One of the ways that I view my anger is as a hissing ball of writhing black snakes, suspended over a lake in a deep valley. The reason the snakes are suspended is that I do not want to touch them, or them to touch me; I know that they get their energy from me, and I fear what that energy might do if it comes back to me through them.

Yet this is not a useful view to deal with my anger, except in this generalized way. If I were to feel this generalized anger, what would I be angry about? Everything. Everyone. When taking my anger in the whole, there is no way to separate out the pieces. The whole is overwhelming.

How, then, do I deal with it? How do I reduce my rage? I can only deal with one snake at a time.

Many of the snakes bear the names of my parents. I shall have to leave my father for another time; in many ways, he is still an enigma to me, both as a person and as a chasm where I needed him as an active part of my life. This is not to say that I did not know him at all, or that I do not feel anything about him, but only to say that emotional abandonment is a difficult issue to cope with. Difficult because it is diffuse. Difficult because it is an absence, rather than a presence.

My mother was not an absence, oh no.

I have written elsewhere about aspects of her control over me. I am not finished with that topic, either; she was not above using public humiliation as one of her weapons. That, too, will be a topic for further exploration.

This segment is a point of departure. I will begin with my divorce from my parents. I moved away from them in 1970 when I started college, but it wasn't until I started therapy in late 1991 that I began to deal with my feelings about them, and the influence they have had on my life.

Therapy for me started in small, anguished steps. I also had present anguish to deal with then, as well as my past, and those early steps were the necessary first ones, to realize that only I could change things, that past and present were linked.

In a few months I thought I had begun to make progress. Then I found out that my parents were still very much in control of my life in significant ways. That was the moment for writing the letter that so many of us write, whether in therapy or not:

July 7, 1992

To the people who gave birth to me:

I disown you.

You were never there to help me when I was your child. I shall not accept your interference in my life now that I am an adult.

To my mother: Whatever made you so angry, so bitter, that you would take out your hatred on your children? When I needed support, I received condemnation. When I needed approval, I received criticism. When I needed love, I received indifference. When I tried to find friends outside my family, you interfered; when I complained, you told me that I didn't need friends. You demanded perfection, and when I only came close, you punished me. When I told you I felt I was under too much pressure, you told me I didn't know what pressure was.

You humiliated me before my teachers. You told me whom my friends could and could not be. You compared me to so many other people, always to point out to me how lazy I was, how uncaring I was, how worthless I was.

I believed you. Damn you, I believed you.

To my father: Where were you? You were always at work, even when you were at home. I was never anything more than a problem to you--punishment to be meted out, and a reminder that home was no home to you. When did you ever take an interest in me? You did no more than take me along on things you wanted to do, or had to do.

When did you ever show any interest in me? When did you ever talk to me? Did you ever realize that I was alive? When did you stop living your own life?

To hell with both of you.

I owe all that I am to you. I am miserable. I blame myself for everything that goes wrong. I sought out people like you to marry, and made their lives and mine into never-ending agony. (Aren't you proud of me? I'm even taking the blame for other people's problems and misery.)

I trust my own judgment--only when it condemns me. I believe in myself--only when I believe that I am incapable of finishing a task, or when I lack the confidence to begin.

I don't know what it means to love. Does it mean that I give and give and give, but that others give back only when it suits them? Does it mean that love is a reward for being good, and must be withheld when I don't meet the standards of whomever I expect to love me?

What about taking care of myself? When did you ever teach me to respect myself, to believe that my wants and needs were important--to me or to anyone else? When did you teach me the boundary between my responsibilities and the responsibilities of others? Between care and support and nurturing, or guilt and shame and inadequacy?

When did we ever have fun--singly, or as a family? We went through the motions; we kept up appearances. The only times I ever had fun were the times when I could forget that you existed. But now I can't forget--your judgments are now my judgments; your sense of being responsible, first and always, is now my guilt whenever I do anything for myself.

So I disown you. I will no longer accept your judgment. I will no longer accept your guilt. I must find my own way, and be my own parent. I need help to do this, but I will not ask you for help, nor will I accept your help.

I only ask one thing of you. Go away--get out of my head, get out of my life, and never come back.

Your loving son,

To say that I was angry when I wrote this is something of an understatement. Enraged, perhaps. Blind to everything else.

As I write these words, I have just read back through this letter for the first time in quite a while. I remember the feeling of that anger, but what I actually feel now is only a shadow of what I felt then, of what I felt so many times through my life.

Many things have changed. I realize now that there was more than rage in this letter; there was knowledge, too--of who my parents were, of how they influenced me as a child, of how their influence lingered as an adult. At the same time, I would not have written this letter had I already been able to free myself of that influence.

Some of those things happened in the writing of this letter. It released a surge of rage, truly released it, so that it has not returned. This was anger that I had felt many times, and expressed many times. Some of those expressions of rage were even directed towards my parents.

But expressing that rage and knowledge was not enough; the letter also declares my independence. This is more than saying that I no longer belonged to them; it is a transfer of that belonging to myself. It's hard to remember now whether I truly understood that when I wrote the letter; it's hard now to know how fully I understand it today. I know from experience that this knowledge, and the responsibility that goes with it, will continue to grow.

This sense of ownership--of my anger, of my life, of responsibility for my feelings and my behavior and my issues--has been a key to dealing with some of those other snakes. The converse--knowing the things that I do not own, and for which I am not responsible--came more slowly, but that, too, has been key in taming my snakes.

I know that there are questions here which beg to be answered: How? Why? These answers will come in future segments. But a few issues remain that must be answered here.

One is the issue of forgiveness. Because I have let go of much of my rage, and because I have released my parents from any responsibility for fixing the damage they did, I have been able to forgive them. I have not forgotten what they did, but I have released them from any expectation that they might have done better. They were who they were. They acted on what they knew and felt. It would not be reasonable of me to expect them to act on anything else, because anything else was outside their capacity. The fact that I needed more from them when I was a child is a separate issue, and a past issue, and one for which there is no resolution. I have accepted that. The fact that I still need those things I didn't get as a child is still another issue, but that issue is mine, and it's one that I can do something about.

When I wrote this letter, I shared it with my individual therapist the following week. At that point, the rage was still overpowering. I didn't share it with my therapy group, though, because I was still new there, and not yet comfortable with either the people or the process. Six months later, when my mother died, I did share it there, but by then much of its power was gone, at least for me. I shared it there one more time, as I was nearing the end of my time in group therapy, but that was more of a ceremonial reading. I left that copy in the group therapy room, as a symbol of leaving that part of my life behind.

But do we ever leave anything behind? Here I am, dealing with it again, because there are still issues that I need to deal with surrounding my parents and my childhood.

There is one more issue related to letters such as this, and that is whether to mail them. I did not, for two reasons. First, much of the power of this letter, for me, was in the writing, the expression of my rage. The other is the question of whom to mail it to. At the time I wrote it, my father had been dead for eight years. My mother probably would not have been able to understand whom it was from. In terms of my real parents, there was no one to mail this to.

In a later discussion, someone who did not know my history asked me if I had mailed this. I explained that when I wrote it, my parents were either dead or dying. Later that day, however, I realized that the true answer was something entirely different.

The parents I wrote about were the ones who still controlled my life at age 40. They were not the parents who were dead. They were the imprint left in my mind by those people who gave birth to me, left in the form of my values, my self-esteem, my outlook on the world. They were the parents who lived on in my head.

I should have mailed this letter. I should have mailed it to myself.