As renowned resilience researcher Ann Masten so aptly described, those like Helen do not really have superpowers. Perhaps even more surprising, they use, she said, the “power of the ordinary”—or the everyday attributes that can be found in minds, families, and communities—to make something out of nothing, to make a lot out of a little, to pull a rabbit out of a hat. As is usually the case with magic, however, things are not quite what they seem.
The closer—and the longer—scientists followed the lives of resilient children and adults, the more they found that resilience is something that goes in and out of view depending on how and when one looks at it. Most often, researchers look for an “observable track record” of good performance, the most easily observable of all being doing well at work or school. But what about those parts of life that researchers cannot see so easily? Soon it was discovered that many kids who woke up to hard times at home yet did well in the classroom—especially those considered to be resilient—felt stressed and lonely on the inside, making their difficulties tough to spot. Similarly, many adults who excelled at work seemingly unfazed by years of troubles were found to be struggling covertly with their relationships and their health. Perhaps decades of research had revealed the secret behind childhood resilience after all: that no child—and no adult—is truly invulnerable.
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In the middle of the twentieth century, Heinz Hartmann suggested that normal development takes place in what he called an “average, expectable” environment. Something like what pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott referred to as a “good-enough” upbringing, the average, expectable environment is a home—or a school or a neighborhood—where there is enough safety, enough food, enough affection, enough peace, enough discipline, enough supervision, enough role modeling, enough attention, enough love, and at least one good-enough parent or adult who cares. In the good-enough childhood, life need not be without problems, as moderate, age-appropriate challenges are good for us. Still, according to Hartmann and Winnicott, those problems ought to be predictable and they ought to feel normal, whatever we as a culture think that might be.
Ironically, the average, expectable environment that Hartmann envisioned may be neither average nor expectable. Many more people than we might like to think grow up with what Hartmann called “above-average environmental burdens.” A 2010 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that, as children, about 25 percent of adults were the targets of verbal abuse, 15 percent suffered physical abuse, and 10 percent were the victims of sexual abuse. About 30 percent watched their parents divorce. Approximately 30 percent lived in a home where a family member abused drugs or alcohol, and 15 percent witnessed some form of violence. About 5 percent grew up with a parent in jail, and 20 percent shared a home with a family member who was mentally ill.
These might sound like problems that “other people” have, or ones that reside only below the poverty line, and financial hardship can surely lead to or result from problems in the home. Yet the landmark study that stunned the medical community with just how prevalent and harmful these early stressors are—the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, begun in the late 1990s and sponsored by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente and conducted by co-principal-investigators Vincent J. Felitti and Robert F. Anda—was an examination of nearly eighteen thousand mostly middle-class families. Of these, nearly two-thirds reported at least one of the aforementioned adversities, and almost half reported two or more.
What this means is that, for all kinds of children and teens, adversity has a way of piling up. Tough times may come bundled together in what has been called an “adversity package,” such as in Helen’s childhood, when one misfortune sets off other problems. In a 2004 study that examined the interrelatedness of hardships, 80 percent of children who lived with one adversity were also exposed to at least one more, and 50 percent were exposed to at least three more.
On top of this, the most prevalent early adversities aren’t one-time events; they affect the life of the child over and over and over again. Rather than “shock traumas”—to use the words of psychoanalyst Ernst Kris—the most common troubles are “strain traumas” in that they burden the child, and then the adult child, in an ongoing way. They are what fellow psychoanalyst Masud Khan called “cumulative traumas,” or problems that build up across childhood, the full weight of which may not be realized until adulthood: “only cumulatively and in retrospect,” Khan said.
What makes most childhood adversities so dangerous, then, is not necessarily their gigantic proportions but their wear and tear on the daily lives of children, and on developing bodies and brains. Difficult experiences get under our skin in the form of what is now widely known as toxic stress, or chronic stress. Chronic stress takes its toll—metaphorically—much in the same way as do repetitive blows to the head. When, for example, an athlete is struck once seriously enough to lose consciousness—when he has incurred a concussion—we intervene, we take him out of the game. When a player receives a lesser blow, however, maybe he seems all right and we send him back to the game, back to his life. But, as neurologists have found, the hits, big and small, add up.
In 2011, Robert Block, the past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, testified before a Senate subcommittee on children and families that childhood adversity “may be the leading cause of poor health among adults in the United States.” This is because the chronic stress puts us at risk for all sorts of ailments down the line—from ulcers and depression to cancer and autoimmune diseases. And make no mistake, resilient children and adults are not impervious to this kind of stress. They may be more successful than others at battling back against it—at putting together a life in spite of it—but here is the rub: Battling back is stressful, too.
A 2017 article in the New York Times titled “Why Succeeding Against the Odds Can Make You Sick” profiled the work of scientists who study resilient strivers, those who worked to overcome childhood disadvantage. The more likely strivers were to agree with statements like these—“When things don’t go the way I want them to, that just makes me work even harder” or “I’ve always felt that I could make of my life pretty much what I wanted to make of it”—the more likely their health was to suffer, leading one researcher to suggest that, when it comes to our health, resilience may be only skin-deep.
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So here we are in the twenty-first century, some fifty years after the accidental “discovery” of resilience. What began as a quest to follow some superkids and uncover their superstrengths became a journey that researchers surely did not anticipate, one that offered no simple answers but did reveal some important truths: More of us face early adversity than not. Many of us use the ordinary powers at our disposal to fight back against them—and some triumph. And such victories are almost never as easy or decisive as they may appear. These days, few people refer to resilient youth as superkids or invulnerable or invincible or supernormal, but maybe those early researchers were onto something with their superhero comparisons. Because let’s not forget, superheroes are complicated characters.
The world’s first superhero—Superman—is an iconic American creation, an enduring symbol of the American Dream. Rocketed to Earth as an infant from his home planet of Krypton, Superman first landed on the cover of a comic book—shown in all his red, yellow, and blue glory—in 1938. He is “faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.” And of course he can fly, too: “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!” Only a chunk of kryptonite from his home planet—a piece from the past—can bring him down.
Yet as the world would also come to learn, it is not so easy to be the Man of Steel. An