I spent 20 years waiting for some sort of an apology from my stepfather.

I was not entirely patient about this. For most of that time I was pretty furious, actually. And while I certainly wouldn’t characterize this as good or healthy, I don’t think it was entirely unjustified, either.

My mom discovered he had been unfaithful toward the end of their 13-year marriage.

By that point, he had spent through so much of their shared retirement savings he would need to declare bankruptcy. That was his encore act after resigning his job as a public-school superintendent in San Jose, Calif., after some very questionable spending decisions like the $80,000 BMW that was purchased for his use, and a $468.72 Cartier fountain pen, among other things. He merited a seven-minute TV report from the investigative team of the Bay Area’s ABC affiliate.

I found all of this to be fairly hypocritical given how strict and self-righteous he’d been when I was a teenager. What made me angriest, though, was his refusal to acknowledge, let alone apologize, for the pain he’d caused my mother specifically and my family in general.

He might not even be sorry, and if my satisfaction depended upon seeing someone be sorry, well, I’ve given him control over my happiness.

After he’d separated from my mom, he invited me to visit him. I responded by saying there would need to be an honest conversation between us if he wanted to maintain a relationship. He ignored me.

I stewed over this. Not just months or even for years, but for the better part of two decades. I thought there would need to be some sort of confrontation, a reckoning, for me to get closure. Turns out I had that exactly backward.

Coming to grips with anger

My mom used to love telling the story of how she found out I had a temper from my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Hollinger.

At first my mom didn’t believe it, telling Mrs. Hollinger she must be thinking of another kid.

“She just lowered her head and looked over her glasses,” my mom would say, angling her head down to demonstrate Mrs. Hollinger’s reaction. “And she said, ‘Yes. He. Does.’”

For the record, Mrs. Hollinger was right, and this story illustrates what I believe are two core elements of my identity: I am an emotional person who feels anger quickly and poignantly, and I am capable of hiding my anger even from the people closest to me.

Now, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time feeling very guilty about that first fact. When I’m mad, I tend to do things I regret, and often must apologize for things like cursing or starting arguments or — when I was 16 years old — punching a hole in the wall of my family’s home.

I’ve gotten better about not doing anything when I’m mad. It’s only recently, however, that I’ve become aware of the problems this can cause. If you’re going to swallow your anger, you need a way to digest it. Otherwise, it can create a hell of a problem on the other end.

My mom divorced my stepfather in 2003. I was 29 years old, and I saw him exactly once over the next 20 years. I thought about him, though. Quite a bit, actually. I kept tabs on where he was living, what educational enterprise he was up to. When I learned he’d written a self-help book, I ordered a copy and “hate read” every word in there.

Occasionally, I would talk through these feelings. I followed a therapist’s suggestion to write a letter that would get everything off my chest. He instructed me to burn the letter to symbolize the release of my anger. I have participated in role-playing scenarios in which I confront the person I’m mad at. I have meditated.

And yet my anger did not dissipate, leaving me with something of a conundrum. I didn’t want to act on this anger, to lose my temper. On the other hand, my anger wasn’t getting any less potent over time. In fact, it might have been getting stickier. So what, exactly, was I supposed to do?

Accept it, my current therapist suggested. All of it.

Accept that he married my mom and upended my life. Accept that he had made my adolescence unpleasant, and then, that his marriage to my mom ended in an awkward and very painful way. Accept that this caused a great deal of pain and made me angry. These were the facts, and they were things that had occurred and could not be changed.

Now I had to decide how to move forward. What did I want?

Well, I wanted this man to express some level of regret over what he’d done. If he wasn’t going to do this on his own, I wanted to do something to call out his behavior in a way that would make him feel bad.

Two problems with this: He might never express remorse or sorrow, and if he did, I might not find it satisfactory.

The alternative was to accept that I may not get the resolution I wanted. He might never tell me how sorry he was for what he did to my family. He might not even be sorry, and if my satisfaction depended upon seeing someone be sorry, well, I’ve given him control over my happiness.

That last part was the turning point for me. That was the thing that allowed me to see that my anger toward this man was the thing that was keeping me tied to him. No one in my family spoke to him. I didn’t have to see him, and once I accepted that he might never be sorry for what happened, I felt the intensity of my anger begin to ebb.

Letting go

The past two years have been nothing short of a breakthrough for me. I have settled a number of outstanding grudges and petty resentments. I even spoke to my stepfather on the phone, and later, visited him in Northern California. I did this to see if I had truly processed the anger I had previously harbored toward him. I also felt it was only fair — since I’d be writing about his time in our family — that I give him a chance to hear how I felt about what happened, and offer his own perspective if he wanted.

We talked for more than 10 hours over the span of two days, which included a five-and-a-half hour interview I recorded. He wasn’t entirely honest, in my opinion. I’m not sure if he was even mostly honest, and he certainly didn’t apologize.

That’s his decision, though, and while there were a few times that something agitated me, I never truly felt mad. I wouldn’t say that I’ve forgiven him for what happened, but I have accepted it, and this has provided me with something that’s more powerful and poignant than seeing him feel bad. I feel at peace.