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, depriving and deficient circumstances would have caught the immediate attention of both clinicians and researchers, but [until recently] the survivors and thrivers appeared to pass almost unnoticed.” Suddenly, though, enthusiasm for these survivors and thrivers ran high. Young people like Helen were called “keepers of the dream” because, from the outside at least, they represented the promise of the American Dream: triumph over hardship, scrappy self-sufficiency, hope for a better future, and a seeming equal opportunity for success.
Resilient children captured the imagination of professionals and laypeople alike, and many early descriptions in academia and the popular press suggested there was something truly incredible about them. Headlines, journal articles, and book titles rang out with superheroic superlatives: “Superkids.” “Invulnerable.” “Invincible.” “Children of steel.” “Supernormal.” These invulnerable, invincible kids displayed an almost otherworldly ability to adapt and succeed, but how?
***
Resilient children are often counted on to save the day at home or at school, and, for a time it seemed, researchers thought that resilient children just might save social science, too. These “children who will not break,” as trauma expert Julius Segal referred to them in a 1978 book, had to have some special strength, it seemed, and if only scientists could discover the secret of resilience, then they could reveal to the world the secret of success. “The invulnerable children!” exclaimed Segal in his writings about resilient boys and girls. “They may be our best research hope.”
Segal was not the only one who thought so, and all around scientists delved into the lives of resilient kids with zeal. The quest for a short list of personal qualities that seemed to make a person resilient generated a pretty long list of purported assets, not all of which need be present in any one individual, or else that person would be super indeed: at least average intelligence, a pleasant or engaging temperament, problem-solving skills, self-control, independence, self-confidence, good communication skills, humor, determination, ability to form friendships, optimism, attractiveness, a sense of faith or meaning, conscientiousness, and some talent or hobby that attracted the attention of others.
Yet as tempting as it was