So growing up in the household that I grew up in many times if I wasn't good I would get punished and so what I learned at a very early age is to be good so I could be rewarded and one of the things that my user took advantage of was the fact that I wanted to people please I wanted to make the adults in my life happy and so gifts were a huge part of my childhood sexual abuse and Gifts were also the love language of my father who was not my person that sexually abused me but he was very verbally abusive and controlling and so he would give me gifts as a way to show me that he cared for me instead of instead of affection or healthy expression and my mom's love language was that too so if she you could just show that she could provide for us then everything was fine so that lack of emotional connection and that being given gifts um as a result of the behavior if my behavior was good I would get a gift if my behavior was bad I would I would get punished I learned very early on that relationships were transactional that that and also I learned not only could I get something that people wanted something from me so it was this this kind of ebb and flow of kind of beginning to take a step back and assess like what does that person want what does that person want what does that person want even those who weren't sexually abusing me or or abusing me at all everybody in life it was a transaction and so growing up in this place of of always feeling like somebody wanted something from me and always feeling like I just had to wait for the other shoe to fall before I found that out and that's a very difficult place to to be in because I could never fully open up I could never fully let myself be vulnerable and even into all of these years later I sometimes still catch myself feeling like that person wants something from me and really have to talk my way through that before um before even walking into walking into a conversation with certain people um my husband and I have been married for 21 years and in the beginning that was a really hard piece that that trickled over into our marriage me feeling like this relationship is transactional too and so together we've worked we're working through that and um really beginning to understand um that that's not the norm of people in life um and that I don't have to kind of stay trapped in that space of a give and take if I give you this then you're going to give me this um and that I can really Branch out and root into to really rich in-depth relationships with people and friendships with people and even professional relationships so if you're if you're feeling like that I really encourage you to you know take a step back and and really do some work around that because it's so worth it.
