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Stay with Crim2 today.
Think about how you react when trouble comes.
Let me ask you this.
What is the first thing you do?
Are you one of those people you cry or are you one of those people who you start yelling at other people?
Or do you just run scared and close in on yourself?
I want you to take a look at this list of personal qualities, positive things.
Everybody has at least one of these as a strength.
Are you insightful?
Are you independent?
Are you a take-charge person?
Are you relationship-oriented, creative, funny, moral?
Well, the reason you want to know where your strengths are before trouble comes
is so that you can call on that strength to get you through it all.
Today, you're going to be able to ask yourself what you would have done, for instance,
if you found yourself in the same situation as my guest.
They all fought their way out of hellish situations.
They've been to hell and back. They know what it's like.
For Ruthie Bolton, trouble was there from day one of her life.
Her mother abandoned her at birth and was later killed by a jealous lover.
The grandfather she lived with beat everybody around him, including Ruthie.
And Sharon Kawhi is a doctor today, a doctor,
but she used to think that she was the scum of the earth.
She, too, found herself from day one abused by a cruel father,
shunned because she had a birth defect.
And Lucy Greeley had to find her survival qualities at the young age of nine.
Doctors removed part of Lucy's jaw because she had bone cancer,
hurting her without a complete face.
And for my last guest, Debbie Kiley, trouble came out of the blue.
Debbie found herself stranded on a life raft in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean when it capsized.
And when it capsized, after the boat capsized, what are you thinking?
Does every person who goes out on a boat think that this could happen?
I don't think every person thinks it can happen.
I had done a lot of sailing.
I was the first American woman to do the Whitbread Around the World race.
I took the first all-female maxi across the Atlantic, so it was something that always was there for me.
It was always in the back of my mind.
But when you sink, you say, this can't be happening to me, not me.
I'm too experienced, I know too much, and so on and so on.
So there's this moment of sort of being out of your own body or surreal or...
It's like you're suspended above what's going on and you're watching it,
and you want to believe it's a dream and you know it's not,
and it's without a doubt the most devastating, lonely, frightening feeling I've ever felt in my life.
Now, originally there were five people in the raft, but three of them died?
Three people died.
One died of...he decided to drink salt water, which brought on delusions even more so.
Immediately? Because we always hear you can't drink it.
So you drink the salt water and you're immediately having delusions?
No, it takes time. It takes time.
It takes, you know, I'd say in his case about ten hours. He drank the salt water after two days.
After about ten hours he went over the side. He thought he saw land.
We heard a shrill scream and he was gone.
The other man who also...
So he became just delusionary?
Absolutely.
Wow.
The other man who died also drank salt water at the same time.
Within two hours he also went over the side into the water where the sharks were.
We all knew they were there. We told him that they were there.
He went over anyway and the sharks ate him underneath the raft.
Did you see it?
No, it was dust. It was borderline dark, dark, and we did not see it.
We chose not to watch it. We felt it, which in many ways...
Was worse.
...seeing his visual feeling is not knowing what's really there and it's horrifying.
When you say you felt it, what do you mean?
You sensed it or could you feel the sharks bumping up against the raft?
We were in a rubber zodiac dinghy filled with air and you could feel the sharks battering the dinghy around
and it would push us from point A to point B.
How wide is that thing and how long?
It was an 11 foot zodiac. It's about three and a half feet wide.
Brad, just to give you some idea, is 6'3 and at this point in time weighed about 230.
Wow.
Big guy.
Now, I heard you prayed a lot to God but not to be rescued.
What did you pray for?
I grew up in the South and I always believe you don't ask God for things, you know?
If you want to ask for the strength, you can do that, but you don't ask for things.
I didn't want to bargain with him. I didn't want to barter and not be able to fulfill what I was bartering for.
So I prayed for the strength to stay sane and I think that's the most important thing.
Now, you say, too, that there's a fine line between it, sanity and insanity.
Really? What did you mean by that?
When you're in that kind of a situation, for me, being in the raft was a very physical survival effort.
And you're there five days.
And you're there five days. It's 40 degrees outside, you're soaking wet, and there's a raging storm.
You get very cold, you get hypothermia, and you also become very dehydrated,
which causes delusions to set in even more readily.
So you all would urinate on yourself to keep yourself warm?
To try and keep ourselves warm.
Now, when I read that, I thought, but that's only for a moment.
Right. It's immediate gratification.
Anything you can do to try to keep yourself a little warm.
We gathered seaweed.
