Nice to see that things seem to be looking up for you, Robby. ("Seem to be" = God forbid I should start feeling optimistic.)
You've inspired several different conversations here, sometimes challenging, sometimes touching, but never without your personal touch.
Yeah, well, families...If I start writing about that now, I might never leave home again. Didn't have an unusually terrible childhood in the main, but there were conflicts, ambiguities and withdrawal of love along the way that certainly made things, um, interesting. I suppose I can thank my folks for my career choices.
As haennie mentioned, I too believe that it's possible to turn things around in the way family members treat each other, in particular, the way that parents treat their children. But you first need to survive your upbringing, physically and emotionally, in order to even begin the tremendous amount of work required to rewrite history, or to at least approach a different, happier ending to the story. I also believe that you need to do a lot of work on yourself but, the reality is, it's often not worth the effort, as has been amply demonstrated in this thread.
(Without going into too much detail here -- I really don't want to be in a position to never leave home again, and no pun intended -- but I only came to know my father in the months before he died. I came to learn that he did the best he could, and what he had to offer wasn't a whole lot. He grew up in a somewhat loveless home, and his mother resented him because he was not the daughter she was hoping for. She and his father had planned to have only two children, and both were boys.)
Children's relationships with their parents are not at all easily malleable (just ask anyone who's worked with families in their professional lives, or someone who's had a family), no matter how many individual examples we may know of to the contrary. A lifetime is invested in the ways in which Mommy and Daddy treat their children, and these are about as easily changed as is individual temperament. Or height.
What's also heartbreaking, in addition to parents who are incapable of love, parents who stifle or use their children's feelings against them, or parents who otherwise neglect or abuse their children, is children who grow up and continue to chase after the love from one or both parents that was never available to them in the first place, and never will be. They often do this with a level of aggression and persistence that's rarely seen. I can't tell you how many times I've witnessed this in my work and among friends and colleagues. I've seen it here on SR too many times as well, and in many cases, the person isn't even aware that he or she is continuing their parent(s) work of banal or aggressive abuse by looking for the love that simply is not there. (I'm not just talking about SR here, but the other examples in my life that I've described.)
Some people sacrifice their lives to this failed expedition, with little to show for it besides the emotional scars.
On a lighter note, and in my experience, the notion of "happy families" is a more or less overblown bit of propaganda (except on menus in Chinese restaurants) that, among much else, works in the service of supporting both capitalism and democracy, two very different things. Life is hard, and it's both more difficult (competing demands and multiple conflicts, e.g.) and more simple (division of labor and the potential for multiple supports, e.g.) when there is more than one or two people involved.
Parents are just people, people with their own problems and their own ways of engaging with them or ignoring them. Some of them don't like children, even their own, and some of them don't like people in general. This is why we find each other. The best thing you can do with someone you love and who loves you is hold onto them as though your life depended on it. With, of course, a very loose grip.