May it be emotional abuse, physical abuse, or really hard times, perhaps everything was plain horrible …

Some say they learned to survive.

I can say so many things.

But roughly;

My father “taught me” that he was destroyed by his own father, and then by his own lifes misfortunes and some few mistakes. He “taught” me to understand and it grew my empathy, ~ I can understand almost everyone.

My “friends taught” me how to deal with/handle people. And my best childhood/lifelong friend taught me how to stand up for myself, and fight if I have to, a while before we hit the teens, in a time where I was weak at a new school.

My everything, ~ my grandMother, Taught me what love is, and how to be more thoughtful and clever to surprise people who come on rude/mean. …how to make people think and feel, if they can.

And in my early twenties I once taught myself by “coincidence”, that cleaning up and organizing a whole (then shared) flat, left me feeling as if it made my inner clean up and organize, while I was occupied doing the simpler and easier version of that in the outside physical world.

There truly is a duality to every thing and in every aspect. And so we can use that to look at things from other perspectives, and there are what seems like endless options. But we only need some opposites of what feels bad for us. So we can use this idea, for finding the good within the bad very easy.
Just to make the outline, remember that suffering is what gives us the kind of depth that expands and widens our very empathy, our emotional scales, our imagination …
We only understand the craze of the hurt and pain of others, when we know how it feels to “break down”.

Suffering broadens your big picture, and whatever bad might have participated in encouraging that, we know there is always the equivalent of a good version to any such as well, so our big picture is bigger than we tend to realize consciously. While you also connect more dots by understanding emotion more, all together becoming more aware, and growing.

Unfortunately its too easy to get stuck in emotional patterns caused by bad past events.
This is the challenge we are facing.  …in a world of ignorance. …as if just to make it more challenging so you become flexible in your game!?

Suffering and sadness are equally important to all the good times. The harder it was, or the more there was, the more you have grown.
We each discover the details for ourselves in our own time, in our own ways. There are the lessons learned, in all of who you are.
We have to choose to appreciate it all, for the good things that we become good at finding within the bad things.

Turn things to good ~ Turn thing to your advantage.
See things good ~ See things to your advantage.
The more we do it, the better we get at it.