Anything you can do to keep yourself busy, to keep from going over that fine line of sanity and insanity,
keeping your mind occupied, praying, working to survive all the time.
Because, Debbie, do the hours seem like days, or do you, in a sense, lose track of time?
Days seem like eternities.
You don't lose track of time.
You know every minute and what you've done in order to make an effort to survive.
Well, why do you think you did survive?
I think I survived because of my strength, my belief in God.
I think my faith. I wanted to survive.
My time was not up, and I wasn't going to give up.
Before this ever happened, did you think you could survive something like this?
I don't think any of us know whether we can survive it until we get there.
I think that as individuals, we're asked to survive certain things.
Not everybody's put to this extreme test.
Now, it's so interesting because you're right, and most people have tests in various forms in their lives.
And one of the reasons we wanted to do a show with all of you is because so many,
I'm so tired of the whole victimization thing, people blaming their own lives
or blaming their life situations.
And so to show, I think, where people have come out of a tragedy and triumph
speaks to the possibility that it can be done.
It doesn't mean that you all are necessarily special.
It just means that you knew what to do or how to do it.
So what was it about you that said, I refuse to give up?
Because I don't know.
In a raft, maybe after the third or fourth day, I might have gave up.
I might have said, well, this may be my time, and I, you know, whatever, I will.
I think it's something that's within all of us.
I think everybody has the abilities, like I said, to survive.
I didn't want to be a victim in this situation.
There were already victims.
I wanted to try to get out of it.
And I think there are lessons to learn by getting out of a situation like this.
What did you learn?
I learned that I can do anything I want to if I put my mind to it.
Great. Great lesson.
When we come back, when trouble greets you at birth,
are your inner strengths already with you at birth?
We're going to talk to Ruthie and Sharon about that when we come back.
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Did you know that women are getting ripped off when it comes to medical treatment?
What is the doggone point of testing all of, you know, thousands of men
with the drug for breast or uterine cancer?
They say their menstrual cycles or this or that makes them too difficult to study.
And heart disease is the leading cause of death in women, yet doctors only test men.
It sounds like it's a conspiracy, doesn't it?
How medicine really mistreats women.
Tomorrow's Oprah.
Ruthie's one of those people that trouble was waiting for when she came out of the womb
and has had a very, very hard life.
I know like a lot of you who are watching, first of all, you were abandoned.
Yes, by my mother.
Your mother had you when she was 13.
Yes.
Completely, you know, nobody 13 anywhere in the world is equipped to have a child.
Exactly.
And so when she was, she abandoned you and left you where?
She gave me to her mother and her stepfather.
Mm-hmm.
And they took care of me and she just left and was on her own.
And you were beaten and witnessed beatings and grew up with the beatings
and that was your life?
Yes.
Yeah.
It's hard. It's hard. It's hard.
Ruthie wrote the book called GAL and I was telling her that I hadn't read the book, GAL,
A True Life Yet, but I saw it and I loved the picture of the young black girl on the cover
who is your mother.
Yes.
And I passed the book because I had so many things to read.
I passed the book on to my godmother, Ms. Eddins, and I had never read it
because every night Ms. Eddins would come over to my house and say,
well, they buy the railroad track now.
They're selling the candy.
They're doing all they can to make it.
Oh, and then she'd be reading them in the kitchen because she stays at my house.
Sometimes she'd say, oh, Lord, the grandfather's beaten him so bad I can't read anymore.
So I do intend to read that book and it is, I want you to know,
has touched a lot of people's lives because so many people,
particularly African Americans, also grew up with that kind of culture
where the idea of being whatever you could out of a child for whatever reason
was the way you handled everything.
Yes.
Some of the reasons were just stupid.
Stupid reasons.
But, you know, growing up with my grandfather, he was also an alcoholic,
and he was the type of person that would want you to do everything for him,
squeeze the bump on his back, comb his hair, do his toenails, make his bath water.
Pull a hair out of his bump, put his shoes on, make his bath water, everything.
And then beat you if you didn't do it to his satisfaction.
Fast.
Yes.
You move fast.
So how do you grow up with any self-esteem,
or did you grow up with any self-esteem whatsoever?
Well, you know, from being beaten like that and abused from him,
I just began to be evil myself.
You know, I used to do things for other people.
I would steal kids' lunch.
I would beat them up.
I'd do everything, anything, you know.
And I was jealous of a lot of people because they had things that I didn't have.
They had nice clothes.
They had birthday parties.
