I'm right there with you, Hope. Of my two brothers and me, I'm the one who seems to have emerged the most successful in all areas of life. My eldest brother never went to college even though my Dad offered to pay for it (he was too bitter about my Dad's role or lack thereof in all our suffering), and he struggled through menial jobs for many years before he finally got to a point where he could afford to go to school at night and get ahead in life. And he did do that all on his own, but with great hardships along the way. And he still is embittered against my father and has made a lot of important decisions in his life, like staying in a *horrible* mentally-abusive marriage for years because he so didn't want to be like him and leave his wife and kids to fend for themselves, because of his feelings about his father. The other brother dropped out of high school at 16 and has been in and out of construction and factory jobs all his life. He is a raging alcoholic and sex addict, and he also smokes and eats to excess. He has been married and divorced twice and is engaged to number three. As successful as I have been and as much as I thought I put the ugliness of my childhood behind me, I obviously didn't put it far enough behind me to not have it affect my marriage. Had I continued to opt not to tell my husband about it, we would very likely be separated right now with the future of our small child hanging in the balance.
Yes, what makes siblings from the same household react to what they all experienced so differently? Part of it, I guess, is that no two of us can experience it exactly the same way. And our genetic and chemical makeup, I think, determines how resilient (or not) we'll be. We're each unique in exactly how we experience our environments, physically and emotionally, even if we share the same overall one.
I do think we can raise our children to be more optimistic than not, though. I think we can do that by letting them fail and by not sugar-coating it to falsely build their self-esteem but instead showing them how they can fix it, or if it's not fixable, or how they can do something different that they *are* good at. And by not over-reacting ourselves when we make a mistake or when some little thing goes wrong. Even though I think our chemical makeup largely determines how we'll view the world and react to it, I still think we can help shape our childrens' view to be more positive than not just by showing them we have that view ourselves.