I am also finding this thread comforting or reassuring in a way - have had to cut off contact with all my family (of origin) to preserve my own mental health (and for the sake of my own family) as they are so emotionally destructive, and it's good to know it's not just me. Even though they appear pretty normal on the surface, they have an evil side to them that made my life hell for years - decades, in fact.
After years of counselling and therapy, I now have the life I dreamed of, with a truly loving DH and now a wonderful DC - but it wouldn't have happened if I had kept trying to make them love me, as I was stuck doing for a very long time.
It's incredibly hard though to cut them out, and I wish nearly all the time that it didn't have to be this way - but bitter experience has taught me that it does. The assumption that mothers are all basically loving and good really gets to me - it seems so many of them are fundamentally selfish, unloving or worse, and it's hard when yours is one of those yet you keep getting the image of mother as the one who will always care for you, always knows best etc etc, perpetuated everywhere.
IMO we have a primal need to trust our parents - it's survival after all - and to look up to them and see them as worthwhile people, and the realisation that they are really not trustworthy and not decent is as painful as anything, I think. But if that is the case, and they are poisoning your life, then sometimes the only way is to walk away completely.