I’m so tired of hearing the usual question about long therapy: if it’s so good, why are you undergoing it forever? That one is about as annoying as the “how-will-those-tattoos-look-as-you-age?” nonsense my niece has to hear.

For goodness sakes, psychotherapy for chronic conditions has to be kind of chronic itself. Or at least occasional. It’s not like emergency medicine. It’s more like gardening.

And I’m not continuous; that’s Cindy. She’s the one who’s been seeing at least two therapists for over 30 years. I started in college, went in and out of it through young adult relationships, found Tom-my-miracle-worker, and now I go in for half a dozen sessions every now and then. When I need to.

It all began with anger management. Not the way we mean it now. I had to learn how to be angry. Or how to show my anger. Or in hippie-talk, own my anger.

See: I was a good girl. I was the light of my parents’ life. They were babies when they had me – he was 27 and she was 25 – energetic and liberal and somewhat arty in post-war LA, and they took me everywhere with them. I was a pink-and-white bundle of plumpness, with curling gold hair and round blue eyes. My mother was beautiful and my father was a manly veteran. We looked good.

I don’t remember any resentment when my younger sister arrived. My parents never told me about any sibling issues they had to handle. We’re less than three years apart, and we’ve always been different but loving. You know how families assign roles. I was put in the pretty slot, and Claire became the artistic one.

I always behaved. Claire pushed at some of their rules, but I was the obedient one. The responsible one. Like the fairy tale princesses: as good as I was beautiful (except in the fairy tales it’s always the youngest sister who gets those adjectives).

At least, that’s how I remember it. I’ve heard some cousins reminisce about those times and there have been statements about me being stubborn sometimes. And the face burn when I was 11 was definitely an accident caused by me – the barbecue was already lit and about to flare beyond smoke when I sprayed it with the starter, and I’m sure that must have been a direct act of disobedience on my part (my father’s anger at me, if any, was swamped then by his rapid care of me and his annoyed attention to my hysterical mother).

So yeah, my behavior must have been imperfect at times. Surely I must have thrown a few fits or toys. But I don’t remember those events. I recollect my obedience and cooperation. I remember my father praising me as a good girl.

Our nuclear family exploded when I was 12. My parents divorced and my dad moved out. They were careful to tell me and Claire that it wasn’t our fault, that it really didn’t concern us, that they both loved us and would always be there for us, but Dad left and weekend breakfasts changed. That was the first thing I noticed. We’d always had pancakes or waffles on Sundays and after the divorce we either made our own breakfast, at Mom’s, or went out to the pancake house with Dad. Mom always slept in. Dad always went out. It was never as it had been.

We weren’t the only divorced family, in LA, in the 1960s. Sometimes it felt like we were in the majority. So there was no stigma at school.

But home changed forever. And looking back on it, so did I.

From then on, I didn’t exhibit anger to men. Certainly not to Dad, but also not to uncles, teachers, and when the time came, boyfriends. I think I thought I was behaving as an appropriate female person. It wasn’t till I was through college and starting psychotherapy that I got a clue.

They say hindsight is 20/20. When my first shrink observed that I must have felt responsible, in my own child way, for my father leaving, his words rang clear as a bell and the epiphany shone above my head like a searchlight. No duh. Because no matter how well or often my folks told me that their divorce had nothing to do with me, the simple fact is that my reality changed. My dad left. And like any kid, I knew my behavior had not been perfect. At some deep inner level I must have concluded that, if only I’d been better, our family might still be intact. I didn’t go so far as to blame me for them, but I couldn’t eliminate the idea that I was there and I must have had something to do with it.

Certainly I felt anger sometimes in that decade between 12 and 22. But I inhibited myself. I prevented myself from expressing it lest I be deserted. I must have converted what was righteous anger to confused hurt. I swallowed back tears instead of tirades. I learned how to depress myself.