dealing with cruel parents
My mother was definitely the main contributing factor of mine and my bro's problems, although I still love her(too soft) and try not to be bitter. She became quite twisted when we were teenagers and didn't let us out, constantly put us down, stopped talking to us apart from to analyze our bodies or something strange like that. She never invited anyone to our house, was always suspicious of everyone; either hated the few friends we had or told us how much better they were than us; forbid us from going to parties; would look us up and down when we walked into a room;played lots of head games; tried to play myself and my bro off against each other so we would have noone to confide in; never said 'I love you', 'I'm proud of you' etc; treated us like aliens when we hit puberty..I could carry on but I won't. Needless to say, there were a few gaps in her child-raising skills. Luckily, our dad is a beautiful person so we actually turned out to be very nice people despite all that

(My dad was often abroad on business when we were little).
The only problem is that we both suffer from sp. I have made some great improvements in the last five years and one of the reasons this was possible was that I realized that resenting my mother and feeling bitter about things was only going to make me more angry and less at peace with myself. There is no justice in situations like these and very few parents will admit the bad things that they did in the past, so my advice would be to not let resentment and bitterness take over your life and accept what happened as part of your destiny.
Some of the most unhappy and unpleasant people I have met in my life are those who held deep grudges against parents for example. There is nothing you can do to change the past, so don't let cruel or hopeless parents destroy your present and future(fully aware that this is hard to do :wink: