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CHAPTER 4

Fight

I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It’s so fuckin’ heroic.

—George Carlin

In 1955, on Kauai, Hawaii’s “Garden Island,” psychologists Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith inadvertently began what would become a groundbreaking and decades-long study of resilience. Their subjects were 698 infants—all of the babies who were born on the island that year. These infants were from Asian, Caucasian, and Polynesian families, many of whom were struggling with multiple adversities. Some lived in chronic poverty and were undereducated and underemployed. Alcoholism or mental illness ran through many of the homes. Werner and Smith hypothesized that the more difficulties these children were exposed to when they were young, the more problems of their own they would have as they grew. This was a commonsense proposition, to be sure, but it was also one that had not, by the 1950s, been empirically demonstrated in a large sample, much less from the cradle and then across time. To do so, these nearly seven hundred brand-new citizens of Kauai were followed, from birth into middle adulthood, by psychologists, pediatricians, public health professionals, and social workers.

Unfortunately, Werner and Smith were somewhat right. Two-thirds of the infants they labeled as “high-risk”—those who grew up alongside four or more adversities—had serious behavioral or learning problems by age ten. By age eighteen, they struggled with their own delinquency or mental illness, and many had become pregnant. What Werner and Smith did not expect, however, was that, despite their troubled beginnings, one-third of the high-risk children went on to become “competent, confident, and caring adults.” They earned educations and held better jobs than their parents. They sidestepped the substance abuse or divorce or domestic violence they had once known, found supportive partners, and built loving families. They were, in Werner and Smith’s words, “vulnerable, but invincible.”

This startling discovery turned Werner and Smith’s work on its head. What was intended to be an inquiry about the devastating impact of early adversity became a seminal work about the possibility of transcending it. How exactly had these vulnerable children managed to make themselves invincible, if they were indeed so? There is no formula, of course, but decades of further research—both in the Kauai sample and in other studies—point to adaptations and conditions that facilitate one’s “overcoming the odds,” the title of one of Werner and Smith’s books on the topic. Perhaps most notably, when Werner and Smith asked these “vulnerable, but invincible” adults how, in retrospect, they understood their own unexpected success, the answer was not all that surprising: The majority reported that determination—a fighting spirit—was their most important asset.

***

Paul looks like a superhero. Or to be more precise, he looks like a superhero might appear on his day off. Behind his glasses, he is handsome in a boy-next-door kind of way, and right now he appears to be about that age superheroes always seem to be, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. His muscles strain a bit against his T-shirt, not so much that his bulk seems strange or steroidal but enough to give the impression that, underneath his casual exterior, Paul is surprisingly strong. He comes across as squeaky-clean and friendly, but he is guarded, too. Paul seems like the kind of person who would fare well in an emergency, like he is fit to take on the world, and in a way he is.

Paul is a nuclear engineer and a young officer in the navy. He found his way to me after he read a book I wrote on the importance of one’s twenties, on the value of making a bold and courageous start in adulthood. He felt validated by the notion that all the hard work he had put into his own twenties would pay off, but he had questions, too. He wondered sometimes if other people his age—especially those not living in barracks or on submarines—were free to enjoy their lives more. They traveled for pleasure, he imagined, and they spent time with their loved ones while he left his partner—a young artist with an alcoholic father—back home alone. He wondered how he could be there for the woman he loved and the country he loved at the same time. Perhaps like many others in service, Paul sometimes looked around and asked himself: “Why am I doing this?”

Why indeed.

This was a question Paul heard often, not only from himself but also from others. Many who questioned him wrongly envisioned the military as a gathering place for those with no other options, yet there was Paul, an excellent student who had lived a middle-class life. To many, his decision to be an engineer in the navy seemed curious, or at least one with a story behind it. When I posed his own question back to him—“Why are you doing this?”—Paul was ready with a response. It was succinct and clear, in that way that perhaps the military trains one to be, yet his answer was also notable for its candid self-awareness: “I really struggled in school growing up, and for years I was hunkered down in a sort of bunker in a lot of ways. But the navy is an environment where I have been able to stick my head above the parapet and thrive.”

***

For Paul, the fifth grade had come too soon. He was skipping a year so, on that first day, his teacher said, “Class, this is Paul. He is joining us from the third grade. Please make him feel welcome.” She might as well have placed a target on his back.

Paul was certainly an easy mark. Of all the kids in his class, he was the smartest but also the newest, the youngest, the skinniest, and the weakest. On his first day on the playground, when the class played Red Rover, Paul gave it his all as he ran toward the line of cheering and jeering classmates, only to be bounced back from their joined hands like a rock out of a slingshot. In a way, all of his school years would come to feel like that. Paul spent his days trying to break in somewhere only to have the other kids grasp each other tightly, like they would rather have their arms broken than be seen as the weak link, the ones who let Paul through. Outside of recess, kids turned their backs to him at the lunch table. They stepped on the backs of his shoes. They leaned in together and snickered behind their hands when he spoke. They spit in his seat and left mean notes on his desk.

When another new boy joined the class, for a short while Paul had a friend. Together they articulated the sort of social class system at work: The “upper” boys were the biggest and the most athletic ones, the boys whom everyone watched carefully and wanted to be; the “middle” boys had some assets but not quite the right ones so they worked anxiously to align themselves with the boys above them; the “lower” boys, of course, were Paul and a couple of others who mostly stayed away from each other for fear of compounding their bad situation. With his new friend, life as a “lower” was tolerable for a while but only until one of the mean notes on his desk said this: “Sorry. Can’t be friends anymore. I want to move up.”

***

Some kids live with emotional or physical abuse at home, while others live with it at school, where it goes by the name of bullying. About one in three children are bullied, usually at school, by the age of eighteen, although what that bullying looks like varies widely. An estimated 25 percent of bullied children are the targets of verbal aggression; they are made fun of, insulted, or called names, or they have rumors spread about them. About 10 percent are bullied physically, by being pushed, shoved, tripped, spit upon, or the like. About 5 percent are ignored or excluded from activities, and another 5 percent have their physical safety threatened. And according to a 2011 study from the Pew Research Center, about 10 to 15 percent of teens reported being harassed via the Internet. Like Paul, most children who are bullied are targets of more than one kind of aggression.

To understand bullying and its impact is to understand the role of power: Bullies have more of it, while their targets have less. Contrary to the widespread notion that bullies are insecure outsiders, most have assets that are respected by their peers. Maybe they are physically large or are fast runners or skilled athletes, or perhaps they are popular or socially savvy. Bullies abuse whatever power they have to maintain their dominant position in the crowd. The targets of bullies, on the other hand, tend to be socially vulnerable, usually because they are different somehow. Maybe they are chosen, as Paul was, because they are younger or smaller or new to a class. Sometimes they are perceived as unattractive or unathletic. They may be disabled or economically disadvantaged, or they may be a member of an ethnic minority or identify as LGBTQ.

Although elementary school students do experiment with bullying behaviors, the lion’s share of bullying takes place in middle school. Bullying behavior spikes during transitions between grades or schools or during other times when social groups are disrupted. Boys and girls jockey anew for friends and invitations, and it is during this social free-for-all that various forms of aggression may be used to establish, or reestablish, the status quo.

When Paul moved on to middle school, most of his classmates moved along with him, as did his low status. More than ever, the boys scrambled for a place at the top of the social heap, or at least for a place as far from the bottom as possible. During school, kids pelted Paul with the bad words they were just learning—gay, stupid, weirdo, pussy, fag, loser, asshole, shithead, pencil dick—and after school they pelted him with rocks while he waited for his bus. Contrary to the old sticks-and-stones adage, the words did hurt—and in fact, recent research has found that social pain travels along the same pathways in the brain as does physical pain.

The imbalance of power is not only what makes bullying possible and intractable but also what makes it so harmful. Of course, some fighting and competition is common and even normal among kids, but those who experience repeated aggression at the hands of more powerful others feel more threatened, less in control, and more anxious and depressed than those who experience aggression at the hands of peers on their same level. Feeling helpless to change what is happening to them, the targets of bullying may live with chronic fear and dread, and the harm that this may cause is as varied as bullying itself. Many victims of bullying feel bad about themselves and feel isolated from others. Because bullying often—but not always—takes place at school, targets may perform poorly in their classes and have a negative view of education and teachers. They may suffer from physical ailments such as headaches, stomachaches, or sleeping problems, and report mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. These problems tend to be more severe if the youth is targeted once a week or more, and they may continue well into adulthood as the experience of powerlessness and victimization becomes woven into who they are, with depression or anxiety lasting for years or even decades after bullying subsides.

This might have been how it went for Paul were it not for one of the rocks hurled his way. When Paul came home with a bloodied eye that required stitches, his mother considered that perhaps he ought to beat a retreat; that maybe the family should move so he could go to another school: “I feel bullied by those kids!” Paul heard his mother cry to his father that night behind their closed bedroom door. Hearing those words and his mother’s sobs, what struck Paul the most was the unfairness, the wrongness, of it all. Parents are not supposed to cry. Families are not supposed to move. People who do bad things are not supposed to get away with them. So in that moment, Paul decided to stay right where he was. He was going to find a way to fight back.

***

When faced with danger, our deepest instincts are to fight back or run away. This “fight-or-flight” response was so-named in 1915 by psychologist Walter Cannon, who observed in animals that, when threatened, the body mobilizes to defend itself or to flee. In Cannon’s model, every living being’s goal is to maintain homeostasis—another well-known word he coined—and, to do so, the brain coordinates bodily systems in order to ensure the stability of what, before him, French experimentalist Claude Bernard called the milieu interieur, or the internal environment.

Cannon’s ideas have been refined over the years, but a century later we know that he was largely correct. Following disturbances in our environment, the brain and the body respond in an effort to make things right. The amygdala triggers the release of stress hormones, and as a result heart rate increases, focus narrows, digestion slows, and blood flows to our muscles for extra energy. These changes prepare us to react to stress—to do something about it—by either advancing or retreating, through fight or through flight.

When we think of the fight in fight or flight, we may imagine physically harming someone or something, and in the most primitive evolutionary sense, to fight is to punch a person who shoves us or to throw rocks at a bear that charges our way. In the modern world and for the supernormal, however, fighting back can take many forms. The word aggression is derived from the Latin aggredere, which can mean “to attack or assail,” but it can also mean “to approach or attempt,” or “to seize an opportunity.” For the supernormal, to fight often means to attack a problem. Rather than raging against another person, for supernormals, fighting the good fight is more often about battling back against a situation—poverty, discrimination, abuse, bullying, unfairness, abandonment—whatever the case may be.

Fueled by some original injustice, the supernormal are not afraid to work long and hard without immediate rewards, even in the face of multiple setbacks. There is an unwillingness to be beaten, an impulse to fight for one’s own survival and to better one’s circumstances, an imperative to stand up for oneself and for what is right. In fact, they usually feel they have no choice. Failure is not an option, as they say, because neither is keeping on with life the way it is.

In my office, this is how the supernormal describe themselves:

I am a fighter.

I am a survivor.

I am determined.

I am a scrapper.

I am tough.

I am strong.

I never give up.

I just keep going.

I do what has to be done.

I’m driven.

I am a striver.

I always find a way.

I pick myself up and brush myself off.

I do whatever I set my mind to.

Backed into a corner, I come out swinging.

Most supernormals do not literally become fighters, of course, and even Paul joined the military as an engineer, a problem solver. But no matter who or what they may look like on the outside, on the inside they see themselves as fighters at heart. Many draw strength from the stories not just of superheroes but of all sorts of fighters. Real-life heroes who can show them a way forward. Characters in books and movies and music that seem as powerful and as relentless as the supernormal may feel. Fictional assassins who know something about locking in on a target and having that killer instinct. Metaphorically speaking, they are hunters. They are stalkers. They are slayers. They are soldiers. Whatever the situation—or the inspiration—each day feels like a fight for survival, and scrappers that they are, supernormals use whatever strengths, whatever weapons, they have to prevail: smarts, sports, family, talent, work ethic, personality, even language.

