Many years ago, I had attended a personal development type of seminar. The speaker asked the participants to go back in time and to imagine they were five years of age. The seminar leader’s instructions were as follows… “close your eyes… and now in your imagination go back to the time when you were five years of age… look down at your feet and what do you see?”

Within minutes of this “vision” exercise, I felt this incredible urge to burst into tears. Following the instructions, I looked down and saw that I didn’t have any shoes on my feet. I saw dirty bare feet. And, as I looked down I saw the scruffy, ripped clothes of a little girl who was not properly cared for.

That sad, little, abused girl was me, the youngest of four children. My parents both worked outside the home. My father had one full-time job and two part-time jobs, that allowed him to put a roof over our heads and food on the table. My Mother worked in a factory and the type of factory work she did was grueling. She returned home from work cranky and exhausted.

Neither one of my parents was happy, and, consequently, their marriage wasn’t a happy one, which spilled over into the way they behaved toward their children. Both of them had been raised in dysfunctional and abusive families. My father had been severely abused as a child. His father had died when his mother was pregnant with him, and his mother, having had one hell of a difficult upbringing herself, grew into an angry woman. She directed all her bitterness outwardly, and my father was often on the receiving end of her anger. Neither my father nor my mother had ever received the sort of love and kindness that they deserved. In fact, their childhoods had been quite the opposite.