9-month-old wisdom from a dear friend. It's working.

"However aggravating [this person] may be, I think [this person] is also your teacher about learning to constrain, contain, and purify your energy of relating. You get so exhausted from giving, but you also resist a teacher who essentially says, 'Stop giving. I don't want all that.' And that's part of the reason you're in a struggle with someone whose energetic style is so different; you have a hard time learning this lesson on your own, so you unconsciously turn to someone who enforces it on you. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to ACCEPT it: accept the limits and constraints and use them to learn how to modulate your giving. You know how hard this is, because you grew up believing you could only get what you needed by giving so much. You need to learn to contain your energy so that you become more of a magnet to people (and to money, for that matter) -- drawing in energy by an invisible force of attraction, and using energy drawn to you to nourish your naturally generous nature."