Also once a student who, like Paul, felt young and out of place, Senator Elizabeth Warren describes in her memoir, titled A Fighting Chance no less, a midwestern adolescence in which she learned to work with what she had: “I was only sixteen, but because I’d skipped a grade, I was now a senior in high school. The way I looked at it, I wasn’t pretty and I didn’t have the highest grades in my school. I didn’t play a sport, couldn’t sing, and didn’t play a musical instrument. But I did have one talent. I could fight—not with my fists, but with my words. I was the anchor on the debate team.”

And as millions of people know by now, Lin-Manuel Miranda, in his smash Broadway musical Hamilton, tells the story of Alexander Hamilton who “wrote his way out” of poverty in the Caribbean and into becoming one of the nation’s Founding Fathers. Maybe fewer people, though, are aware that Hamilton’s story is not entirely unlike that of Miranda, who wrote his way out of some tough times, too. As a child in Washington Heights, Miranda was picked on for his verbal skills: “I caught my first beatin’ from the other kids when I was caught readin’,” he raps on The Hamilton Mixtape. Miranda fought back against his troubles with his songwriting, winning a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, two Grammy Awards, and three Tony Awards by the age of thirty-six. “It’s up to me to draw blood with this pen, hit an artery,” he raps some more. The pen, as they say, is mightier than the sword.

***

Paul returned to school with a bandage over his eye, and he began waging what he called an internal battle for self-respect. Much the way some kids have lucky socks they wear to soccer games, Paul started his day by rummaging through his dresser drawer, looking for his superhero T-shirts. He wore them in layers under other shirts and jackets, like armor he said, and they protected him from feeling defenseless and alone. Days at school were long, and as he counted down the hours—“six more, five more, four more to go”—Paul practiced being strong, at least in his own mind. He memorized the periodic table. He solved word puzzles. He worked a Rubik’s Cube. He changed his handwriting so it slanted to the left rather than to the right. Mind over matter, whatever it was, Paul was determined to make it so. Ever since the stitches, the kids no longer threw rocks at him, and the words and comments that came his way Paul deflected: “I refused to accept that what they said about me was true.”

These might sound like imaginary victories, or mere wishful thinking, but researchers know that fighting back on the inside can be as important as what happens on the outside. One study examined the well-being of eighty-one adults who had been held as political prisoners in East Germany and who had been subjected to mental and physical mistreatment including beatings, threats, and being kept in the dark. Decades after their release, about two-thirds of the prisoners had struggled—or were even still struggling—with post-traumatic stress, while about one-third of the prisoners had not. To understand why some prisoners fared better than others, researchers looked at the type of treatment they received, as well as the coping strategies they used while held captive. More predictive of later suffering than how severe the abuse was or whether the prisoners feared for their lives was the extent to which they gave up on the inside. Those who felt mentally defeated—who felt like “nothing” or who quit caring about what became of them—were more likely to struggle for years and even decades after their release than those who secretly fought back in their own minds. Even though these prisoners may have appeared to others to have given up, complying with guards and signing false confessions, on the inside they were prevailing in ways that no one else could see. Secretly, they refused to believe they would be defeated, and they imagined that, sooner or later, they would triumph. What happened on the outside did not matter as, in their minds, they were unbeatable.

Maybe being strong on the inside should have been enough for Paul, but as had been the case with some of the children from Chowchilla, he wanted to be physically strong too. “Was I going to be the kid everyone kept telling me I was, the kid who got pushed around?” Paul remembers asking himself. “Or was I going to be someone else?” Paul’s father signed his son up for judo, and soon the dojo was a place where he did get to be someone else. “I was the most aggressive person there,” Paul recalled, taking pride in the way he channeled the fighter within. He made a point of explaining that judo is not a sport of kicking or punching; it is a martial art in which one pins or neutralizes the opponent. Each afternoon after school, Paul could win without anyone getting hurt.

