And there was no one around to meet your needs?

This actually goes right along with the more info about needs that I was talking about.

When you are a kid your caretakers are supposed to meet your needs. Adults are supposed to meet their own needs or get some other adults to meet their needs. Children can help around the house, etc., but they are not supposed to be meeting the needs of adults. The adults who get children to do this are people who didn't get their needs met as children and never fixed this issue (and think that it is okay to do this to a child).

So when a child doesn't get her needs attended to and she has to meet the needs of an adult, she never learns that she has needs or how to meet them and she was trained to be of service to others only. A child learns about her needs by getting them met as a child and then learning how to do it herself as she grows older.

I also think that there is a glitch in there to being able to meet your needs as an adult if you grew up this way. I think that the child in this dysfunctional environment learned that it wasn't okay to have needs. You already talked about craving to be loved. Well, I think that a child learns that getting love = denying her needs. So as an adult, of course you won't meet your needs because this will jeopardize getting love. Just realizing this helped me to unlock my ability to meet my needs.

And when you cannot meet your own needs, meeting the exact needs for someone else is the 2nd best thing, meeting your needs vicariously.