4 Strengths That Help People Overcome a Rough Childhood

Childhood maltreatment often leads to poor functioning in later life—but some people manage to achieve positive well-being. What personal strengths do they have that would allow them to defy the odds? This was the central question of a study led by Janet Schneiderman, a professor at the University of Southern California.

To explore this inquiry, Schneiderman and her collaborators interviewed 21 adults about their lived experiences with childhood maltreatment. As children, the participants had engaged with the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, with some being placed in foster care. The researchers largely asked participants about personal traits, family dynamics, and factors that supported or hindered their success. From there, they analyzed participants’ narratives for themes.

The results were striking. Four overarching themes emerged, each breaking down into subthemes. The results of the study are summarized below.

Theme 1: Seeing oneself in a good light. The participants’ narratives included reflections on their personal and professional success. This theme broke down into two sub-themes:

• Self-worth. Participants viewed their self-worth through the lens of success in school, work, and their lives overall. Some shared that they had to overcome difficult circumstances and feelings and worked diligently to arrive at self-acceptance. One participant shared: “I had to love myself again and see what I wanted in life because, at some point, I was lost.”
• Helper role. For these individuals, being a helper meant sharing their experiences, providing financial support, working in a helping role, and helping children and their families. Some interviewees were inspired by their struggles to help others. One person expressed: “So just being able to be an inspiration to other people, be encouragement or just tell people you can make it out.”

Theme 2: Moving forward. Participants also delved into how they journeyed forward with their lives to attain greater well-being. This theme also had two sub-themes.

• Letting go of the past. Participants expressed the need to change their “old ways” of thinking and forgive the people who had caused them harm in the past. One participant recounted: “I went from being a victim and always telling a story about how something happened to me to becoming a survivor and telling stories about how I overcame and how I am where I am now.”
• Being future-oriented. Interviewees’ plans for the future encompassed education, work/career, living and financial situations, family, and travel.

Theme 3: Coping with life. Participants relied on different coping strategies to deal with their challenging circumstances, as captured in the three sub-themes below.

• Boundaries. Participants described needing to disengage from people or situations that were toxic, scary, or barriers to growth—and often involved family or friends. In setting boundaries, they wanted to be self-protective and choose who they brought into their lives. One participant stated: “I pick, and I choose... that’s just the way it is. I’m choosing my family. I’m choosing my friends.”
• Routines. Having a routine or schedule, whether it came from themselves or others, provided much-needed structure. Participants also expressed a desire for predictability and certainty, especially about others’ expectations.
• Self-sufficiency. This sub-theme involved not depending on others, persistence in attaining goals, and exalting their independence. Consider the reflection of one interviewee:

Having to just depend on myself, depend on my own, like okay, I don’t have my parents right here. You know, I don’t have nobody that I can go and look up to and be like, hey, my mom’s going to come for you or my dad’s going to come for you because my dad was always in the street, and he used to hit my mom, so that was never good.

Theme 4: Meaning-making. This theme reflected how participants made sense of their lives and broke them down into three sub-themes.

• Maltreatment. Participants reflected on how being maltreated affected their relationships with their families and with others and how they reckoned with their traumatic histories. One participant remarked: “You see people or another situation worse than me, and they’re still breathing, it kind of makes you think, well, I’ll be okay.”
• Foster Care. Participants’ experiences in foster care were mixed. Many reflected on the difficulty of losing their family, and others saw it as valuable (even if after the fact). Many interviewees derived important meaning from the experience and were grateful to those who tried to help them on their journey. One participant expressed: “I feel like I got really lucky by ending up with that lady. She changed our lives for sure. I always saw it as a chance to be a new person.”
• Personal Insights. Through self-reflection, participants identified wanting to be happy and grateful for what they had, improve by being adaptable, and understand that people and the world can and do change. “Whatever came my way, I made the best of it because I don’t know where I’m at, I don’t know why this is going on, why this is like that. I was like, hey, you got one shot at just being happy. Literally, like, absorb negative energy and turn it positive.”

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