Such daily mastery experiences and physical activity likely protected Paul from depression and anxiety that can go along with bullying and other adversities, yet there was more to it than that. Rather than engaging in routine or maintenance exercise, Paul’s workouts both in and out of judo were increasingly designed to push his own limits. On the weekends, Paul put on his superhero T-shirts and ran two miles, then four miles, then six, the pounding of his feet keeping time with the rhythm of his breath and with the intense, thumping music he listened to. Sometimes Paul pretended he was training for the apocalypse. Sometimes he pretended he was invincible.

As an adult, Paul did look pretty invincible, and I commented on how certain and unshakable he seemed, even as he spoke about some very painful times. “I can talk about it now,” he said, suggesting that, at one time, he could not. So I wondered—and I asked him—back then, before he could talk about it and before he could draw on the strength of being a naval officer, how did he put one foot in front of another, day after day, as he walked to classes in the hallways at school and as he ran for miles on the streets of his town? How did he fight back for all those years?

At first, his answer was no surprise. His dad was in his corner, he emphasized; and to be sure, having good people who can compensate for what is bad in life can make all the difference. But then Paul said something else. He named—even owned—an emotion that is so often a part of the story, yet one that many supernormals feel ashamed of including. “I got angry,” Paul added unabashedly, as a simple matter of fact. “I realized it was wrong what those kids were doing to my family and me, and it made me angry. And that anger became my fire and motivation.”

***

Anger has a bad reputation. Both scientists and laypeople tend to think of emotions as positive or negative, and of the six universal emotions—happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise—only happiness seems clearly positive, and the negative emotions seem to be, well, all the rest. As would be expected, positive emotions are viewed as desirable and negative emotions are seen as undesirable; positive feelings lift us up, it is thought, while negative feelings drag us down. From this perspective, an emotion like happiness is to be cultivated while those like fear and sadness and anger are to be eliminated or at least managed. Historically, anger has been viewed as an especially damaging emotion, and this take on getting angry is echoed in many ancient sayings, like this one purportedly by Seneca the Younger—“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured”—or this one widely attributed to Buddha—“You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.”

More recently, however, rather than judging feelings as good or bad, some scientists have suggested that it makes more sense that each of the universal emotions has a uniquely important role to play. It seems reasonable that while happiness is an emotion that allows us to enjoy life when all is well, other emotions can help us adjust and survive when all is not. With this in mind, researchers have begun to appreciate anger as an emotion with enormous adaptive value. There are many reasons why we become angry, although most involve feeling wronged somehow. A strong feeling of displeasure, anger emerges when we feel thwarted, provoked, or aggrieved. Maybe something or someone we treasure has been taken away, or we are prevented from attaining an object or a goal we desire. Often, but not always, to feel angry is to perceive injustice, an unfairness that results from the misdeeds of others. Anger is a signal that something has gone wrong. Something hurts. There is a violation of what “ought to be.”

One afternoon, not long after Paul and I talked about the role that anger had played in his fight against bullying, I had a session with a client in her forties who still struggled with the effects of childhood bullying. I asked her if, growing up, she ever got angry about what was happening to her. (This may be changing some but, historically, girls and women have been especially discouraged from expressing or displaying anger.) “No,” she replied. “But I think it would have been better if I had.” As Toni Morrison wrote in The Bluest Eye, “There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth.”

***

Seneca and Buddha were right that just feeling angry is not necessarily beneficial, and, to be sure, chronic anger is hard on the body and mind. What can be useful about anger, though, is not the feeling itself but the action it inspires. Anger is where the fight in fight or flight comes from. An energizer and organizer, anger moves us to close the gap between what we want and what we have, or between the way things are and the way we think they should be. It compels us to resist the current state of affairs, rather than giving up or giving in. A powerful emotion capable of generating enormous forward momentum, anger propels us toward our goals and even over obstacles along the way. Aristotle was able to hold this more generous view of anger when he wrote, “The angry man is aiming at what he can attain.” This sort of active, even tireless, striving is a hallmark of the superheroic and the supernormal, and it has long been recognized as one of the key ingredients of success.

