitute teacher.

I have “loan papers” she signed years back promising to pay me/us back, which never happened. Finally, I put a boundary on us to only pay her rent.

My husband fears if we don’t, she’ll be homeless, which is not what we want at all. We are financially stable and aren’t hurting financially, just emotionally as I feel I’m being used and abused.

I recently learned she borrows lesser amounts of money from my brother and pays him back. Any advice on how to emotionally, if not financially, disengage from her? No one else in the family can or will help her.

– Upset Sister

Dear Sister: One solution may be to release the expectation of payback and focus on the emotional wound. Not that she shouldn’t pay you back – she should. But it sounds like her problems with money management are also communicating that she doesn’t care about the help you’re giving or is taking that help for granted. That may make the debt feel even bigger, for both of you.

Try to have a direct conversation about this arrangement. You may want to start by stating that your financial support isn’t contingent on the outcome of this conversation. Tell her how you’ve felt, using “I” statements, and ask if she understands where you’re coming from. Tell her how you’d like to feel and how you’d like her to play a part in that, be it by simply acknowledging your help or by making strides to be a better steward of her money.

It also sounds like she needs a more extreme intervention. That may not be something you want to take on. But consider financial counseling services for older adults or even conservatorship to help prevent her from mismanaging her money and relieve you of the worry you’ll have to clean up a mess for her.

Dear Eric: One of my sisters and I share a mutual friend. My sister knew her from work. When I moved to a different home, my sister’s friend lived on our new street and came over with a gift and introduced herself. Since that point, I had neighborhood brunches to get to know people. From there, my sister’s friend/my neighbor went out to happy hour with our husbands occasionally.

The mutual friend told my sister we all were going out. My sister and friend had never gone out; they’d only exercised together. My sister then texted me immediately and asked if we all could go out.

I asked the friend to please keep my business to herself and kindly set boundaries with my sister. For context, once I did something with my niece, my niece’s children and my husband. My sister said I should have invited her, too.

Since this time my sister has ghosted me. I did ask her to go for a walk and sent a happy Mother's Day message, both with no response. I did ask her why she just didn't ask her friend about going out.

From what I have read, advice says you cannot force communication and that I offered the olive branch and must move on. I had a friend that cut me off because I couldn't attend her mom’s funeral. I feel there is a lot of this today.

I am tired and embarrassed but mostly hurt. Please advise.

– Ghosted Sister

Dear Sister: Your sister’s actions suggest she has a deep need to feel included that’s not being met. But from your telling, she may be trying to satisfy that need in the wrong way, or at least with the wrong people. Your decision to set a boundary and maintain the friendship with your neighbor without her suggests that her request struck a deeper chord and this isn’t just about a single instance.

From your letter, you have a desire to make amends, but what you feel you should make amends for and what she wants may not align. It’s reasonable that you’d make friendships independent of your sister, especially with a neighbor. But there’s also a world where it would have been easiest to just have a group hangout including your sister.

You don’t need to apologize for not doing that, but perhaps a good next step would be writing a letter acknowledging the way she feels and asking how, if at all, she’d like your relationship to change. As you wrote to me, you can’t force her to respond, and you may need to just let time heal this for her. But by naming what you interpret as the problem, you could help her to separate her feelings from the facts.

(Send questions to R. Eric Thomas at eric@askingeric.com or P.O. Box 22474, Philadelphia, PA 19110. Follow him on Instagram and sign up for his weekly newsletter at rericthomas.com.)

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