They had gifts, presents, lunch to school, and things I never had.
So I was envious of so many people, so I wanted what they had.
So I began to take it.
Why did you take care of your stepfather, who had treated you so badly?
Why did you take care of him until he died in spite of the way he had treated you?
Because he was really the only father that I knew.
And when I saw him, he was sick.
He was so sick, and he was dying, and I felt so bad for him.
So I think, and I said, you know, he himself probably had an abusive life when he was little,
and that's all he knew.
So he grew up, and he gave us what he got in life.
So I just couldn't really blame him because I figured he had a problem himself,
and he needed help, that we ourselves couldn't help him.
Now, did you, and let's talk about this for a minute,
because you know I've done lots of shows on whether or not you should hit children or not.
And most often in those shows, although white people and black people agree
that you should and shouldn't on both sides,
to a great extent I've found a lot of people from our culture, African American culture,
believe that it's okay.
And a lot of, you know, black people say to me, I was beat.
My dad had beat me, and I was beat.
Sir, I was beat, too.
I can't tell you I liked it.
And they say, I was beat, and it did me some good.
How do you feel about that?
Do you feel that children should be beaten, or do you feel that it did you any good?
I don't think kids should really be beaten.
I think they should be punished, you know, like certain things they like.
Disciplined, yeah.
You know, like the Nintendo, television, phone, friend's house, all those kind of things.
I promised myself I would never beat my kids as long as I live,
because I don't want them to.
So though you were beaten, just, I mean, and I mean beaten, too.
I don't mean like a little spanking.
I mean beaten with anything that was available to be beaten with.
If the electric cord was there, that's what you got beaten with.
If the buckle was there and the belt was there, that's what you got beaten, you know?
So you don't believe in it now.
No, not at all.
Now, how did you discover that there was something of value to your life?
Because what most people don't, the reason I'm so opposed to it
is because if you're beaten all of your life,
you grow up thinking that your life is of no value, that you deserve it.
So where did you turn yourself around?
Well, you know, they would always tell me when I was little,
you're not going to be anything.
You're going to be just like your mother.
You know, she was a troubled woman that, you know, left me alone with my grandparents.
At 13, yeah.
Yeah, and you know, she would steal and do all kinds of different things and bad things.
So they said I'm going to be just like her.
And that's all I ever heard.
When I was little, I was going to be nothing.
So I was determined that I was going to show them better.
I was going to be better.
Better.
And so was it in high school that you discovered that your gift,
because the book is, Gal, is so beautifully written,
is that where you discovered that you could write?
Well, I began to write when I was really in elementary school and everything.
And then...
As I say, I haven't read it, but I mean, I haven't read the book,
but I always like to read the first sentences of books.
And I like, it's lyrical.
It's lyrical.
So I'm saving it so when I have some time to appreciate it.
So where did you learn to be such a lyrical writer?
I just like to write, you know, from when I was dating guys.
I like to write poems and songs and...
I love you.
You know, things like that.
I didn't like to go and buy things out of the store like cards and stuff.
I wanted to write them myself.
And I just like to write a lot.
Did somebody once say to you that you were a good writer and you should continue to do that?
A teacher of mine, she did it in high school.
And, you know, I never believed it.
Yeah.
And so I don't even know if she really knows, but I never stopped writing.
Never stopped?
No.
Yeah.
You know.
That is terrific because I always say this, and maybe you all agree or disagree,
that everybody who makes it makes it because somebody shows them the way.
There is a piece of light, whether the light is the strength of your own soul,
your faith in God, your belief in a power greater than yourself, or a teacher.
Hopefully it's somebody's parents.
But all of us who make it, you know, we're all messengers for each other.
So you make it because somewhere a teacher says, you know what?
And for myself, I used to think, you know, I grew up in similar circumstances.
And I used to speak in the church all the time.
And the people and the sisters in the front row fanning themselves would say to my grandmother,
Hadame, this child sure can talk.
So if those sisters were alive today, wouldn't they be shocked because I'm still talking.
That's right.
That's right.
Ruki, it's great.
Sometimes the one thing that saves a person in trouble, as I was saying,
is another human being who takes the time to care.
I understand a teacher that you had help you see a way out?
She was reading somebody outside them under my desk.
She read them and she told me that I was going to be a writer one day.
Well, do you remember Carol Hurt?
Carol Hurt?
No, it was Miss Anderson.
Do you remember Carol Hurt?
Yes, that's her.
Yes.
