I am getting phone calls from an inmate at the county correctional facility. I think it might be the young schizophrenic woman I try to avoid talking with who keeps calling me. I always do healing for her, as you know, but don’t want personal interactions. I can’t take personal responsibility for her welfare given her volatile mental state. Am I failing her in not following up with her calls?

You will be relieved to know we do not consider this your duty. You have gone out of your way to help this unfortunate woman and continue to answer her entreaties in the way most appropriate, requesting healing work on her behalf, but at arm's-length, so as not to become more deeply intertwined. She is reaching out to you because we are impulsing her at times to do so. That is because we see the value of your work more than you do and want to honor your intention to help because we know it is making a difference. That is not apparent yet, but building towards that eventuality. That does not mean you need to deal with her legal issues. Like all adversity, this will be a learning experience, if a painful one. Some things must be learned the hard way before people take more careful steps to avoid getting into trouble. Her state of mind works against her and that is often her undoing, but mostly because she is targeted relentlessly, and that just gets the better of her and is not her failing personally. The same is true here of this unfortunate incarceration. It was arranged to happen to trigger her in ways she would make a misstep and could not save herself. But this is a common strategy, to so torment the targeted individual they become unstable and act through emotion and at times, irrationally. If there is an imbalance being created in the thinking and exhibiting delusional behavior, it will typically justify confinement in one type of facility or another. The fact that is orchestrated to happen does not save the person because no one will understand or appreciate that, because they will not believe her account of what has happened. This is so typical of mentally ill people, that no one will really listen to them and take anything in particular seriously, except what they want to hear.