Also wanting love and caring and yet getting scared or angry and pushing it away is also mimicking what the child in you "did learn" from the parent who failed to provide healthier nurturing.

I am just being general to give you the main reasons behind your challenges. The lack of proper nurturing can be from having an abscent mother, a mother with and addiction, a narcisistic mother, or a mother whom herself has psychological challenges.

Unfortunately, with the way women have been more self involved with personal goals, careers, and relationship challenges, there are a vast amount of children that have been growing up without the proper nuturing. Unfortunately more women with children are outsourcing with day cares etc, instead of focusing on the necessary nurturing that really needs to happen with their young children. Hense we have been experiencing a greater number of our youth who struggle with anxiety and depression issues and struggle to grow and feel good about interacting and going through all the difficult stages of growing up. Many begin to experience depression in their teen years and right through the 20's with this question of, "why am i struggling so much"?

What will help you is finding a "good therapist" that can help you sort through your past and become more aware of what you missed, what is truely "not your fault" and how to slowly learn to overcome it.