Back in 2002, I started seeing a therapist.
We took a while to get into issues at were affecting my life at the time. In fact, I think we spent the first six sessions with me telling my life story and her listening.
At the end of the story, she came out with one thought.
“I am amazed at how much anger you are keeping inside,” she said.
Moi?
I had a pretty good idea what that anger was.
Some of it was aimed at my employer, who two years earlier had taken my column away after five successful years. Overnight I went from having a job that was a joy to me to having a job that it hurt to do every day.
Another chunk of it was my first marriage, or as Woody Allen said, the Ox-Bow Incident. It was a long time pining away for a marriage that fell apart during the Carter Administration.
But as much as those two bothered me, the real source of anger that was hurting me was my parents. I went to war with them when I was 11, and in terms of resistance, I became the king of passive-aggressive behavior.
Nearly everything I did hurt me a lot more than it hurt them.
I underachieved big-time in high school, and they punished me by not letting me learn to drive for most of my junior year. At the beginning of my senior year, they told me I could learn to drive.
My response?
“No thanks.”
I got my license the following May, and the only date I drove for was the senior prom. It was my first and last date with a girl who was essentially a family friend.
That wasn’t even the beginning of it.
They were so overprotective through my childhood and my teen years that I felt infantilized, and when I went away to college at age 17, it was a recipe for disaster. I flunked out and was reclassified 1-A in February 1969. In March I was called down to Richmond for a pre-induction physical.
I probably would have been on my way to Vietnam, but my parents pulled some strings and got some doctors to describe me in a way that would get me exempted from military service.
It’s tough to blame someone for wanting to keep you safe, but what happened was that I apparently started to believe they would keep me from suffering the consequences of my actions. That cost me dearly for the decade of my 20s, which I finished with no money, no real job and the end of an ill-fated marriage.
By the end of my 30s, at least I had a job.
Things got better after that — wife, family, house and even some career steps forward. But when things didn’t go well — and occasionally they didn’t — the anger came back, but in a different way. In recent years, when I can’t get past the regrets for the things I did or didn’t do, all the anger gets focused inward.
Maybe someday I’ll stop being mad at myself.
I just hope it won’t be for the reason the late great George Jones sang “He stopped loving her today.”