When you’re a kid growing up, you have certain expectations of what your life – what your immediate surroundings – are going to look like.  You expect to be safe.  You expect to be loved unconditionally.  You expect there to be food on the table, stability in your home, enough money to take care of the needs that come up, whatever they might be. 

But for some of us, it didn’t always work out that way – in fact, most of the time, it didn’t. 

And those of us who grew up in households like that, where there was dysfunctionality or addiction – maybe abuse of some kind – we learned to come at the world in a certain way.  We learned that the love that we received was conditional, and that we were always trying to be good enough to earn that love.  And so, we learned how to please other people and act the way that they wanted us to act in order to give us that love. 

And because of all that, we never really felt safe…