Yes and no. I've talked a fair amount about my family here already. I was the youngest of five and there was a lot of trauma growing up. For many years, I tried to be the glue- the one person connecting with all of them. The older I got, the more I realized that, although we all saw similar trauma, we experienced it differently and we're still processing it differently too. Over the past couple years especially, I've come to realize there's not a whole lot I can do. If/ when they've healed sufficiently, they may come around. It sometimes saddens me that I'm not close with my siblings, or any of my family, really, but I've come to accept that we're all on different paths for now.
Those are some good points, which remind me of a surprise I received about twenty years ago when my sister, who is four years my elder and the first born of five siblings, so matter-of-factly referred to our mutual upbringing as both “horrific and abusive”. We were both adults at the time she said it, and we were both the parents of two children of our own. In fact, the conversation itself was about the comparison between our own upbringing and how we were bringing up our own children. While I’ve never thought of my childhood as ideal nor “nuclear” by any stretch of the imagination, I certainly didn’t have the same perception that she did. She did not elaborate, nor did I seek it, and I just accepted that we are all entitled to our own interpretations of events as they occurred in each of our lives, albeit having been raised in the same household by the same mother [note the absence of the plural word “parents” there, or any mention of a father; there was a stepfather for many years, but he neither started that role nor finished it between the births of all five children and the coming of age 18 of all five children, and that is an entirely different story in itself].
Benedict Arnold 