Are kids really hardwired to love their parents, and what if you weren't??

I always wanted to get away from them, live somewhere else, I was never happy or glad to spend time with them. Being with them seemed like a punishment or something to endure, I never felt like they would protect me from the world.

I deeply loved my parents, and what you're saying here was exactly true for me as well. I couldn't stand to be around them. But I look back now and I know I was avoiding the guilt and pain of making their lives worse. I blamed myself for all of it, for all of how they treated me and how miserable they were to each other. They communicated to me in so many ways that my presence was a burden on them, and so I wanted to be apart from them so I wouldn't hurt them anymore. Simultaneously and very confusingly, I hold a lot of anger from that time, both at them and myself, along with a lot of other emotions that make everything tangled up.

Basically, the only way I got anywhere in recovery was to take on faith that there was love at the bottom of everything, and that if I could think of things through the lens that it was either my love for them or for myself that drove me to do everything I did, I would be able to untangle it and make sense of it. And I've been proven right, at least in my own recovery journey.