The Table Video

What factors are involved in cases where persons learn to love despite all odds?

Transcript:

I’d like to explore that a little bit more with you, and Tom, please, I’d love for your perspective on this too. But thinking about the difference, right. Some people who emerge from circumstances of abuse and exploitation, and a very difficult upbringing, emerge, and they emerge with the same characteristics as those who raised them.

And others emerge from abusive backgrounds with loving character that is almost the opposite. And I think, in a vacuum of course, anyone who comes out of circumstances like that wants to be better than their abusers. What’s the difference though? What is the X factor in making someone transcend their own upbringing?

I have at least two possibilities. One is resilient children from at-risk backgrounds are often resilient because of one key person, might not be their parent. It often isn’t their parent, but a neighbor, an aunt, a grandmother, someone who deeply cares about that person. So that’s the safe person that enables them to grow and mature and so forth.

And the other is, I wouldn’t underestimate the power of choices. Sometimes people have goals and they pursue them, pursue them doggedly, so with kind of an end it mind, it kind of ends up shaping some of these characters.

Those are the two that I first thought of. And the third I might just throw in is that at least in most situations I know, folks who are in abusive situations, homes, et cetera, have some access to a community outside that home, be it the classroom at school, be it the church community, be it friends in the neighborhood. Sometimes some of those people, some of those communities can really make a big difference in pushing someone away from the abuse that they’ve been raised in.