I'm very fortunate to have had good parents.
My experience with circumstances like yours comes second handedly from my career as a psychiatrist.
Now that I'm retired and ordained a permanent Catholic deacon I see similar situations doing expert witness evaluations for annulments in the marriage tribunal.
Your post strikes home as I provided an opinion in a situation reminiscent of what you described just this morning.
God bless you. I hope you have had the opportunity for healing or reconciliation.
Mom is dead. I am 64 years old. To be totally on the level, I started reading books on psychology when I was 11-years old and determined, on my own, that my mother’s mental problems were not caused by myself but stemmed from her childhood.
This was later verified by my dad when he told me that mom’s childhood was a miserable one. Her mother had been given to a convent at a very young age and the French nuns beat her. Poor woman grew to adulthood believing herself to be of no value, basically worthless and treated all her children the same.
I forgave my mother everything when she rejected alcohol. On her deathbed she said I had been a good daughter but there was no expression of love. THAT is the toughest thing to overcome: I was a national award winning artist before I graduated high school; poetry I wrote in college is included in a volume of the Best Twentieth Century Poetry; I’m a Navy vet; I worked in nuclear engineering; but none of it mattered to my folks. What is tough on a person is overcoming the feelings of being worthless in the eyes of your parents.
I believe that we, all of us, are what we strive to be. Blaming someone else for the way we are is a detour from reality - we make it happen for ourselves and no one else.
Thanks for you comments; I truly appreciated the wisdom.