I appreciate you sharing your experience, but keep in mind two things: 1. It's unclear what your family member was going through. Your own experience is much m

I appreciate you sharing your experience, but keep in mind two things: 1. It's unclear what your family member was going through. Your own experience is much more salient to you, but battles are more and more invisible to external viewers, so it makes sense that you would characterize your experience as more difficult. It can be true that you had a horrible experience, and so did this person. There's a reason the "walk to school uphill both ways" meme exists. 2. Your sample size here is very small. Even if it is true that your experience was worse (we can't know for sure), your actions in that circumstance shouldn't be generalized to people-in-general, and the same applies for your family member. > It makes me think some choices are not our own - and if it is predestined in some way at birth, well then yes, more compassion is necessary. I'd encourage you to challenge whether predestination / loss of control is the qualifier for compassion. How can we know, for certain, why people make the choices they do? If you were predestined or not, we don't currently have a way to know. Would people deserve compassion if everything they go through is a direct and pure result of their choices and nothing else?