My parents have both passed away. I don't think they could hear me; they certainly couldn't deal with feelings.
I think as they say, they did the best they could. Obviously, I wanted much more, more like what I saw children in healthier families getting--I don't mean materially. Although when I was much younger, I was focused on the material.

Now, I see that the upset I felt about material concerns was just my child-self having something concrete to point to. I really longed for attention and love but could not articulate that.

Immersing myself in books and television was a way as a child to numb my feelings of loneliness and insecurity , anger and fear that my parents could not address. Because their parents had not addressed their needs.

Now sometimes I imagine my parents as the little lonely children they must have been in pre WWII America. My mother was an orphan, my father's father was quite strict, and strongly believed in beating his children. My parents grew up to be people who would rather die than talk about their problems, and they did die without talking about their problems.

My father was an unrecovered alcoholic and my mother's untreated depression progressed on to psychosis.
They were rarely if ever happy. They firmly believed that it was a sign of craziness to go to a psychiatrist or a counselor of any kind and in that they were not unlike many people of their generation or for that matter now.
Sometimes what I thought was the "cold shoulder" from them was actually their inability to deal on any level with feelings. I think anything I was distressed about, they had to minimize. or perhaps their parental guilt would be triggered.
I didn't understand this until I became a parent. It takes a great deal on my part to let my daughter have her anger and fear and not always try to make light of it or minimize it.

I was shocked the first time my daughter said "I hate You." I got angry at my "little ingrate." I also thought I was a failure as a parent and felt very guilty.

Then I realized what was going on and said to my daughter, " I understand, I think you are very angry at mommy right now> Let's talk about that, it's okay to be angry." You can't imagine how quickly her anger dissipated.
Our families and sometimes our friends cannot always be what we need them to be or even what common decency says they should be.
That is why we can find other outlets and understanding persons and meantime keep trying to strengthen ourselves.
I very recently started asserting myself when the situation called for it. People quite close to me were taken aback. It was scary for me to insist on certain boundaries and set bottom lines but it was necessary for my survival.
I am sure "the new me" I will make mistakes, but I have decided I have been passive for too long and a few mistakes in the opposite direction will be okay.

If I lose friends and family over healthy assertion of myself, I never really had them to begin with.

Best to you with your situation.

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