I have had therapy so maybe I shouldn't need to post about this (again, yes - apologies) but this has to be the year that I give up trying to ''clear my name''. What a new year's resolution. I won't be sharing that. But I will be feeling it. I'm getting down out of the dock. I never did anything wrong. I took money from them but they don't own me. I didn't sell my right to my own perspective.
All of 2020 and 2021 were spent trying to make my parents 'see' that they hurt me but that made them so angry. When I tried to force a conversation on them to raise some of the inconsistencies in their logic, they stonewalled me (20 months so far). I wanted to get an answer to the question how come my pain is a grudge, and accusation, but yours is valid and you're making me feel bad for having caused you pain (by telling you that you caused me pain 
but by trying to force this conversation I ended up being labelled abusive.
They want me back in the family but only as an apologetic, grateful, subordinate daughter who accepts all of the labels. I literally must accept their right to label me paranoid and mentally ill. There is no wriggle room, no chink in their defensiveness. They accept zero feedback.
I'm not mentally ill but my father was at my age. (He's still on seroxat).
Even the original label, the 'mother wound' I was never paranoid. I was too trusting. My father went to a psychiatric hospital with depression and paranoia and they cannot see that that is text book projection. Well of course not.
I made the mistake of thinking that our unhealthy family dynamics were all so OBVIOUS that they would have to see.
I was wrong. They see nothing. They see a mentally ill middle-aged ingrate and that's all they'll ever see.
I have wasted two years battling with them when what they need from me is that I make them feel superior.
2022 I will resist trying to make them see. They won't, they can't They can sit their feeling sorry for each other having such an awful ingrate daughter but I will not be contacting them.
I never thought they were this bad though. I never thought it would get to this. I held on to hope for a long time that they would acknowledge (never apologise, but acknowledge) that I didn't fit the labels projected on to me.
I want to be free to be calm , content, wise, curious and artistic and I just cannot do that if I'm squaring up to be invalidated and erased.