She was Miss Anderson then.
Can you imagine?
You know what?
I love teaching.
I love teachers.
I think that what you all do, I think you're the true leaders of the world.
I really do.
The true leaders of the world.
Have a seat.
And the reason why is because you light a spark sometimes that you didn't even know that you lit.
No.
Have you read her book?
Yes, I have.
Can you believe that this is the young girl that used to be in your class?
No.
She was always so happy at school.
She was the kind of kid who came by and, hey, Miss Anderson, waved at me.
And I never, never knew that she was going through what she went through.
But are you pleased that she turned out to be the young writer that you-
It was wonderful, yeah.
I know.
Do you remember saying that to me?
You don't remember?
I remember that you wrote poetry.
I remember how much, what a special person you were.
Yeah, and everybody always told me that I copied it out of a book and I was going to be that thing and this wasn't my work.
So I believed them.
You know, I thought it wasn't my work for real.
This, to me, is a lot of validation for teaching.
You know, that somebody remembers what you said, it makes it all work.
Doesn't it?
Those teachers out there, give yourselves a round of applause.
You deserve it.
I'm telling you.
You have no idea of what you're doing in the classroom.
What grade was that?
What grade was that?
I was in the ninth grade.
In the ninth grade.
Something you say in the ninth grade impacts somebody forever.
Or for me, don't get me to crying, but for me it was Mrs. Duncan in the fourth grade.
When we come back, we're going to talk to Sharon, who had such a hellish childhood, she tried to kill herself at 16.
We'll be back.
We'll be right back.
Hi, I'm Jim Palmer.
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We're talking about how not to play the victim role in your life because so many people in the world have overcome just what would seem to be a lot of other people, impossibility.
Sharon also had a rough beginning. She even tried to kill herself at the age of 16, correct?
That's correct, Oprah.
I was born with spina bifida, which is a spinal cord defect, leaving me paraplegic when I was born.
And back in the 1950s, if you were in a wheelchair, people didn't want to see you.
My parents would keep me in the house when I was little.
There were times in my wheelchair I'd be playing out in the front yard.
If I'd hear a car coming by, I would race to the backyard so the people, the family in the car would have a happy day and their day wouldn't be spoiled seeing me.
And then when I'd hear the car go by, then I'd come back out and play with my garden. I had a garden and a dog.
Who taught you that?
My dad, I think my father, he was a lawyer. He was an elder of the church. He was a city councilman in Columbus, Ohio.
He was looked upon with great respect, and he was my father, and I adored him. I worshipped him. I would have done anything for him.
At night, when I'd have my spinal cord pain, which I still have today, my father would hear me crying, and he'd always have vodka every night.
He didn't drink during the day. Well, he might have. It was vodka, so he couldn't tell.
But he'd come in with his vodka, and he'd come into the bedroom and get in bed with me, and he'd say, you know, have some of my vodka, and this will take away the pain.
And what he did was to share with me, he was a World War II hero, and I think our country does not address the needs of veterans returning from the war emotionally,
because I think Dad had been emotionally scarred from the war. But he would share with me how he had gone into the concentration camps to liberate the people,
and he'd say, you are suffering a pain that all mankind has to suffer. But then he'd say, here, take the vodka, baby, and you'll feel better about it.
And I'd say, but Daddy, you know, it tastes like the medicine I have to take at the hospital, because I was, like, having 50 operations, a lot of surgeries.
How old were you when this was happening?
I was four through nine. When I was nine years old, I had a surgical procedure that changed my appearance in a way that my father really had difficulty accepting.
So he no longer came to me and was gentle with me at night, which I missed, because that was the only physical affection I was getting at the time.
My mother was always at the hospital visiting me for surgeries, but emotionally, she was kind of a distant person.
I learned to read at a young age, though, because my father would write postcards to me. So in order to read those cards, I would read his cards.
Did he tell you, though, that no men would ever really marry you? They would only use you for sex?
Yes. At nighttime, he said, you just have to be strong and be reliable. Develop your brain. You have a good mind.
He'd say, thank God, you know, the doctors predicted you'd be mentally retarded. He said, if you were, I'd have you institutionalized right away.
You know, bring home straight A's on your report card or you're out of here.
Wasn't he verbally and physically and sexually abusing you?
Oprah, when he used to smoke, and I'm a physician now and I'm really anti-smoking, but one reason I think I'm biased is because he would extinguish his cigarettes on me.
And on my legs, my left leg, I have no sensation, but my right leg, I do. So he would use my right knee.
