My elderly parents recently announced that they have disinherited me. Everything goes to my brother and his wealthy wife and children. I’m in my thirties, single, living in a rented flat and unlikely to have children. They’ve given me no reason. My brother’s view is: “Relax, our parents are mad. Whatever they’ve decided, it’ll be 50-50 between us.” However, his wife has expressed a fondness for their house, and my guess is that I won’t see anything. My relationship with my parents is back to “normal” — which means we haven’t discussed the will. My parents are ageing rapidly, and my brother lives abroad. I can’t foresee him or his wife doing anything for them. I get the impression they expect me to take on their care single-handed, while leaving my brother a small fortune. They seem to expect me not to mind about being disinherited. I have suffered from depression in the past, and all my parents do if I show negative emotion is to inform me that I am mental. Their mental-health records are way longer than mine, incidentally. I need a practical solution to the problem. How do I get my parents to change their mind and avoid the elder care?

I’m not sure this is about money at all. I think it’s about feeling abandoned emotionally. In your longer letter, your parents do sound — as your brother says — rather mad. You describe how your father, who is constantly redecorating his house, gave you a wrapped-up box of “some of our lovely things for your flat”, which you later discovered to contain a used, broken lavatory seat. That would be funny if it did not make you so sad.

Eccentric might be a kinder word for your parents, but, unfortunately, eccentricity does not make for great parenting. That, I think, is what the “practical solutions” you crave are all about. It is not so much that you want your parents to change their minds about giving you their money. You want them to change their minds and give you the love and attention you crave. On top of that, it may be that you resent caring for them because they have never cared very well for you.

I might be wrong, of course, but there’s such a strong note of self-pity and resentment in your letter that you sound more like an abandoned child than a woman in her thirties. Please don’t take that badly. There’s a lost child in all of us. I feel great empathy for you, because I believe you may be suffering from a failure of care on your parents’ part — hence your inclination to depression and helpless negativity.

I am not sure what you mean by your parents having mental-health records “way longer” than yours, but I suspect that if they have struggled emotionally, they have never been able to give you the full attention and care every child needs when they are growing up. Parents who are unable to put the needs of their child before their own — for whatever reason — may bring up a child who is emotionally needy and prone to depression. If, on top of that, you have inherited depressive tendencies (depression does have a genetic liability), then you are unlikely to be able to see them clearly as elderly people to be pitied — and loved. Instead, they have become people who are deliberately trying to withhold their attention and affection, and the money has simply become a symbol of that.

In purely practical terms, if your parents are ageing so rapidly that they will soon need full-time care, and they have sufficient funds themselves, the state will expect them to pay. So I doubt there’ll be much money left. On top of that, your brother has said he will split whatever there is with you. In other words, you seem to be worrying over a problem that hasn’t yet happened, and may never happen. Another harsh reality is that this is their money, not yours. Stop thinking it belongs to you by right. In particular, stop believing it’s going to bail you out. That keeps you living in some mythical future, not making plans for the present and your own financial independence.

If this isn’t, at heart, about money, and what you’re actually asking is how you can get your parents to give you the love and attention you so badly crave, the harsh answer is that you may never be able to. You have to accept them as they are and stop expecting them to change. If they are as eccentric and self-involved as you make them sound, they are never going to. Take the focus off them and put it on you. Help yourself. I suspect, because your viewpoint is so remorselessly negative and self-absorbed, that you may still be suffering from depression. Your resentment against your parents as well as against your brother (who sounds very sane and nice) and his “wealthy wife” is so symptomatic of the depressive’s attitude of “poor me, everyone’s against me” — I suffer from depression periodically, so I know it well — that it might be useful if you got help from a good therapist. Then, perhaps, you could get some emotional perspective on your parents, rather than taking their eccentricities so personally. You might even, one day, laugh at the gift of a broken loo seat.

If you have a relationship question for Sally Brampton, e-mail sally.brampton@sundaytimes.co.uk. In case of publication, names willbe withheld. We’re sorry, but Sally cannot answer every letter personally

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