"nurture Vs Nature" the Never Ending Debate

"Nurture vs Nature" The Never Ending Debate

In my own life I believe that the "Nurture vs Nature" debate is about even. I grew up as a foster child and had 2 siblings. We all went thru a lot of horrible abuse. My older sister could take it and has not been mentally stable in over 30 yrs. My younger brother sheltered from the worse of the abuse, is a fully functioning adult that is a great contribution to world. I have some residual issues yet I too am a fully functioning adult with a wife and family and a career to be proud of.

I was told that I was not to have survived the age of 5 from the abuse that I sustained early on. By the time I was 13 I had been in 14 foster homes, 2 adoption homes, 2 group homes, and juvenile detention center. I had lived in 48 of the 50 states. With this kind of nurturing I was on the wrong path to nowhere. I was a tough kid. I lived to protect my little brother. We were separated when I was 13, he stayed at the foster home and was adopted while I was shipped off to a group home for troubled kids. He had a few issues but hey lived a normal life and did normal stuff. He turned out great. My sister is a different story. She was separated from my brother and I when I was 5. She was sent to a hospital and later was adopted. But she never came out of the delusions that she suffered from. Strong drugs had detearated her mental capacity to a pre-pubesant age. To this day she is 40 yrs old and acts like a 12 girl in most things she does. I struggled in my early teens but by the time I was 17 I had figured out that I needed to stop hating the world because it was killing me. So I decided to live not just survive.

Now my siblings and I all had the same parents thus the same genetics pool. We are different personalities and we all came out of our child hoods very differently. How is it that even though I suffered the worst of all the abuse that I am in a better place then my sister who was removed early on? How is it that my brother turned in to an upstanding member of society with his past? How is it that I changed my life to become what I a today instead of in jail or dead? I think that some of the things that helped me get thru everything, was my stubbornness. I get that from being half Irish and half Scottish. That is genetics. I was able to endure great amount of pain. Genetics. I was able to adapt very quickly and I was able to learn quickly. Genetics. Well what about nurture?

I learned from other people. I learned to watch people and to read them. I learned that people laughing are less likely to hit you than those who had a bad day. I learned what not to do to people you care about. Deep down thru all the crap that I was being subjected to, I knew, I felt that it was not how it was suppose to be. I do not know where this awareness came from genetics or environment it just was.

The nurturing that I received

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