There was a big scar today where he would do that. But fortunately, I think, you know, he came to his senses enough and he did quit smoking.
And so I'm a real non-smoking advocate here.
So did you do what a lot of kids do? They create fantasy parents for themselves.
Yes, I did. And how that happened, I had my little wheelchair, I called Nellie Bell, and I had a right hand crutch, which was Roy Rogers, and a left hand crutch, which was Del Evans.
And I would pretend that I was a daughter of Roy Rogers and Del Evans because I'd watch their TV show. When I'd be recovering from surgery, I watched a lot of television.
What were your favorite shows? We were just talking about this the other day. People our age.
Well, Howdy Doody.
Howdy Doody.
That really dates me.
Did you watch My Friend Flicka?
Yes, absolutely. I love horses.
Didn't we love that? Did you watch Sky King?
Yes, Sky King. Oh, Raymar the Jungle was an inspiration to me. I mean, I wanted to become a doctor, so Raymar was a missionary doctor in Africa.
So how did you come to try to kill yourself at the age of 16?
What I had learned and what my father had taught me was that to shed tears was wrong. If you had to take alcohol or a drug to numb the pain, to mask it, that was preferable.
The worst thing to do was to be honest about your feelings. We never communicated in our family. Music for me was my outlet. My piano, my singing. I would sing at church.
My father would make me get up and sing church solos and I'd be scared to death, but I'd do it because daddy wanted it and I would do it.
But through my music, I also learned to put a shell around me so that when someone would say to me, hey, you did a good job, I'd say, well, they're just saying that because I'm in the wheelchair.
And especially when it came to my music, because that was my sanctuary. If my dad would do something that really upset me, I would go to my violin and kind of practice and play.
And my cat would come and she'd sit under the music stand and watch the violin.
So music was your light out of the tunnel.
It was my sanctuary. It was somehow through my music since I couldn't fly. I always had wanted to fly like an eagle.
But my music somehow released the emotion, helped me to express the emotion.
And when I sang in church, I was able to sing with feeling and the people would come up to me afterwards and say, hey, you know, it was beautiful.
Her violin teacher, Mr. Susie, is in the audience. Mr. Susie, where are you? You're Mr. Susie.
Did you know you were her way out? Her sanctuary?
Not consciously, I don't think.
Oh, another teacher, another teacher.
Not consciously.
No, I knew she was having problems. And music is an emotion.
Yeah.
And I knew she was having it.
It is an emotion, isn't it?
It certainly is. And we, I was not her violin teacher.
She came to me in the ninth grade and said that her older brother and sister were in the marching band and she knew she would never march.
And I told her she could make a contribution.
So like in the three months between the ninth and tenth grade, she went out and started violin.
And by the time September came along, she was ready to play in a very fine orchestra.
That is terrific.
Well, when we come back, thank you, Mr. Susie, another fine teacher you are.
Thank you.
Another fine one. She lost part of her face when she was only nine.
We'll find out how Lucy fought her trouble in just a moment.
We'll be right back.
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Lucy Greeley has come a long way from the battle with cancer that she had to fight beginning at the age of nine.
Doctors removed part of her jaw.
I understand your favorite day used to be Halloween because you could wear a mask. Is that what you felt?
Yeah, it was, I think, my story is actually twofold in that I first underwent a great deal of physical suffering because I went through years of chemotherapy and radiation, and I had a lot of surgery.
So they literally rebuilt your jaw?
Yeah, although that didn't come later. I was sort of like primed for pain already. I knew physical pain really well, and one of the ways I used to deal with my physical pain was try and transport myself out of it.
And then when that was all finally over, I naively thought it would be over, and little did I know that like the worst suffering was yet to come in terms of feeling ugly and feeling different.
And I don't think I was even really able to name exactly what it was that I felt so bad about until one particular Halloween when I was walking around in a mask, and I felt so good.
I mean, I really felt so good, and I couldn't really understand why until I realized that this joy and hope that I felt, I felt because I was wearing a mask and nobody could see my face.
Because what would people do when they saw your face? Would they?
They had different reactions. Some people would stare, some people would quickly look away, and some people, kids in particular, would make fun of me.
So I could never really tell for the longest time, and I got so accustomed to being teased and it's so hurtful that I always expected the worst.
And you've had over 30 operations, I understand.
Something like that, yeah.
Were your parents? What were your parents saying about all this?
