Wake up calls.

Big traumas certainly serve as wake-up calls.  The question is, however, if a person has just awakened too late.

I firmly believe that people are capable of reinventing themselves.  Often people don't know to do that until some external force compels it.  At that point, they're left with the choice of reformation or continuing on in their former path's.  Reformation is hard, but people do it.

Take, as an example, Georgy Malenkov.

Malenkov graduated school in 1917, just before the Russian Revolution, and he served in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. He became a commissar in 1920.  He rose steadily in the Communist party, surviving Stalin's purges, and was the head of its nuclear missile program when that era arrived.  He became a member of the Central Committee, the real ruling body in the USSR.  He suffered a downfall, however, when he tried to stage a coup against Khrushchev, and was accordingly expelled from his positions.

Khrushchev was decidedly an opponent of the Church.  Malenkov had never been adherent in his adult life.  But upon his release from position, he converted to Russian Orthodoxy and became a lector, which in the Russian Orthodox Church is a minor order of clergy.

Dramatic change.

It probably wouldn't have come about, however, but for his fall from grace from Soviet leadership.  A coup attempt against Khrushchev fell, he fell, and he fell into the Church,.  It's almost like what Shane MacGowan noted in A Rainy Night In Soho.

We watched our friends grow up together

And we saw them as they fell

Some of them fell into Heaven

Some of them fell into Hell

The lucky ones choose to fall into Heaven, the obstinate ones choose to fall into Hell.

Save for the fact that some people find the alarm bell going off a bit too late.