Siblings downplaying/ rejecting your experiences

I went NC with my siblings about 10 years ago and I think it was the best decision I ever made.

For some background- I’m the youngest of 6 and parent died when I was 12 and 13. My siblings were all adults at the time they passed.

My dad was an abusive alcoholic and my mum enabled it. I’m still processing a lot of emotions around events that happened when I was a kid with them both. That’s a work in progress.

But I find my siblings reaction to my trauma really difficult, they minimise and try to convince me that I was the lucky one who avoided much of the abuse. They completely ignore that the first 13 years of my life I was emotionally abused on a daily basis and then I had to process the death of my parents as a child and have my whole life turned upside down when they died. I was a child who was threatened with being put in to care on a daily basis.

I acknowledge we all had different experiences with our parents, we essentially had different childhoods due to our ages and relationships with our parents. I recognise that each have their own challenges, but none of my siblings seem to accept that I have strong feelings about our family. One of my brother in particular takes issue with me having strong feelings about my childhood. He implied that I should be grateful I wasn’t sexually abused. Like that’s the benchmark for trauma.

My sister and I, we had totally different childhoods. She was my dad’s golden child, she was beautiful and quiet and he would want to take him everywhere with him. She had to go to the pub with him even when she was young and spent time around him and his friend while they were drunk. This sounds awful, I can’t imagine some of the things she would have seen and heard around them. I feel like my mum did nothing to protect her. She moved away at 16 to avoid the family and escaped the madness, she was out of the house before my parents got sick.

One of my brothers, R, is gay and my dad hated him for that. Called him unforgivable names and wanted him out the house, got violent with him on a few occasions too. I think this really fucked him up and he ended up in prison, I blame my dad for this.

Why is it that I can see why our parents are to blame for R’s issues, even though I was kid when all this was going on, but nobody gives me the same grace?

I was the invisible kid, the one my dad clearly did not want. My sister was beautiful, I was ugly and fat and my dad didn’t want me there. When I was little he would be out most of the time, but when he was home he made it hell. Him being at home meant he didn’t have the money to be at the pub, and so he wasn’t in a good mood. He would have to stay in the living room, as bedrooms are for sleeping in, and stay quiet and out his way while being in the same room. If I fidgeted he would tell my sister to tell me to stop, because he didn’t like to speak to me directly. My sister relished in telling me ‘Dad, says you better stop that’ as she would speak to him. My mum would tell me to ‘stay out of his way’. When he got sick he was home all the time, just as nasty, but my sister was gone so any venom came directly from him. I was relieved when he died. I never felt safe, cared about, protected or anywhere close to being loved as a child.

But whenever I would speak to my siblings about it I was just made to feel stupid, or that I had no right to feel that way, or that they had it so much worse so how dare I!? I don’t even question who did have it worse, I acknowledge we all had shitty childhoods, it’s not a competition.

When I think about it, going NC is kinda letting my dad win as he intentionally isolated me as child and it continued into adulthood.

Has anyone else experienced this? Was going NC the only solution? There’s no going back now anyway, but I’m curious if anyone managed to mend these kind of relationships?