My family is much closer now that we're adults. At the time, I think we all lived these sort of very separate lives, and we sort of dunked into each other in a way.
I think it was very hard. It became a way of life for all of us.
And they were wearing masks in many ways, like acting as though, you know, pretending as though it wasn't there?
Well, the whole world is still wearing masks. People are so afraid of it, especially diseases of the face. They horrify people.
Now, I read someplace where you said you didn't think that you could not have gone through it now.
Well, I mean that in that I can't... I really come a long way. I mean, the fact that I'm sitting up here in front of all these people talking...
Cameras.
Yeah. I mean, it's amazing. I've been in all these, like, fashion magazines.
I have, like, all the accoutrements of a beautiful woman.
And, like, I had never, ever dreamed that I would ever be beautiful, that I would ever be loved, that anybody would ever want me.
Because I was convinced I was ugly. I was utterly convinced I was ugly.
Well, joining us is Dr. Stephen Wallin, who's a psychiatrist and the author of a book called The Resilient Self.
He says that we all have comeback potential inside us and we know where to find it.
Well, if that is the case, I'm so fascinated to be able to have this discussion with you.
Why do some people have it and others don't? Why do other people just bury in?
For instance, one of the things that intrigues me is the welfare mentality, as we label it in this country.
And what it really is, is people who have decided that they were victims.
Once, a long time ago, we did a show on people who thought they had AIDS and then found out later that they didn't.
I don't know if you all saw this, but what happened is even after they were told that they didn't,
and it was confirmed that they didn't, they still started to behave, continued to behave as though they did.
Right. Well, I mean, the question that you're asking about why some people have a lot more resilience than others is a real Nobel Prize-winning question.
Answer it and get that Nobel Prize! Yeah.
But let's say that the wonderful strengths that you have in this group of women here today are not all that uncommon.
There are lots of shipwreck stories around where people have found within them special strength that they can call upon.
And no one really knows why some people retain that sort of burdened feeling like they're only damaged goods and they're only victims.
I suspect it has to do with some of the people who have touched the lives of some of your guests today
and also some of their innate psychological characteristics that we describe in the book.
So are you born with it?
Well, you're born with possibilities.
And if you make certain choices in your life, if you meet certain people, if you build certain things inside of yourself,
such as the kind of personal strength that Debbie talked about originally or some of the kind of insight, you know,
about knowing what your problem is, that you heard Ruthie talking about, the kind of creativity that we heard here,
all of those are the resiliencies that we talk about that make people then rise above adversity.
So can you make yourself resilient? Because life is about, unfortunately, growth.
Right. It's about learning and growing.
So you know at some time in your life, there's going to be some difficulty coming.
Absolutely.
You'd like to prolong, you know, postpone it for as long as you can.
But you know the difficulty is going to hit.
So is there a way to find out, for instance, the kind of person you are so that when the thing hits you, you are prepared to handle it?
Well, I would say that we all have within us the ability to call upon psychological strengths to work against those adverse times.
And when it gets really cold in the boat, the best thing to do is to pee on it to keep you warm,
rather than railing after the god of the sun who's not making it shine.
OK. If you find yourself in a bad situation right now, you'll really identify with the young man we're going to meet next.
Maybe his current struggle will shed some light on yours. We'll be back to talk to him in just a moment.
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And now let's make that random call with today's $10,000 question.
Who shot Alexander Hamilton in that famous duel?
Hello?
What?
Excuse me?
Hold on. Let me get some milk.
No!
Oh. I'm sorry, your time is up.
What is this?
Gut milk.
This is Jeremy Nagle and, right now, he's trying to beat the odds.
the odds. Jeremy managed to escape when a gang robbed him, but then he decided to go
to the scene to rescue his friend and that's when Jeremy was shot and consequently paralyzed.
He is now struggling through rehabilitation. When did this happen?
June 15th of 1993.
Has it been a long road to here?
Very long. At first I was stuck on the point that I wanted to die and I even told the paramedics
that not to work on me, not to touch me, just let me die.
Why did you feel that?
Because I knew how serious my injury was.
You did?
And I didn't feel that if I was shot I had an after life experience so to speak and I
felt that maybe that's how it was meant to be.
Uh huh. You say after life, you mean you saw the tunnels, all the light.
So many people are seeing it that I'm about to believe all of y'all, really.
I saw something a little different. I saw a scale of music notes. I didn't hear it,
I just saw it. Because like your other guest said, music is very important to her. It also
is very important to me and influential to me. And I woke up three days later in an ICU
unit on a ventilator and I had no idea of how bad that anything was and at first I was,
my spirits were okay and then I found out I was paralyzed and I just told everybody
to leave me alone just to let me die.
