The key ideas

Supernormal: The Untold Story of Adversity and Resilience

Meg Jay, 2017

On the outside they are successful, reliable and always rescuing everyone, while inside, for years, they fight a battle no one knows about. Clinical psychologist Meg Jay tells the stories of clients who grew up with alcoholic parents or lived through bullying, abuse and loss. The book explains how such people survive, what it costs them and what helps them go on living.

Who it is for

For anyone who grew up in a troubled family, coped on the outside and is tired on the inside. And for those who live alongside such people and want to understand them.

It may not be true that everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. But, as we now know, a great many are.

Helen, who rescued everyone

Helen arrived at her first session exactly on time. On the way she had a flat tire: she left the car at a garage, jumped on a bus and ran the last few blocks. “You're a real superhero,” said the psychologist, the author of this book. And Helen burst into tears.

When she was a child, her younger brother drowned, and many years later her father took his own life. All those years Helen was “the strong one” for her family, and later she fought for justice all over the world. No one knew all of her. When she was asked whether she considered herself a resilient person, she answered firmly: no. If she were, she wouldn't be sitting here.

Clinical psychologist Meg Jay had heard answers like that for years. In a large American study of almost eighteen thousand families, mostly middle class, nearly two thirds of the adults recalled at least one adversity from childhood: a divorce, a parent who drank, abuse, illness in the family.

Resilience is usually described as a spring: something hits you, and you bounce back to your old shape. Jay shows something else. These people don't come back the same: for years they fight a battle no one sees. When researchers first noticed such children, newspapers and articles were full of words like “superkids”, “invulnerables” and “supernormal”, and Jay takes up the last one. She asks two questions at once: how do they manage, and what is it like for them?

A word nobody explained

Emily was six when a neighbor burst into the house. Her parents had gone to a baseball game, and the girl was playing with her babysitter. The man staggered around, slammed cupboard doors and shouted, demanding to know where her father kept the liquor. Emily thought he was looking for pickles, and she dutifully checked the fridge. When the neighbor left, the two of them went back to their board game as if nothing had happened: they had no way to explain it.

Emily's father drank. On Saturdays he drew the curtains in the middle of the day, and sometimes he took off his belt. The girl had heard the word “alcoholic” only from the neighborhood kids, and her brother told her it was a bad word. Emily could name what went on at home only twenty years later.

Jay believes this is how most childhood secrets are born. Fear takes away a child's voice, and the child simply doesn't have the words: no one ever said “this is alcoholism.” What isn't understood gets pushed into a far corner, and over time it starts to feel like a secret. The adults walk around the trouble like an elephant in the living room, and the child learns to walk around it too.

That is why a supernormal person's secret is usually not a trick or a lie. As an adult, Emily never told her friends or the man she lived with for two years about her father. She wasn't hiding it on purpose. It simply never occurred to her to talk about it.

Read in Livria

About the author

Meg Jay is an American clinical psychologist who teaches at the University of Virginia. She is the author of “The Defining Decade”, a book about why you shouldn't put your life off until later.

All books by this author: Meg Jay

Terms from the book

  • Cortisol
  • Amygdala
  • Pennebaker
  • Helen
  • Resilience
  • Emily
  • Paul
  • Mara
  • Bipolar disorder
  • Winnicott
  • Jennifer
  • Vaillant
  • Sam
  • Supernormal: The word early articles and books on resilience used for children who grew up amid adversity and thrived anyway. Meg Jay uses it for all resilient people: both their struggles and their successes go beyond the ordinary. It is an image from the book, not a diagnosis.
  • Martha: A client of Meg Jay's whose mother humiliated and hit her as a child. She became an actress.
  • Rachel: A client of Meg Jay's, an artist. As a child she was abused by her older brother.
  • Columbo: An American TV series from the 1970s about a modest and very observant detective who notices the small things others miss.
  • Cycle of violence: The widespread belief that someone who grew up around violence will become a victim or an abuser. According to the data Meg Jay cites, this link is much weaker than people tend to think.
  • Bock: Arlie Bock, a Harvard physician and researcher. In 1938 he founded a study that followed the lives of 268 graduates for more than seventy years.

All terms

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