I can so relate to what I bolded.

What I've come to in the last year, though, is that for me it's the (dissociated) pain that my FOO didn't care. And I dissociated, cut off, part of myself to stop the pain.

The problem for me is that even having gotten that part of me "back" I am still all alone -- husband deceased, adult children have their own lives ( both seem to be doing mostly OK, thank goodness). I had fallen apart after my husband died 18 years ago and was in therapy almost continuously, but in the fallen-apart state I couldn't and didn't rebuild a life despite my best efforts.

I still try. But the failure of my last therapy at the end, her inability to accept my for who I am and my "strange" non-conventional temperament, and her looking down on me because of that is a real repeat of attitudes both within my FOO and conventional female society, too, which most therapists are members of. And part of that cliquish-ness is a rejection of women who are temperamentally different.

Ok the "answer" to that is to look elsewhere. But at 70, how I am supposed to build a life even if I more or less have the "self" to do it? Few skills or talents to do that because of both temperament and trauma during most of my life.

But yes, I still try. My kids care about me some. And, more to the point, maybe, I care about me some. So I still try. It's incredibly hard. But how is that new, in the history of human life on Earth? Of course, it isn't and that doesn't make it any easier.