Why do I feel empathy for my mom being alone during the holidays?

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Hi Blueberry Pancakes, I've been reading Rebecca Mandeville's excellent "Rejected, Shamed, and Blamed: Help and Hope for Adults in the Family Scapegoat Role" (2020), as well as watching her youtube videos, and she talks about how some of us also have strong, lingering feelings of sympathy for our PD parents because we developed those feelings during childhood as a way of surviving. As horrible as they were or could be, those people were our lifeline when we were young, and not being connected to them at that period of time was threatening to us on a very basic level.

I haven't seen my parents in over 13 years and the things they've done to me have been in the realms of sheer cruelty and I'd also say sadism. And yet I still sometimes feel bad for them. One thing that helps, which it sounds as if you've done too, is to be able to step back and see things objectively, even if we're still going through the subjective experiences of feeling the feelings we have for them.

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