I can relate to most of this.

My T has recently reminded me/us that I/we have experienced CEN. My mother was hardly around and never fought to protect me from my abusive father. I love them both, and I understand that they were struggling from their own issues. But it affected us children. My sister is in denial, but my half-siblings (from both my mom's side and dad's side in their previous marriages) are all screwed up from CEN, too. It didn't matter who they married, they all received similar treatments. We're all screwed up in similar and different ways.

My father was an alcoholic.

I was parentified, yet I fought with my sister all the time. We grew apart and are mutually estranged from one another. I tried to reach out to her during this pandemic, but she refused to have anything to do with me. Like dad did to us, she pits other family members against me.

CEN runs much deeper than individual neglect when you have siblings. When siblings are involved, CEN affects sibling relationships, and it also increases the potential for sibling abuse. I lived through constant fights with my sister. I wasn't always innocent, but I wasn't always guilty either. We were so close in age that we never really learned to get along.

My mother just passively allowed everything to happen. She turned a blind eye to the abuse that she allowed to happen. She's loving, soft-spoken, and way too submissive. She, too, was a product of child maltreatment. So, I feel sorry that my mother - now in her mid-80s - continues to people-please, and finds her only purpose in life to help others, as if parentification became her lifelong journey. She is supposed to be the one taken care of by my niece, but my unvaxxed niece and her unvaxxed boyfriend decided to have children during the pandemic. They now have two children, and they push off the babysitting duties to their great grandmother (who is vaccinated but not yet boosted because my antivaxxing family doesn't see it as a priority to take her to get her shots). My sister, who is vaccinated but not boosted, traveled many times to see our mother, who could have risked her life. I remain really upset, and there's nothing I can do about it.

The emotional abuse continues over and over again. And it worsened during this pandemic!

I wished I had severed ties with my entire family. It's hard to let go of the tie with my mother, because I do love her and worry for her health. I love her, despite her inability to love me the way I had wished. But I'll take whatever love she has to offer. The guilt becomes more severe as she ages, yet I feel even more depressed by the betrayal traumas as I age with no legacy, with crippling disabilities, and with the kind of loneliness that CEN brought about.

Anything that life stressed me out with brought about my CEN to remind me that I was nothing, that I didn't matter, that I was hated, that I was just a rag doll for others to use and abuse. Any self-esteem I had, any confidence I had, was immediately shot down whenever familiarity with my childhood was retraumatizing my adulthood.

CEN is a sore subject for me and my DID system. We all struggle in different ways - all different parts of me, who were largely created because no one cared enough to care enough as a parent. We had to become our own parents. Self-care reminds us of those trauma triggers, which is why self-care is bitterly painful - an oxymoron, if you will.