Christine - The house is in the kitchen could mean that the kitchen is where the family meet, and is the centre of family life. But the centre of you sense of being protected, by family, by the 'home', was shattered.
You can blame it on your parents, but in fact they were or are the result of a long line of people and a cultural background that led to an awful way of living and relating - and you are the result of that. Those convictions and beliefs they lived by are in you and you are trying to meet and change them. In a way you are in the dream expressing something of those attitudes by, "Why am I doing this when you are not paying attention (she is not looking at me or what I am doing) and you are talking to someone else?" I put down the knife, grab my stack of grey papers (for work/) and walk out of the kitchen."
You like most of us are caught in a form of current, a river that was caused by past events, by people and their beliefs and attitudes, which led to your present situation. In a real sense we are all created by that torrent of events which led to our birth in the body and environment we are now carried along by. We can either be simply carried along by it or we can change its direction. It is bloody hard to do, but it can be done, and each triumph we meet in doing it adds to our strength and alters the future for us and others.
So if possible gradually alter the feelings of being hurt and used, and instead see that we are all in a battle against the very feelings which gave rise to what you have met in your family. Fight the good fight.
You said you had a dream once that ...instead of feeding people...I should "feed the birds."
The people are probably the sort of associations you have with parents and adults in general; the birds are usually about imagination, intuition, the mind, freedom from restraints, thoughts or hidden wishes or hopes, or your longings to move beyond limitations or boundaries, or even love or a lover.
So to feed the birds would be to stop giving energy to the old reactions of hurts and a sense of being used, and instead feeding the uplifting given by your intuition, imagination and feelings of freedom from your old and painful self.
See
http://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/questions-2/#Victim -
http://dreamhawk.com/inner-life/habits/ -
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/secrets-power-dreaming/Tony