Everyone has a back story. A back story is a person’s personal history. It applies to any history, good, bad, or neutral. However, it is most commonly used for the most significant negative thing(s) that happened to someone, usually in that person’s childhood, but sometime in the past. Back stories are used by many people to generate sympathy or to justify a reason for a person’s negative present. When they’re used for this purpose, I call them sob stories.
Sob stories are most effective when given to the privileged–especially those who for some reason or other feel guilty about their comparative success. People who’ve inherited their money sometimes feel guilty for having unearned resources; people who have won the lottery or had extreme good fortune in their job. Scam artists know or sense this, and capitalize on it (in the purest sense of the word.)
Now, remember, I only call back stories, or personal histories, “sob stories” when they’re used, consciously or unconsciously, to generate sympathy for the purpose of manipulation, getting material goods, money, or forgiveness for bad behavior. Some people can have genuinely terrible things happen to them and use their awful past to enrich their unproductive present. I don’t use the term “sob story” to lessen the wrongness of what happened to them, only to show my disapproval at their motivation for sharing it.
Some common sob stories are:
- An abusive past. This could include abuse or molestation as a child, an abusive relationship, being a victim of a violent crime or other such events.
- A misspent youth. This can include a criminal past, wild teenage years and the like.
- Economic victimization. This category includes being the victim of a scam artist or bad investment advice or even being laid off from one’s job.
I could go on, but you get the picture.
When you hear these stories–most of which are true–your first instinct is to feel pity and horror at the teller’s misfortune. Your next instinct is usually to try to do something to either fix the problem (men) or alieviate the suffering (women).
However, if you carefully analyze even some of the worst stories, the basic events are not at all that uncommon. A huge number of people come from dysfunctional families and suffer abuse at the hands of family members to some degree or other. Significant numbers of the population, if one believes the crime statistics released each year, are victims of physical, mental, and sexual abuse as well as other violent crimes. Even more are victims of bad luck with finances and lose their jobs to downsizing or a bad economy.
These things, no matter how horrible they sound at first hearing, are not all that uncommon. This does not make them right or lessen the damage done, but neither does it make the person unique or special; life is tough all over.
The fact is that most people to whom bad things happen recover at least enough to function at a minimal level in society. Some overcome the negatives in their lives so well that they actually use them to spur themselves on to remarkable successes. Some, however, chain themselves to them so completely that these negatives constantly bleed into their present and damage their future. God has provided the best advice ever on the subject in the book of Philippians chapter three and verse thirteen when Paul says that he is “forgetting those things that are behind and reaching forth to those that are ahead…” Forget the negatives of the past and concentrate on your goals for the future.
That’s what successful people do.
Losers, on the other hand, blame everything on their (usually distant) past. Some losers come ready-equipped with a good sob story to use; maybe their dad was a violent drunk. Others have to really stretch to try to generate one. Case in point:
I’m not a bum either, and I never have been, but in 1996 I had a reversal of fortune. I’d gone off to college and it just didn’t work out at the school I’d chosen. Unhappy, I dropped out and headed back to my hometown. With dropping out my financial aid came to an end, and I found myself nearly broke and without an income stream. Homelessness followed quickly and naturally from the situation.
I just love that. “Homelessness followed quickly and naturally…” from dropping out of college.
How many people drop out of college every year?
How natural is it for homelessness to result?
Um, HELLO!
The above quote was written in 2004, but in reference to a stretch of homelessness that lasted for five years. That means that the writer is blaming his then homelessness on a fairly common and extremely mild sort of event that happened to him FIVE YEARS before finally getting himself off the streets. So, what … in FIVE YEARS he couldn’t find a way to overcome the disappointment of dropping out of college?
Come on!
And that’s not even all. Wait until you hear how he twists good to make it appear evil.
What you are more than who you are will determine the resources that are available to you. Women can rely more easily on family than men can. A man who runs to his parents suffers an amazing ego shot, in addition to the abuse he takes from others. Certain ethnic groups are good at supporting members until they get on their feet, immigrant groups for instance. If you are a single, young, strong man, of American birth, then you, my friend, have no one but yourself to depend on.
In other words: I’m a White Anglo-Saxon male, probably from a good family (ergo the ego hit).
Can you stretch “coming from a good family and an advantageous heritage” into “coming from a priveledged background made me homeless” any better than that?
