Sometimes we are so different from our parents that there is NO WAY for them to understand where we are coming from.

Growing up, my parents were good parents BUT.....I was so embarrassed by them when I had to go anywhere with them & when I was young they wanted to hold my hand....I would pull away & walk as far away from them as possible. I honestly at the time didn't understand why I felt that way. I was always fighting with my parents, especially my Mom. My dad would just go out into the garage & work on his hobbies. I remember trying to change my attitude toward them one time & the first thing they did was trigger my attitude toward them again......but I thought I was the problem with the fighting.....especially after I got married & ended up doing nothing but fighting with my H for 33 years until I finally left. With my parents, as soon as I left the house the fighting with them pretty much stopped BUT it would flare back up again at times though it was a lot easier to tolerate them when I no longer lived with them. We even took them on vacation with us because they basically had no money at that time & it gave them the ability to go places.

Ok, so I's 63 & it wasn't until just 2 years ago that I was able to put all the pieces together......my Mom died 11 years ago, & my dad had died 15 years before that & 8 years ago, I finally left my H.....so I've had a lot of time to integrate the past.

I remember my Mom always telling me that when I got older that I would see that she was smarter than I thought she was. Sadly, that never happened, even when she was dying, she just reinforced my view I had always had of her.....but it didn't mean I didn't love her, she just didn't have the ability to make wise decisions & when I was growing up, her own self-esteem problems really messed up my own life & my ability to be involved with things that I wanted to do & honestly, I resented it in a HUGE way & that is where a lot of my anger toward them came from.

It wasn't until I figured out the real problems with my H & what had caused the marriage to fail that I saw that the same thing was the issue with my father.......there was no ability in them to emotionally connect to anyone & yet my mother kept telling me how much my Dad loved me.......but he wasn't capable of showing it himself....& turned out I didn't understand it so I thought my H's issues were mine, not his because of the fighting I did with him about things that he was totally messing up in our lives & I just wasn't willing to sit back & accept his behavior without confronting him about it. A personality trait that was foreign to my parents & any time I would confront, my Mom would tell me that she was sure they mixed up the babies in the hospital because I was NOTHING like my parents. She had no idea how hard I worked at being NOTHING LIKE THEM.

The true awakening came when I left my H....all of a sudden I felt peace.....a peace I had NEVER felt in my life.....alone finally with no one there to needle me or do things that I thought were so far out of line.....& all the new people I was around were just fine & I had no issues with them, & I have NEVER had a fight with anyone in all the 8 years that I have been gone from my H & obviously, my parents are no longer alive to fight with.....but I realized the anger issue wasn't JUST ME. I had problems with the way I was reacting to bad behavior, but I wasn't just an angry person who had anger spilling out all over the place at anyone who got in the way. I was really a peaceful person who could learn to respond to things in a diplomatic way & in all reality, I haven't even had to use that often since I've been away from my H.

I realized that I had grown over the years to have no tolerance for the behavior of my parents & because the cup was so full, when I ended up marrying a H who was just like my parents, the cup was already full to overflowing to the anger just continued & totally overflowed & over the years it just grew worse & worse to the point where by the time I left my H, I was actually seeing red every time I had to deal with him.

Sadly, I have learned the reason for his behavior & it also makes sense as the reason for my Dad's behavior, but it's not something that could have been Dx'ed because it wasn't even known about until 1994 in the US.....the last 13 years of my marriage & the T's I went to had no idea as they didn't see it either.

Just writing this because I wanted you to know that sometimes the anger truly does have to do with the environment & the situations we end up feeling stuck in & when we leave them, if it's truly NOT our personality, it goes away & we come to realize that the only problem we had was that we weren't able to react well to the dysfunction that had kept being dumped on us.

Just a thought because it's a thought I never had until I was able to sort it all out. Yes, I responded badly with my anger & fighting.....but found out that any other normal person would have responded in a similar way & that what I was dealing with really was a serious problem & it wasn't just me & I was right to be angry about what was going on.

Just some food for thought......thoughts I had no idea about when I was in the bad situations dealing with my anger & everyone telling me that I was the one with the problem.