01 Jan Resilience: What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us Stronger
The Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas once wrote; “There’s only one thing that’s worse than an unhappy childhood, and that’s a too-happy childhood.”
I’m not sure if this is true or not, but I do know that this poses an interesting question for parents who worry their children are growing up under difficult circumstances. They wonder if their offspring will fail to reach their full potential, or worse, sink into despair and dysfunction. Too many people feel lesser somehow because of the adversities they have grown up with, imagining that they would be happier or more successful if they had enjoyed a stress-free childhood.
Recent studies have shown that while the risks are real, a surprising pattern has been found among those whose early lives included tough times. It turns out that plenty of folks draw strengths from hardship and see their struggle against adversity as one of the keys to their later success.
A study published in 1962 by psychologist Victor Goertzel, titled “Cradles of Eminence: A Provocative Study of the Childhoods of Over 400 Famous Twentieth-Century Men and Women.” The selected individuals included names like Louis Armstrong, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. The Goertzel’s found that less than 15% of their famous men and women had been raised in supportive, untroubled homes, with another 10% in mixed settings.
Of the 400, a full 75% – some 300 individuals – had grown up in a family burdened by a severe problem: poverty, abuse, absent parents, alcoholism, serious illness or some other misfortune. To wit: Eleanor Roosevelt’s father was an alcoholic who died by the time she was 10. Oprah Winfrey was sexually abused by relatives. Howard Schultz (founder of Starbucks) grew up in a housing project. Louis Armstrong left school in the fifth grade to support his family and John D. Rockefeller’s father, a con man, was often absent.
“The normal man,” the Goertzels wrote, “is not a likely candidate for the Hall of Fame.”
The word we use to describe such people who rose to great heights after difficult childhoods is resilience. Resilience doesn’t just apply to the ranks of celebrities, the resilient person is everyman. They are ordinary men and women, in every walk of life, who meet the definition of resilience as set forth by the American Psychological Association: “adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy or significant sources of stress.”
When researchers asked these resilient adults to explain their own success in retrospect, the majority reported that their most important asset was determination. “I am a fighter – I am determined – I will survive,” said one woman who made her way out of an abusive childhood. “I give it 100% before I give up. I will never lose hope.”
And another who became an aerospace engineer put it this way: “I don’t let problems take control. I just pick myself up and start all over – you can always try again.”
Of course, there is tremendous variability in terms of how individuals respond to adversity. Social scientists rightly argue that resilience isn’t a single quality that someone does or doesn’t have, or a single action that a person does or doesn’t take, but rather it is a phenomenon – something we can see but may never be able to neatly explain.
Back in 1962, the Goertzels’ finding that so many prominent people had grown up with hard times may have seemed counterintuitive but, given what we now know about stress and coping, it isn’t so surprising. Coping with stress is a lot like exercise: We become stronger with practice.
University of Nebraska psychologist Richard Dienstbier also explained how this works with his “toughness model,” first published in 1989 in the journal of Psychological Review. His study revealed that those who had known significant adversity helped to shape how they turned out, leading the study’s author to agree with Nietzsche, that “in moderation, whatever does not kill us may indeed make us stronger.”
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