I can attest to the fact that we're not all "born with a silver spoon in our mouths." Just take a moment right now to imagine what life would be like for you if most of the things we often take for granted were not there for you. No good food, clean clothes, lack of physical and emotional security, no validation from your parents and loved ones, no proper home to live in, lack of love from your parents, inadequate heat in the cold winter, unequal treatment, no functional bathroom, and several other things that we all regard as the basics of living a comfortable life.Just imagine now that your life with the direct opposites of all the things I earlier mentioned and more. What if you had the lack of parental love and approval, exhaustion, neglect, physical abuse, emotional abuse, anxiety, anger, shame, violence, hunger, and several others.I need you to imagine that you were just a kid - a very young child in your "parents" home - but living in the environment, we earlier explained with virtually no hope of redemption from the extent of suffering you were going through. Like an endless reign of misery in your life!I have a question for you right now, how terrible and nasty does your upbringing as a child have to be before you'll undoubtedly fail in life as an adult or even die young? Did you know about the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACES)? It's a research study that was carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Health Maintenance Organization Kaiser Permanente. Well, the answer to my first question was studied by ACES. The study sought to define how terrible your childhood had to be before you're almost sure to be a failure in life. According to ACES, when it comes to factors that could cause a child to do poorly in life, they identified ten risk factors. These factors are physical abuse, emotional neglect, physical neglect, household substance abuse, sexual abuse, household mental illness, exposure to domestic violence, divorce or parental separation, emotional maltreatment and incarcerated household member. The study then proceeded to monitor thousands of kids just to evaluate how these risk factors affected their lives. After obtaining facts from their observation, they concluded that if you had about four or more of these risk factors, then the possibility of having a happy life will be below average.The study also implies that there is a high possibility that you will end up living a lousy life. We can conclude that these are mere numbers, but the truth is that based on the numbers, if you happen to have just a score of four risk factors or more, then you're battling against incredible odds in your life. After taking the ACES test, I scored seven, and this means that I had seven risk factors against me. The odds are stacked against me to the extent that no right-thinking person would have expected me to do well in life. Well, it would have been easy for you to bet against me then, but you would have also lost your fortune at the end of the day because my life turned out better than all predictions. Under normal circumstances, I should have suffered chronic anger problems, depression, and anxiety. I should have become an alcoholic and never be able to raise my family. Probably, I should have long died either by depression, drug abuse, suicide, or alcoholism.I was raised poor in a trailer, which left me with little space to seek refuge anytime I needed to escape my father's fury. My mom was a registered nurse, and my father was a Marine. The abuse I suffered started at a very early age, and it was one nightmare I would never wish my enemies to experience. My dad didn't just abuse me; I never impressed him regardless of how much effort I made or how well I performed in anything.