I felt flashes of recognition reading your story.
The martyr act is my father's favorite. "I never did anything. ANYTHING." I remember once during a screaming/cussing rendition of the martyr act he told me that when I was a child, he "ate sandwiches so that we could have something better to eat." Given the hell that this man put my sister and I through throughout most of early years, that statement just struck me as a so ludicrous. Sometimes there's nothing to do but laugh, and realize that some people just don't care about the truth and will say and believe literally anything to maintain the delusions that they cling to. Funny thing is I can remember his own mother, my grandmother, making very similar preposterous statements when I was young, shifting blame for my father's problems and categorically denying any wrong doing despite how obvious it was that she was mainly responsible for his alcoholism and insanity. I guess it runs in families and is just part of the pattern in a dysfunctional family.
I also love it when they go out of their way to point out how bad someone else supposedly has it as a way of de-legitimizing your own anger. In my family its a cousin whose father would never pay child support to his mother when he was a kid. I can't count the number of times as a child being told how lucky I was to "have a real father" and don't I know that ****** would give anything to have what I have? To this day, they still tout our the cousin. My father has even been so bold as to say "I think ****** has a lot of anger inside of him over the way his father has treated him over the years." To which my grandparents would nod this deep, somber, profound nod. Wow!!!!! And all these years, through the drinking, the long struggle with his mental illness, the chaos, the insanity, the rage, and everything else, they have the gal to talk about how other people probably "have a lot of anger" over the way they were treated by a parent. But me, I don't know how lucky I am.