Supernormal. Мэг Джей

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      According to the American Psychological Association, resilience is adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, or significant ongoing stressors. Researchers say it is unexpected competence despite significant risks; it is achieving success despite serious challenges. No matter how exactly one chooses to phrase it, resilience is doing better than one might expect; it is making good when much has been bad. Certainly, after all she had been through, Helen had made good. She had adapted well, and she was more competent and successful than many may have predicted. So why, then, did Helen not think of herself as resilient?

      The problem is that, colloquially, we talk about resilience in deceptively simple terms. We say people who are resilient “bounce back.” They “rebound.” And if we look in the dictionary, we see resilience defined as elasticity, as the ability to recover quickly and easily, to return to one’s original state after an illness or misfortune or shock. There are all sorts of situations for which this kind of springy definition makes sense, such as when we rebound from having the flu or we bounce back from losing a job. But none of these popular descriptions matches what goes on inside those like Helen, most of whom do not recover quickly or return to their original state, but are forever changed by their early experiences. When it comes to overcoming childhood adversity, resilience is no snap.

      In fact, social scientists argue that resilience is best understood not as some kind of elastic trait that someone either does or does not have, but as a phenomenon—as something we can see but do not entirely understand. We can see this sort of phenomenal resilience in stories of those like Helen, and we can see it in the lives of well-known women and men we will hear a bit about in the pages ahead, ones who show us that those like Helen are not as alone as they feel but are, in fact, in good company. Here are a few:

      Andre Agassi, tennis champion

      Maya Angelou, author

      Alison Bechdel, cartoonist

      Johnny Carson, comedian

      Johnny Cash, country singer

      Stephen Colbert, comedian

      Misty Copeland, ballet dancer

      Alan Cumming, actor

      Viola Davis, actor

      Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor

      LeBron James, basketball champion

      Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States

      Paul Ryan, 54th Speaker of the House

      Oliver Sacks, neurologist

      Howard Schultz, chairman of Starbucks

      Akhil Sharma, author

      Elizabeth Smart, child safety advocate

      Sonia Sotomayor, US Supreme Court Justice

      Andy Warhol, artist

      Elizabeth Warren, US senator

      Oprah Winfrey, media mogul and philanthropist

      Jay Z, rapper and businessman

      But of course, most resilient people aren’t celebrities. Most are everyday women and men hiding in plain sight as doctors, artists, entrepreneurs, lawyers, neighbors, parents, activists, teachers, students, readers, and more. These women and men deserve a better metaphor than the bounce of a ball or the snap of an elastic band. They deserve a metastory, one that does justice to the full experience of being resilient, and that is what Supernormal is all about.

      In the chapters ahead, what the stories of both private and public individuals will show us is that, contrary to the notion that resilient youth bounce back from hard times, what they actually do is something much more complicated and courageous. They are nothing if not protagonists in their own lives, often waging fierce and unrelenting battles others cannot see. As we are about to learn, theirs is a heroic, powerful, perilous lifelong journey, a phenomenon indeed—one that, after decades of interest and research, still amazes and confounds.

      ***

      In 1962, psychologist Victor Goertzel, along with his wife, Mildred, published a book titled Cradles of Eminence: A Provocative Study of the Childhoods of Over 400 Famous Twentieth-Century Men and Women. Their famous men and women were those who had at least two biographies written about them, and who made positive contributions to society: Louis Armstrong, Frida Kahlo, Pablo Picasso, Eleanor Roosevelt, to name a few. What was “provocative,” or at least surprising, about the Goertzels’ book was the revelation that, as children, three-quarters of these prominent individuals had been burdened by poverty, broken homes, abusive parents, alcoholism, handicaps, illness, or other misfortunes. Only fifty-eight, or less than 15 percent, seemed to have been raised in supportive, untroubled homes. “The ‘normal man,’” concluded the Goertzels, “is not a likely candidate for the Hall of Fame.”

      Perhaps former First Lady Abigail Adams was right when she said, “The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with great difficulties. When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.” Or maybe it is simply true that no matter where one looks, if one looks closely enough, adversity is more common than not. Rather than the freakish burden of the unlucky few, hard times can be found in the personal histories of the eminent, the heroic, and countless everyday resilient individuals.

      Social scientists initially stumbled upon these everyday resilient individuals mostly by accident. For almost a hundred years, since the founding of the field of psychology, researchers had largely concerned themselves with mental illness, and especially with how problems in childhood led to problems in adulthood. Sigmund Freud is probably best known for popularizing this notion late in the nineteenth century, but it was, in fact, a point of view that was already well established. “Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me,” Freud purportedly said, and indeed it was eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope whose words became this popular adage: “As the twig is bent, so is the tree inclined.”

      Yet in and around the 1970s, small, disparate groups of researchers began to observe that as the twig was bent, the tree did not always incline. At the University of Minnesota, psychologist Norman Garmezy set out to study children who, because their mothers were mentally ill, were at risk of being ill, too, only to become intrigued by those who showed few signs of trouble. At the Institute of Psychiatry in London, Michael Rutter studied boys and girls who seemed similarly unaffected by poverty or deprivation. Emmy Werner, a psychologist at University of California at Davis, launched the Kauai Longitudinal Study to follow at-risk infants across time, only to become captivated by those who seemed to rise above childhood disadvantage and family discord. At the Menninger Foundation, Lois Murphy and Alice Moriarty co-directed the Coping Project, a research program that identified children who handled hardship well. And Swiss psychiatrist Manfred Bleuler—the son of Eugen Bleuler, who coined the term schizophrenia, and who himself worked with adult schizophrenics—noted with surprise that most of his patients’ children were quite accomplished. He proposed that their difficult early experiences had a “steeling effect” on who they were, making them remarkably strong.

      As British psychoanalyst James Anthony wrote in 1987, “One would have thought that the picture of children triumphing over despairing, degrading, depressing, СКАЧАТЬ