“People often look at me and say, ‘Oh she’s been this very successful general officer, she was the CEO of a Fortune 50, life is good.' Well life wasn’t always good,” retired Major General Gale Pollock told me.

Pollock grew up with an extremely violent father who would beat and intimidate Pollock and her mother with fists, belts, knives and guns.

"I was about 11 when I started saying, 'No, this is not acceptable.' Finally one night I got out of bed, when he was in the middle of one of his terrors, and I stood there in front of him and said, ‘Stop! Men don’t hit women—you leave her alone.’ And much to my surprise, he stopped. Think about how empowering that is for a little kid!"

At 13, she met the person who would not only inspire her desire to become an army nurse, but also provide her with the encouragement to continue moving ahead.

“We lived about 15 minutes from Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, and as odd a person as my father was, he would invite soldiers that were living away from home over for Sunday dinners,” Pollock explained. “One of them, Robin, was in his mid-twenties. I told him, ‘I’m really scared, I don’t think I’m going to live to get out of here.' He listened to me and said, ‘Yes you will, you’re going to go on to do great things and you’re going to get out of here.’ So on all the nights when I was terrified, I held on to his words: ‘you’re going to do great, you’re going to get out of here’.”

We can’t always choose what happens to us in life, but as Pollock told me, we can choose to look back or to look forward.

“I know those things happened, they certainly affected me,” she admitted. “But I don’t have to let them make me immobile. I can say, ‘well I don’t like what happened, and so I ‘d like to help other people escape if they’re in that kind of environment: I want them to know they can escape. But I don’t spend a lot of time looking backwards.”

Watch my moving interview with Gen. Gale Pollock below: