My past...how did I end up here

We often times forget or don't realize that the way we were raised and the events that happened throughout our lives have a huge impact on who we choose to spend our lives with.

In therapy I came to realize that I have always chosen emotionally unstable and unavailable men. Before my husband, I dated 2-3 sex addicts, one of which was also an alcoholic and a drug addict.
So where did this come from? What led me to seek out addicts? What was I drawn to? Well for starters my mother did the same. She was raised by an alcoholic father who sexually abused her as a child. Her mother was not emotionally available and denied the abuse. My father was never close to his family and left home at age 15. He joined the military art age 17 and after marrying my mother he spent most of their marriage out in the field/overseas. So I come from a long line have people who didn't show or accept affection. I also had a sense of abandonment and always craved male attention.
I was sexually abused by a playmates at the age of 4-5 and then again at age 8 by a friends father. I went to 15 different schools and found it difficult to make friends because I was always "the new girl". However in middle school I began to see how I could get boys attention and by high school I had learned to fill the missing pieces of my heart with that temporary satisfaction. I had a baby at age 15 (with a teenage boy) and was I raped at age 17. I also worked as a stripper from age 19 to 24. After leaning about my husband's addiction, I struggled with many feelings of guilt and shame about having been a stripper and I felt like it was karma...my payback for possibly causing this same pain in other wives and girlfriends.
 I can confidently say I am a love addict and question whether I am also a sex addict. While I've always been able to remain faithful in relationships and never felt compulsions to act out sexually, when my hostile relationships ended, I allowed myself to be used by men because at the time I thought this would help me feel wanted and loved, in a sense.
Obviously this is not a healthy way of thinking but having been exposed to so many things of a sexual nature at a young age and having parents who were not in a happy, healthy and loving relationship, I didn't really know what normal relationships look like.
I honestly believe that if it wouldn't have been for my husband's addiction and the intensity of my therapy I don't know that I would have ever figured out how my past was affecting my decisions about relationships. I'd never really heard of boundaries before and I didn't understand them. What I've learned is that we teach people how to treat us and setting boundaries has to do with protecting ourselves.