Liz, you've done everything you can do and then some. Please don't take it personally! Sounds to me like this woman is, as you said, very used to being in charge and being able to control her life and environment, which now of course includes a newborn. I've found over many years of working with all kinds of women that these women are among the hardest to "satisfy", and I find it very frustrating too. They are the ones most likely to consult an LC in the first place (not a bad thing!), but also tend to have read a lot and to have consulted a variety of "experts". Also not a bad thing, but it seems to me that this often makes it harder on the women themselves - not to mention their babies and their LCs!; they approach raising the baby the same way they would approach a big new project at work, and, as we all know, babies don't operate that way! Many of the things that work well in the corporate world just don't prepare you well for nurturing a newborn. In the "real world", one is rewarded for being able to control a situation by use of logic, rationality, planning skills, and intellectual preparation. Well, babies don't know that - they operate totally on the immediate, the instictive and the spontaneous, and there's absolutely no reasoning with them or trying to control them. They're just there, needing what they need right then, and there's not much you can do about it. Must be frustrating to a person used to operating in a different mode entirely! (I wouldn't know, since I'm kind of a big baby myself!) Anyway, I've learned to not let this kind of thing bother me so much. The first thing I learned as a brand new nurse was to offer myself with a kind of humility (not easy - I'm not a humble kind of girl), to just kind of give myself over to what my patient (or client) needed and to try to not intrude myself much into that place. I just try to remind myself "it's not about me"; sometimes it's not easy, but I still work at it all the time, and I find that it does keep me from brooding over the question of "why didn't she just listen to me and do what I told her?". (I get lots of practice - Diane W. is the only other LC in private practice in our town!) Cathy Bargar RN IBCLC Ithaca NY *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html