Just remember that you can't pick your relatives, including your parents.

We can go through life learning how to more wisely choose friends, how to be selective and form healthy bonds with good and genuine people.

But with our relatives, it's just a genetic role of the dice. And you get stuck with your parent(s), with all of their good and bad qualities, while growing up.

It's not like you chose as a kid to give your time, love and energy to people who make you feel inferior and brush you off. Yet you forged bonds for better or worse with these people.

So just remember that our parents do not represent what is "normal". We get to decide what our normal will be as adults, what we tolerate, what we need in relationships, what healthy and normal is going to be for us.

As children I think most people see their parents as the be-all-end-all epitome of what is "normal", but in adulthood we can begin to see that they are just complicated and flawed humans like everyone else.