Hi, sorry to hear about the way your parents reacted. Something that helped me to come to terms with my mom's denial was what a friend and a therapist told me. She said that admitting and remembering you have been cruel to your child is too hard for a parent. If they are not complete monsters, they want to believe they did everything possible to be good and raise their kids well. And sometimes people act automatically, they do weird, cruel things, with some sort of logic that comes from emotions and not from the mind. They might think the most horrible disciplining is the right way to teach a kid how to survive their adult life.

This is a very late reply but in the meantime my father died. It was after a few months of him not picking the phone on me because I got angry that he had taken a loan that he doesn't intend to repay and had given my name and phone number to the credit company to call. I never wrote the letter (as far as I remember) and lately have very little contact with my family, apart from my mother who calls every few days. We almost never discuss anything important, just have the same dialogue again and again about food, weather, and that's it. I sometimes feel like confiding in her and I do this, although I had decided I shouldn't because she is not a reliable person. I've come to terms with the fact that she has had a tough childhood and she never really wanted a child, she wanted a mother to soothe her. She didn't have the emotional stability and resilience to be there for me, she was short-tempered and easily irritated by me because she poured her own self-loathing and low self-esteem onto me. I used to feel angry that both my mom and my dad became much nicer to me once i didn't need them anymore, that they would seek support, reassurance, guidance from me, when they didn't give me any. Now I am mostly sad when I think about this - I can see they were lost in their own way and didn't have much to give but needed a lot to take. My sadness is that I might be repeating this pattern. I'm torturing myself a lot now and then and feel sad that I would've been able to do much more if I didn't have to fight the monsters in my soul. But I think I find some sort of consolations, understanding and forgiveness in the thought that I was raised by two broken parents, who, at that point, couldn't do better, and among family that didn't want to admit that there is anything wrong so they can save face. It took decades for them to admit my father was an alcoholic, despite being witness to his almost daily comatose drunkenness.

I hope you find some solace.