How do you balance legal/familial obligations with your own desire to leave?

I'm not a native English speaker, so I used a translator to help with some of the wording. I hope everything is still easy to understand.

Here's my situation.

Ever since I was a child, I've never felt emotionally connected to my legal relatives—my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, or anyone else in my family. In my mind, they simply don't feel like my family. At the same time, I recognize that they did provide for this body throughout my childhood and supported me until I became financially independent and started working.

In my culture, adult children are generally expected to take care of their parents and stay close to their family. It's considered both a moral and social responsibility. However, all of us (everyone in our system) desperately want to leave our family of origin behind once we're able to support ourselves and build our own lives elsewhere.

One of the biggest struggles is that we don't know how to deal with the harm our family caused this body. We didn't begin to remember many of our childhood traumatic experiences until middle school.

The difficult part is that we don't experience those memories as our own. They feel like they happened to someone else in the system rather than to the person writing this post. Because of that, trauma therapy has been very confusing for us. We don't really know how we're supposed to process memories that don't feel like they belong to us. It often feels as though we're observing someone else's experiences from a third-person perspective.

So far, the only thing that has consistently helped is limiting contact with the people and situations that trigger us. For example, if my mother is in the same room as me, I often can't fall asleep, no matter how exhausted I am.

At the same time, I worry that choosing to distance myself—or even cut off contact—would be seen as "abandoning" my family. In my culture, that decision would likely be met with strong social criticism.

Some members of our system also experience guilt, almost as if we've taken the place of the family's "real" child, and that child should have been the one to stay with them instead.

I'm wondering if anyone else has struggled with something similar. How have you balanced family obligations, cultural expectations, and your own need for safety and healing?

Thank you for reading.