Happy endings: our advice columnist on the columns that helped change people’s lives

Annalisa Barbieri has been helping Guardian readers with their personal problems since 2008. Here she shares some of her favourite bits of feedback

We all hope that any advice we give is taken and enriches someone’s life. As someone who gives advice every week in these pages, I sometimes (but not as often as I would like) get to hear what happened next. When the reader writes back to say that my reply was helpful and how it has changed their life, even in a small way, it makes me feel very happy. Who doesn’t like to make a positive difference?

Some years ago, a reader, a mother, wrote in to say that she had recently found herself in a difficult relationship. She had been with her boyfriend for two years, after separating from her son’s father. Although the reader and her boyfriend loved each other very much, she said, and there were seemingly many good parts of their relationship, her partner had a hot temper and could be verbally very aggressive and harsh with her little boy, who was only six. The reader and her partner were making plans to move in together. Her son had said he didn’t want this to happen. A brave boy. What should she do, she asked? My advice was to listen to her son and to reconsider the relationship and read up about abusive relationships, which is what I feared hers was, if not already, then certainly becoming.