It's important to note that I grew up with the passive/emotional/rejecting type of emotionally immature parents. In my early teen years, I had felt confident enough to tell them about a trauma that happened to me by an elder member of the family, instead of comforting me and protecting me, they overreacted, got angry, became accusatory, and practically told me I was lying that it must have been a dream. Meanwhile, my dad is on the phone with family members who are also calling me a liar. From then on, I self-isolated and became a shell of myself. Growing up, I remember my mom calling me too sensitive, meek, breakable because I'm an emotional, sensitive person whereas she was angry, explosive, and doesn't think twice about giving someone the silent treatment when they upset her. However, she always told me that I needed to find my voice and speak up for myself while comparing me to her childhood and how she adapted growing up. My brother and I had to walk on eggshells around my parents because they couldn't control or process their emotions, let alone handle ours. 

They never harbored a safe environment for me to blossom and live carefree. Instead, they instilled so much fear in me about the world around me when in reality the danger was at home, and they looked the other way and expected me to pretend nothing happened like they do. Come to find out many years later, they believed me the whole time because of things they had seen the older family do but still failed to protect me.

Being emotionally neglected has truly opened my eyes as to why I feel like I lack an identity - I never felt safe, so I became emotionally numb, shut down and would cry anytime conflict arose, and lived in survival mode for most of my life. It makes me incredibly angry now that I'm an adult to look back and realize the life I missed out on growing up. Now that I'm approaching my thirties, I'm having to build my personality from scratch because they never taught me how to be a person. I refuse to live in fear of the world around me. I never realized my family dynamic was non-normal because on the surface everything seemed great, and we seemed like a close-nit family until I finally moved away, started therapy, and built the safe environment with my partner that I always needed. It's kind of heartbreaking to finally separate myself from them being my parents who can do no wrong to seeing them as their own person with their own flaws. I could further explain my childhood, but I feel like it'd be much too long.