I was visited by my family recently and had a godawful experience with them.  Since moving far away almost 12 years ago, I've spent less and less time around them and I now can't even spend 4 days a year around them without losing my mind.  The most recent experience has made me really rethink my family history and dynamics and its role in my own mental health.  


I always felt I had a normal and good upbringing.  My parents always told us (myself and one brother, one sister; I'm the oldest) they loved us and they went beyond the minimum providing for us materially, trying to spend time with us and be there in our activities.  There were definitely happy times.  


However, I do have a lot of trouble remembering times I knew were often bad.  My parents both survived extremely traumatic, abusive (3/4) parents, and were sometimes barely acknowledged, let alone cared for.   Both of my parents always aimed to do better than their parents and clung to the importance of traditional family values as a consequence.  They also didn't believe in mental health, though my mom was diagnosed with OCD and probably has other fairly serious mental health issues.  So when they did wrong, they never acknowledged it and often shamed us for criticizing since we never had to go through what they did.

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My young childhood all seems to have been fine, though because of my dad's work, we had moved a total of five times by the time I was 18.  I did feel insecure, however, about being very bad and uninterested at sports and disappointing my father who was a sports freak.  In 2000, we moved for my dad's work just as my mother's only good parent, her father, died of cancer and she fell into a deep depression (her mother, my grandmother, also then remarried in less than a year a guy who looked just like her dead husband and never spoke to anyone ever again.)  My father had a lot of anger issues and had a very traditional view of family (he pushed my mom to quit working and stay-at-home for us) and mental health and he took a lot out on my mom at the time and denied her depression when it didn't resolve.  Then after 9/11, the recession made my dad lose his job and my parents declared bankruptcy and almost lost our home.  There was a lot of very bad screaming and fighting at the time, though I paradoxically felt that it was a great time growing up (I was 9-13; we were there for four-ish years without moving, the longest I stayed in once place, and I could make and sustain friends.)

My dad eventually got a new job and forced us to move again right as I entered high school.  I lost all my friends, but I was doing okay trying to make new ones.  Until a traumatic incident(s) my first semester in high school at 14 which I don't care to discuss, though I often feel guilty as if it "wasn't that bad."  I told my parents, and they complained at the school, but nothing came of it and they didn't push it further.  I don't remember all the details of how things happened.  After that, I was essentially ostracized at the school until I was a senior and had no close friendships.  I was always very lonely and became very depressed, wanting to seriously kill myself twice and abandoned Christianity (this being the conservative South which meant it was a problem; we went to church every Sunday.)  I also plotted an elaborate plan to run away from our town and essentially got caught.  We fought and my dad threw me against a wall, the only time he ever physically touched me like that.  My parents also took to me to a horrible Christian therapist and our pastor who both essentially told me to just get over feeling bad, an experience which kept me wary of therapy for years.  I kept quiet more or less for the next three years, waiting to escape high school, and my parents blamed me for always being sad and "not just being positive in life."  My dad also became less and less of a presence in my life at this time, becoming a workaholic and traveling all the time, pretty much absent.

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I had a wonderful senior year and then I moved as far away as possible for college as I could from the town I hated.  I came back frequently for family.  On my own in college, I finally was able to be who I wanted to be (although my mental health continued to deteriorate, including one suicide attempt), but my parents didn't like the "changes" they saw (which were really what I'd always been, but couldn't be due to where I lived and their own desire to present a good "social image.)  I continued to be harassed for my "negativity" by my parents and criticized for my life, leading to more and more intense fights.  Ultimately, in 2013, as I was graduating and in a deep funk, in addition to having just opened up to my own bisexuality (which I still have never told them about), our conflicts came to a head, and my dad came to visit for the first time in a long time, but turned it into an "intervention."  After this, I decided to never tell my parents anything about my life again.

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Since then, I minimize time spent with them.  I am rarely asked anything about my life and never discuss anything serious if possible with them since it inevitably leads to a criticism (from my mother) of my life.  My dad is too much of a workaholic to do anything now besides work, and he is on the verge of being divorced by my mom and barely avoided another bankruptcy after COVID, yet, like everything in his life, he's in complete denial about it.  My mother is essentially alone now all the time, has no friends, and so I often guiltily play her confidante, though she never asks me anything about my life.

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I'm also estranged from my brother.  Once my best friend, though often with tensions, he became a racist gun nut, married a racist gun nut holier-than-thou POS, and became an alcoholic (though now thankfully recovered.)  In 2014, in a fit of hangover rage, he attacked me and my dad basically blamed me for it.  In 2016, I couldn't take it anymore and cut off pretty much all voluntary contact.  My sister and I have a good, if not always close, relationship.  


Is this how families are?  Are these more or less normal things?  I've always felt guilty because "I had it so good," and family has been such a big thing for my parents, and I want to give them what they always wanted and never had themselves, but I also feel like things weren't and aren't good, I have been mistreated, I feel like I'm only cared about when I'm doing good or acting in ways that fit in with their ideas of who I am or should be, and it's not okay.  I personally feel like the concept of "family" is a joke after all this and knowing what my parents themselves went through.  I feel like I barely have a family.  But how long can I keep playing the bullshit and how far do I want to go to maintain my distance?  I've also thought about reconciling with my brother, if only for him (I know he wants to reconnect) and because I feel he went through so much of this shit too and it was unfair and maybe we were pitted by our parents (or others) against each other in some weird competition at times (my brother was good at sports, but was bad in school; I was the opposite), but I've never gotten any apologies and I hate his behavior.  What's real here?  How much of this played a role in my fucked up mental health?  Should I be angry?  What do I do?  Thoughts?