The challenge is that there is emotional baggage, but the contents of the baggage is unknown to LW. LW has created a nice circular structure for herself. I suspect her non-payment of loans may have to do with some core resentment over having had to contract the loans in the first place; if LW had the money her dad spent on booze, she probably could have been privately funded. It's a hypothesis, but it may be that every time LW reaches for the checkbook to start the process of payment, it may be a hostile reminder that her family of origin was toxic, laden with a booze-saturated dad and an enabling mom.

I agree with several other writers that hiring a pro is a considered response. It does several things:

It gets an objective, unemotional "voice" involved, one who can speak to what can, and what cannot be done.

It allows LW the freedom to let her emotions run rampant while a functional solution is put in place

It WILL result in a cessation of the dunning phonecalls, the nature of which can hardly be assumed to be adding to a rich and vibrant "quality of life".......

The experts (I would find an attorney with expertise in debt law) may have any number of solutions, this is part of what one pays them for. however, they are also paid to be the intermediary, to be the negotiator, and to be LW's "face' during these transactions. This level of choice and separation from the realities of it may well help LW to free herself to look at the reasons why. And for that, she needs one more pro - a decent therapist. Her childhood was of sufficient traumatic content that, if she has not explored therapy to date, she will, I am sure, find it useful. So might the occassional attendance at a 12-Step ACOA meeting. In all of this, if she has any deep level of communication with her fantastic and loving husband, she needs to "keep him in the loop" while owning the sequence of actions....... If he is the decent chap LW represents him to be, he will be so filled with relief that LW is taking considered steps for resolution that he will be deeply supportive.

So, if LW can head into choppy waters, both with her loan by hiring some pros and with her toxic childhood, by hiring and working with skilled trauma therapists, and if she is ready and willing to move some heavy emotional machinery around, she can truly capitalize on the wonderful life that she has managed to create - and will be able to live fully within it.

But - the bottom line - unless the pros tell LW to blow the debt off (which I doubt) - pay the loans off, on some schedule, on some routine basis. I paid for three of my four degrees with a combination of loans, grants and the modest income from a part-time architectural practice; my family, though affluent, were no resource for me out of a deep sense of self-protection....... (same reason, booze and the complications that grow from it) and paying those loans off took decades. However, I am grateful for the low-interest loans that allowed me to acquire the education I wanted to create a life independent of childhood toxicity. Each payment I made symbolized a payment that was dedicated to my functional and emotional independence from my family of origin.

Eero Saaranin was, by the time he practiced, an American citizin, naturalized in 1940. He was the son of a brilliant Finnish architect who moved to this country and created a stellar educational program at Cranbrook. Saaranin's work at Dulles is brilliantly flawed, in that he strived to create a different movement sequence for passengers. Sadly, the technologic and operational issues confound his solution, but it was a brave effort in thinking "out of the box".

However, his aesthetic, for both terminals that he designed, spoke to a desire to evoke, via the nature of the design some element of the experience of flight at a time when there were still romantic notions about it (vs the cattle car aspect with which flight is now imbued). Dulles is a careful study of wing design, in some of its aspects, and TWQ's metaphor for birdlike amorphism has been frequently noted. While it is easy to derive naieve assumptions of the aesthetic, Saaranin was deeply focused on the emotional aspect of architecture and space at a time when his colleagues were focused on creating peurile sterile environments that could be replicated across the face of the earth, endlessly and monotonously, with little regard for context or for the human experience.