I would think that was a natural phase of it, wouldn't you as his father? The anger
comes first.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
And I'm sure you were angry too.
Absolutely was.
I was more hurt than angry why someone would just arbitrarily shoot him. That made me angry.
It hurt me that he was laying in the bed, couldn't move his arms, couldn't do anything
and that his life was dependent on oxygen and 15, 20 other people and he beat the odds.
He walked once already. Unfortunately he fell this year.
But you'll walk again, won't you?
I've always believed that.
So what gave you the resilience? What made you fight back? What turned you around?
The first time when I was shot my father was very influential on me because he also only
has one limb and I've seen him struggle since I was three years old when he first injured
his legs and I've seen him go through 20 odd some operations and he had his leg cut off
on a Friday and went back to work on the following Monday on crutches.
You did.
Yes.
You just do what you have to do, Oprah.
You do what you have to do.
Well, Oprah, you know there are several things that the Nagels really show us about what
resilience is. Even though they had a phase of being angry, they are not basically angry
people and they have moved past their anger to find their inner strength. That's one aspect
of this story that I think we heard in several of the other people. So in answer to your
question about how not to be a victim, I think you do have to get past your anger and find
a way to mobilize your own inner strength. You also saw the creativity that he talked
about as these steps, in a sense, healing himself using this music similar to what several
of the other guests have found.
So does everybody who, when you do it, Lucy, is it always about understanding, or all of
you can answer this question, is it something bigger than yourself? One of the things that
I treasure, one of the sayings of Course in Miracles, is whenever you fear, it's because
you're trusting in your own power. So I have lived basically fearless in the world because
I believe that there's something bigger at work than myself always working here, always
going on.
For me, it was always the willingness to adapt to each moment and to let go of expectations
of how things should be. And I felt so isolated and so alone, and I felt so pressured down
by the weight of social responsibilities to be beautiful and to be a certain way, that
I just had to sort of give that up. And instead I would concentrate on being here in this
moment and I would think in terms of just perceiving the way the light fell or the sound
of a voice. And luckily for me, I found writing. And I originally used that ability to perceive
things to create my own world and shut myself off, but through writing I found a form to
actually enter into the world and open up.
Well the question is, does it take a lifetime to get over the effects of serious trouble?
The scars my guests still carry with them. We'll talk about that after this.
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Do you still feel the effects of being scarred in your childhood, Dr. Kawhi?
Oprah, I think I can say over the past five years, there's been a lot of healing for me.
I had always tried to be open minded and open to opportunities accepting of other people
because so many people had rejected me and I know how much a child and an adolescent,
a young woman wants to be accepted. However, what was strange to me was five years ago
at St. Jude Medical Center where I medical director in Fullerton, California, Rayford
Johnson came to me from the California Special Olympics and he had asked me to help be a
physician sponsor. As you know, these athletes are mentally retarded. I had a fear of working
with retarded people because I felt the only reason I had to fight my way into school was
to prove I wasn't retarded. It had been fed into me since childhood that mental retardation
was something to be ashamed of, that I was able to make up for my paraplegia because
of my intellect. And what those special athletes taught me and what Rayford Johnson taught
me was that you have to love a person, period. Love is a gift. It's not something that's
earned. What I learned through the California Special Olympics, giving my time as a physician
helping these young athletes, we went to Kilimanjaro to make a climb up Kilimanjaro
in Africa. And what I learned from their courage and bravery and their sensitivity to my feelings,
the feelings of their coaches, some of the coaches were more afraid than the special
athletes were. They taught me and they accepted me as a regular person and they hugged. I'd
always been afraid of any physical thing physical. And we're huggers in Special Olympics. If
you've worked with me, you probably have. We hugged.
Ms. Eunice Schreiber herself.
Yes. And what Mr. Rayford Johnson taught me, he had the strength of a lion and the gentility
of a lamb and the soul of an angel from above.
So you have healed.
And he has taught me that you can be powerful and compassionate. And what I want to...
Yeah, but it never stops.
It's not an action. You don't say you're resilient, you're healed.
It's a very important point. The pain that survivors feel exists at the very same time
as their pride in their strength. It's not like they've gone from being damaged and no
longer damaged and now being strong.
