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Growing up with messages that contradict reality teaches you to distrust your own perceptions.

Gaslighting and emotional neglect often come from the same parent, in the same moment.

The problem was never that something is wrong with you. The problem belongs to your childhood.

Trusting your own feelings again can be learned, and trust is the foundation of everything.

Fourteen-year-old Olivia sits at the dinner table with her family, picking at her food. While the others talk in the background, she is absorbed in her own thoughts, trying to sort out in her head why her math teacher seems to hate her. "Why don't teachers like me? I try so hard, but I must be doing something wrong that I don't know about," she worries for the six hundredth time.

"Olivia!" her father says suddenly, breaking through her reverie. "When your mother talks, you listen!" Startled and overwhelmed in the moment, tears come to Olivia's eyes. "There you go again," her mother says. "You don't even bother to listen when I talk, and then you pull out the tears. I've never seen such a selfish kid."

Olivia has been called selfish many times by her parents. They use this word often when they are not happy with something that she did or said or felt. In reality, Olivia is anything but selfish. She is by nature a kind and caring child. She worries a lot, and she feels things deeply. She keeps it all inside because she knows that there is not room for her worries and feelings and problems in her childhood home.

As Olivia goes forward with her life, grows into a young adult, and then gets married and........

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