By Jane Austen.

Another Therapy Thursday. I told my therapist today about something I had figured out about myself : a lot of my anxiety is a result of my father’s (and to a far lesser extent, my siblings’) impatience with me.

My father is an angry, impatient guy. Growing up with him as a father meant constant danger. You could only really relax when he wasn’t around. Otherwise, at any second, you might get swept up into has anger and his impatience. It meant living, in many ways, on the edge. Constantly.

I remember that there were a few times when he went on a trip by himself when I was growing up. With him gone, it was a whole different household. Not only were my siblings and I safe from him, but without him around to make us tense, we were far more relaxed with one another.

Those were some of the happiest times in my life. Three weeks with him gone was better than three years of therapy. It was like Heaven.

I think it took me this long to make the connection between his impatience and my anxiety because a) I don’t like thinking about him, ever, at all, for reasons that should be clear right now but mostly b) the tension he created in the lives of my family was so pervasive that it’s hard to perceive.

It was the water we swam in, and it poisoned us all.

Because when you are a kid, you internalize things like that. I realized in therapy today that in many ways, I am still acting and behaving (and feeling) like he’s still around. The real life Larry Donald Bertrand has been out of my life for twenty years, but the one in my head has never left.

Not that I hear his voice or anything. It’s far deeper than that. It’s the emotional responses dealing with him trained into me that remain. It’s this unrelenting inner impatience with accompanying anxiety that needs no voice or commands to enforce itself.

All it needs is the ability to make me feel like whatever I’m doing, I’m doing it too slowly or wrong or both, in order to perpetuate itself.

I used to blame my sister Catherine for my feeling that I was doing everything wrong and that I was helpless and should just let others do things for me because I will only screw it up and someone will have to do it for me anyway plus fix the mess I made of things as well.

And it’s true she nitpicked me and I felt like I could never make her happy.

But now that I see how LDB made all of us so tense and anxious, I wonder if that wasn’t just my sister expressing said tension in her own way. Some people express negative emotion through nitpicking and fault finding. It’s not pleasant to be the object of it, but the person means well.

They just have a funny way of showing it.

I’m not sure why I never felt like I could meet her standards. I suppose when I was a kid, the things she asked of me seemed random and arbitrary and impossible to predict, even though it’s clear to me now that she just wanted me to be presentable.

And it’s not like anyone else was taking an interest in me. I think she was trying to take care of me in her own way, and when I think about that now, I want to give her a big hug and thank her for trying to do for me what nobody else was interested in doing.

And tell her I wish I had been more appreciative and attentive at the time.

The tension my father generated also goes a long way towards explaining why people were so unwilling to slow down and teach me to do things when I was a kid. His impatience made everyone impatient. That’s just how people react to tense, hostile situations. It’s not wonderful, and in a perfect world, his being like he is would have caused my siblings and my mother to become very close to one another, like soldiers going through basic training together.

But it didn’t, or at least, it didn’t for me. Instead, I think, we were isolated by it. Maybe if we had been a less cerebral family and hence more open to acting on instinct and emotion, we would have banded together against my dad and made him either calm down and behave, or GTFO.

The thing is, though, leadership comes from the top – it has to – and my mother didn’t fight back against him. She took it all, and did nothing to defend us from him. What could we do in that situation?

We were just little kids.

Now that I have made the connection, it seems so obvious that my constant state of tension from which there is no real relief comes from him. Long before I was ever bullied in school, I was bullied at home, and by the man who should have been my number one protector.

Fathers are supposed to make their kids feel safe. Not scared. Scared is the opposite of safe.

Now that I know this, I can fight back. I can make the crucial separation between my anxiety and myself, and recognize it as his problem, not mine. And I am not putting up with it any more.

So let this be the beginning of the eviction process. Get the hell out of my mind, Larry Donald Bertrand. You were a lousy father, and if you don’t believe me, just look at the kids you raised.

All four of us have had to fight mental illness in our lives. None of us have reproduced. We have all had problems in our lives we can tie directly to your glowering presence.

We never expected perfection of you, Larry.

We just wanted to feel safe in our own home.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.