Yeah, but I think you can go from, because I will say this with my own, you know, life
past and history and so forth, that you can go from the gaping hole that it left in your
soul to sort of closing the hole and living with the effects of that. Because, and also
in my own life, I wouldn't change anything because everything that happened made me who
I am.
Yeah, that's right. And then you made certain choices to live out your life by doing certain
things which keep you strong.
And that's what we see with all of our survivors here.
Yes, ma'am, at the mic.
My daughter Tammy was killed January 3rd of this year. She was repeatedly raped, she was
robbed and she was stabbed 121 times. How am I supposed to go on? I do have faith in
God, but she left a four-year-old daughter here that asks me every day, when are you
going to wake my mother up?
Well, I think...
Go ahead, then.
I think it's a natural thing to be mournful about this, but I think where you have to
look is within yourself into what you know about yourself to survive, whether it be into
God or into your self-perseverance. In my realm of thinking, we all have a certain mission
here in life, and it may be your mission to raise that child, and there are probably some
really strong lessons that you're going to have to learn through going through this.
But that could also be so distancing, too. I know, like, when something that tragic has
just happened and then people say you have to look within yourself, it seems so impossible.
I mean, and it just creates all this distance and makes it even more futile and more hopeless.
Well, certainly the grieving that she's doing, she has to do.
It's so much about understanding that there's another side to it and we have to...
I applaud you for all of the work that you're doing to get past this, and you will probably
draw inside of yourself on something that is a personal strength that we call a resilience
that will then allow you to do good works in your community, to help the grandchildren,
to be able to be creative yourself like some of our survivors up here. It will come to
you.
But also it comes from... doesn't it come from understanding that you will survive?
I mean, even in the depths of, you know, by...
It's the trust that whatever happens is what's meant to happen.
Exactly.
Yes, but it's knowing that no matter what, even in the depths of my greatest pain, I
can allow myself to feel the pain, but I know that I will overcome it. I will overcome it.
What we found is that resilient survivors love well, play well, work well, and then
what you had mentioned is expect well. They have an optimistic frame of mind where they
expect that things are going to work out for them.
You will survive it, but you will feel immense, enormous pain and grieving, but you will...
You have the capability to survive it, but it's not going to be easy.
Oprah, I'd like to share with her because I lost a baby.
I have to go to break, and I'll let you do that when we come back. We'll be right back.
From your 24-hour newsletter, I'm Nadine Woodward. Up next on First News Live at 5, investigators
are combing this travel trailer for clues tonight. They're trying to find out who would
stab a 72-year-old man to death. Parades, both for and against Proposition 1, show just
how hot the issue is in Idaho, but what do you think about the anti-gay rights proposition?
A live report on the fight for the 5th District Congressional seat and Tom Sherry's weather,
all next on Creme 2 News.
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Ron Sims was born in Spokane. He understands the people of eastern Washington and I think
he'd make a great man in the U.S. Senate.
You know, I want to protect our communities that depend on fishing, our communities that
depend on timber, our farming communities, our rural communities. I want to be a senator
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Thank you.
This is Shavar Jeffries, whose mother was murdered when he was 10 years old and he was
shuttled from home to home when she died. But he stayed away from the drugs and crime
around him and is now an honor student at Duke University. How did you bounce back?
Where did your resilient self come from?
Well, I would like to say two things as far as my resilience. So my resilience self came
first from within, from my people around me, my grandmother, my aunt, and my community.
I had the Boys and Girls Club there for me. And that was for what I had to do as he was
saying, well, I need to do myself to make myself successful. Secondly, I like to say,
there's a quote by Mary McLeod Bethune, which says that the struggle is wearing me down.
I feel the coming on of an inevitable thing, a breakdown. I need somebody to come and get
me. And as we said earlier, you always need somebody who's going to show you the light
at the end of the tunnel. So I'd like to say that all the people who have the leadership
ability, they have the position with which to influence people that they need to come
and get us because we need help. People need to stop being concerned about self and look
within what they can do to help each other out, because you can't continue to say don't
make an excuse. Don't do that when you when you're bombarded with a situation where you
don't see any hope in any way out.
I absolutely agree with you. We'll be right back.
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Well, some of my guests today, everybody except Dr. Kauai, have written books about their experiences.
Albatross describes Debbie Kiley's story at sea. Gal, a true life, is Ruthie Bolton's life story.
And Autobiography of a Face is by Lucy Greeley. And what we've been talking about here for this
full hour, The Resilient Self, by Dr. Stephen Wolin. We thank you all for being with us today.
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