Exactly and it goes beyond victimhood as well. You'll have a group of people go through the same negative experience (e.g. almost dying from a natural disaster, being held as a POW and tortured) and what's interesting is you'll see a huge variation of the impact of those events.

Some people will come out of it relatively unscathed, while others will be haunted by it for the rest of their lives.

No doubt their past experiences shaped their mindset and how they made sense of the negative experience.