Everyone has a choice to take the bad parts of their life and reject them or to choose to make them a lesson on what you don't want to see moving forward.

Doesn't mean you don't have empathy or sympathy for people who have hard lives, but it's a dangerous road assuming people aren't capable of choosing for themselves how to behave. We had better have a choice, or nothing can ever get better and we can't really give people freedom since they aren't able to choose for themselves.

Epictitus was a physically disabled slave in ancient Rome, and he said a lot about this sort of thing: people could control his body, but they couldn't control his mind. Now, over a millennium later, that lame slave has his name remembered alongside the philosopher king Marcus Aurelius as people of great virtue.