I'm glad you're not trying to just do what you normally do - as good as it is. Taking us along for your ride is true to who you are, and we appreciate it for that. I'm keeping you in my thoughts.

Since you're now hip deep (ha!) in the medical system, I have a modest offering to make. I produce a radio show called "White Coat, Black Art", about the culture and business of medicine. My doctor-host won't explain your diagnosis, for example, but he'll help you understand the coded, shaded language of doctors, and how and why they sometimes lie to patients as a part of the Art of their craft. We get a lot of letters from people in your present situation, and they seem to find comfort and a measure of control in the added understanding of this new world they have been thrust into. You can find White Coat, Black Art podcasts for free on iTunes, or go here: http://www.cbc.ca/whitecoat/index.html?copy-podcast

You sound like me. Well, the first part especially. The angry, sometimes violent father. The older alcoholic boyfriend. (add in an alcoholic, depressed mother, just for fun) The drifting aimlessness. The anger. Most of all, the anger. I have avoided bitterness and distrust though, partly by hardwired personality and partly by dealing with my anger.

It took me a long time to realize it was there. I kept it expertly suppressed. But it came out in flashes: reading quietly in a sunny cafe in Vancouver and sideswiped by a sudden urge to stand up and throw my coffee mug at the wall of mirrors as hard as if I was trying to get a curveball by Sammy Sosa. The shattering, the crashing slivers of silvered glass. Oh. The longing to lash out, to destroy something. And then as quickly as it came, the urge would be gone. I'd turn back to my book and turn the page. It took me years to recognize these moments were important clues to what I was really feeling.

So I say to you that you need to go back to therapy, with someone else, and perhaps a different kind. I did two years of a pyschotherapy and really dug around, found my feelings, unearthed them and faced them. The anger - at the father's angry lashing out, at the mother's silent helplessness - came out like hiccuping sobs, in bursts that I could handle. And behind it I found this little girl who had come to believe, at a profound level, that she didn't deserve to be loved. That was the message she'd gotten, and it made her so angry. And that's why she drifted. That's why she accepted relationships that didn't actually meet her needs. That's why sometimes she wanted to smash things just for the sheer complicated joy of feeling what she was actually truly feeling.

And now I'm not angry. I don't want to lash out. I'm not drifting. I am able to say what I need and accept the consquences, good and bad. You can too. Go back into therapy. Go back to yourself, go deeper. Find that little girl, and set her free.

I was your girlfriend. I am cheerful in the mornings and cheerful at the end of the evening, but the end of the work day is often my worst time. I'd cycle home through traffic in the heat and noise and land on my doorstep, hungry and tired and sweaty, and I'd walk in and need half an hour alone tocollect myself, clean up, and calm down. And my (ex) bf could never never understand why. He'd take my keeping to myself as some sort of judgement on him. Sometimes I was irritable, and sometimes, to my regret, I lashed out at him when I felt like he was pushing at me. But mostly I could keep my mood to myself and I'd come downstairs after half an hour and be happy to see him.

Except that I felt judged all the time. Judged for having a mood other than cheerful. Judged for feeling what I was feeling. Judged because morning people aren't judged as bad and "angry" for being cranky when they wake up, but somehow being that way at the end of the day meant I was a disfunctional person. I felt worse and worse, like I was a bad person, and the tension grew.

But the telling thing over time, as we struggled with this one problem, was that slowly I realized it was typical in our relationship: I wasn't allowed to feel anything that my ex felt even remotely threatening or scary - as defined by him. And since he grew up in a highly repressed home, that covers a lot of ground.

So my point here is this: if you two are going to be a couple over the long haul, you've got to allow eachother your feelings. She shouldn't lash out at you, true. And you shouldn't take everything so damn personally.

Three months isn't a lot of time to work out the kinks and get used to a lover in your space all the time. It's a huge life changing event; give yourselves time to reconfigure things. Maybe a bigger apartment will help. Maybe your gf needs to go to the gym or a coffee shop at the end of the day and have a bit of time by herself to calm down. Maybe you need to take a walk at 5 pm. Experiment. Be prepared to fail a little bit. Good love is worth the effort.