The past is a record of where you've been, not a road map of where you're heading. Trudi Pavlovsky is a vibrant example of not allowing the patterns of the past to haunt your future.
For the record, she states without a hint of emotion that she was sexually abused as a child by three different people on three different occasions. The incidents contributed to her being a withdrawn and aggressive teenager who dropped out of school at the end of Year 11 and then a young woman who entered destructive and threatening relationships. In her 20s the still unhappy young woman tried three times to end her life, but thanks largely to a mother whose life she strangely mirrored and who taught her daughter everything she needed to know about survival, Trudi emerged from the darkness, determined to be a light for other troubled people.