I'm sorry for your loss. The horrible thing about being an ACOA is that often we are attracted to relationships with other people who are emotionally disfunctional themselves because it is all we know & it fuels our sick need for abandonment. I have seen this in myself & alot of the ACOA books I have read list this as a symptom of being an acoa.
This is not your fault that these people did this to you. I too had a horrible time picking good friends.....especially in high school I hung around with a "pack" of girls that were emotionally abusive twards me & treated me like a tag along. They NEVER valued my friendship & the more abused I was the less value I thought I had & the more I lost confidence in my ability to make new friends....and the fear of being "friendless" made me put up with the unnessicary abuse for much longer than I should have. They eventually faded me out by dropping sevral notacible "hints" but it took me a few YEARS to feel totally rejected & finially detach from them (senior year of school). My best friend for sevral years now....is also a child of a dysfunctional family. Her father was an abusive drug addict & her mother was so mentally ill that she let her kids live in squaller & animal feces until DCFS took her & her sister away. So we have alot of the same issues & sometimes now that I am trying to get healthy I feel hurt or betrayed by some of the things she does because she is still in a very unhealthy mindset. She is also very nagative & draining with out realizing it. When I am trying to be possitive she will often attempt to bring me down....subconciousley by talking about and dwelling on & dumping the negative things on me. She was a young single mom at 15 with not many possitive things in her life & I can see how she is sometimes emotionally abusive to her own child....with out knowing it....I see that she is perpetuating the cycle of unhappiness,mental illness, and emotional abuse in her baby & until she gets help she is going to continue to do so. I can't talk to her about it. How do you say to your best friend that I think you are abusing your child & I think you need therapy with out loosing a much valued friendship? I don't know. I have been where you are and it's not pleasant. I think we have a HIGH TOLERANCE for abuse being ACOA'a so we just accept abuse as normal and hang on WELL after normal people would have let go of a relationship. I know I do...not sure about your particular situation.
I have found with my above friendships that my "friends" were emotionally healthy, stable, "normal" teenagers who had NO idea about the suffering and inner turmiol that I was dealing with. It DID NOT give them the right to abuse me the way they did....but now I realize that I was very likley a "drag" because I wasn't (and still am not fully) healthy and healthy people are disturbed by emotionally unhealthy people & don't know how to cope with their behaviors.