Session the seventh with my psychologist.

I got to say hi to my psychiatrist during the wait. He’s not just a great psychiatrist, by the way, but also hot. ((When he’s not wearing his crazy plaid blazer jacket. Ye gods.)) Sadly, my life is not a romance novel, and that would be a really bad relationship to start up anyways.

So… I actually did not talk to my psychologist about the thing I thought I should talk to him about, because right now I’m going slightly crazy with the holidays approaching. It’ll get worse. I try to ignore what day it is but somehow I subconsiously remember that it’s almost time for the hell weeks in which my father used every single holiday stress excuse to beat, control, and dominate the crap out of me and my mother.

So. We talked about that. He poked a bit with “why did he act that way, do you think?” (My psychiatrist remembered that my father didn’t need alcohol in his system to be an abusive monster.)

And actually, I don’t know why he did all that. I mean, obtrusively it was because my mother and I never celebrated the holidays correctly, and this disappointed him into senseless rage. He wanted Martha Stewart perfect holidays, which are even more impossible when your family came here directly from Vietnam and thus have no American holiday tradition knowledge. At all.

I think he got all his ideas from television. Like, several contradicting lines of ideas. It was impossible to meet his standards, in large part because he never let you know what they were until he was slamming your head against the wall for doing something wrong. Also, he kept changing the rules—I can only imply this because he’d run the door over your toes because you didn’t do X, and then the next day he’d cut your hand because you did do X.

My psychologist and I figured it was completely irrational chaos, “almost psychotic,” he said.

Every holiday tradition, my father poisoned. It’s so horrible that I can barely do anything during the holidays except, when I can, knock myself out with something, or find some series (fantasy, SF, mystery, anything long and immersive and with at least a little humor and upbeat endings) and read hell for leather.

(Before my Kindle, or frankly Amazon Prime shipping, these times were incredibly bad. You think my local bookstore’s hours are horrible? They really hit the skids during the high shopping season. Like, gods forfend if people buy things from them. And if I finished whatever on Christmas Eve….

I must sound like a worthless little whiner to people who look down their noses at fast shipping, the Internet, or ebooks. Hmmm. How much do I care. Not very much.)

Anyways, we talked about some ways to possibly overcome the bad memories this holiday, but books seem the only reliable answer, as my only IRL social friend is not going to be here for the holidays. Well, that and connecting to other people….

… except that I am very shy and tend not to trust people. Part of that is because during the time when I was on the immediate run from my parents, well, it was just so strange that they kept finding me during those years…

… and it was a friend (another one, now an ex-friend) who was feeding them information about me. It’s even more complicated than that: he was the first guy who creepily sexually hit on me. When I was 17. I didn’t know that it was wrong at the time, and he implied it was all my fault because I kept sitting in sexy positions. (ETA: no, I didn’t know that they were sexy positions, and I wasn’t trying to seduce him. I didn’t even know of sex in any way but in terms of my father raping my mother. Not at all romantic or sexy.)

Actually, I found out that two friends were helping my parents stalk me. One of them was at my University department’s office, so she fed them all the forwarding information.

Yeah.

And then it got worse.

So. Um. It’s hard for me to start relationships.

I really don’t look forwards to the holidays at all. And other than that… I got nothin’.