You're right, a lot is determined by the way we choose to look at things. We can decide to take a hard situation and make it into a learning experience as I have seen happening in my own life recently. I chose to not react angrily but to look for ways to become more skilled in communicating with others and learn how to diffuse a situation instead of reacting violently in response to an incident involving a loved one.

Maybe people aren't equipped with the right tools to handle change so they fall back to negative patterns, instead of making the conscious decision to look for alternatives, so it's helpful to find those alternatives and utilize them in our own lives and introduce them to others. This has worked out to my benefit in the last couple of years. I am fortunate in that aspect, I think.