The unfortunate truth is that when you give and give without balance, you don’t actually attract more generosity back. You often attract the opposite: people who take. And no matter how much you give, your own needs remain unmet.

I didn’t see it for years, because like so many givers, I told myself, “It’s fine, I don’t need anything back.”

The child brain doesn’t interpret life events through the same lens of logic and context that we as adults do. As children, we are meaning-making machines. We store every experience as evidence of “what love means” or “what I need to do to be safe and cared for.”