In the 1800s, Sir Francis Galton collected biographical information on nearly a thousand celebrated statesmen, writers, scientists, poets, musicians, painters, poets, military commanders, and others, arguing that eminence was the product of the “triple event of ability combined with zeal and with capacity for hard labour.” The fact that the word ability is given pride of place, as the first of the three events mentioned, is likely no accident. A cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton makes the aforementioned argument in his blockbuster book, Hereditary Genius, in which he asserts that intelligence and talent are largely inborn, passed down in great families.

By the 1900s, however, researchers questioned the primacy of innate abilities such as intelligence and began to pay increasing attention to the other factors that Galton put forth: zeal and hard work. Lewis Terman launched the Study of the Gifted, for example, and followed academically precocious children into adulthood, and what he found was that tenacity was more predictive of whether these children became accomplished in their fields than was their IQ. More of the same was reported by Catherine Cox, a psychologist and student of Terman’s, who examined the lives of 301 geniuses and found that when intelligence was controlled for, lifetime achievement was dependent upon traits such as “persistence of motive and effort.”

In the twenty-first century, many of us know of this stick-to-itiveness as “grit”—or “passion and perseverance” as researcher Angela Duckworth defines it. Multiple studies have shown that grit contributes to success in far-ranging areas including grade point average, educational attainment, teacher effectiveness, National Spelling Bee ranking, staying married over the long run, and—as in Paul’s case—retention in the workplace and the military.

Yet, despite how common it now is to hear about the importance of grit, perseverance seems to be well understood while the passion behind it is less so. Passion—the “zeal” Galton pointed to, or the “motive” referenced by Cox—is the emotional component that propels it all. Each of us needs a reason to dig in and fight for what we want, especially when what we want will not come easily. Indeed, in a video produced by the navy about the challenges of Officer Candidate School, three graduates of the program begin the recording by pointing to the irreplaceable power of a deep-seated feeling. “If you don’t have the passion,” says one, “you’re not going to make it.” None of this is to say that anger is the only emotion that can fuel hard work, but it certainly seems to be one way to get there. Several studies have shown that, from infants as young as seven months to adults of all ages, when faced with frustrating, challenging tasks—such as accessing a withheld toy, opening a locked box with the wrong key, and working both solvable and unsolvable problems—it is those who get angry who persist.

Brain science supports this notion that anger can indeed be productive, particularly when it is coupled with goal-directed, forward-moving behavior. In fact, when channeled into active, healthy striving, anger is the brain’s opposite of fear. Anger first springs from the reactive amygdala, but when we move from feeling emotions to acting purposefully on them, activity shifts to the prefrontal cortex, or the area of the brain where we plan and execute intentional behavior. The right prefrontal cortex manages our more pessimistic responses, and it is activated when we feel angry and powerless, when we sit where we are and stew. However, something different happens in the brain when we feel angry and powerful, when we move from the question of “What has been done to me?” and instead ask ourselves, “What am I going to do about it?”

In the words of William Arthur Ward, “It is wise to direct your anger toward problems, not people; to focus your energies on answers, not excuses.” To benefit from the anger that we feel, we must move from being a victim to being an activist, at least on our own behalf. This redirection of energy from powerlessness toward purposeful activity has long been recognized as therapeutic for trauma and grief—“Work, work, work. This is the single most important goal of traumatized people throughout the world,” wrote Richard Mollica, an expert on survivors of mass violence from around the world—and it is a maneuver that can even override the more emotional, uncontrolled, reckless forms of anger such as rage.

When we perceive there is something we can or should do to overcome the obstacles in our way, anger activates the left prefrontal cortex, or the side of the brain that manages our more empowered responses. The left prefrontal cortex is where we work toward goals, solve problems, and plan for and pursue the things we want. In this way, getting angry and taking action can be good for us as it moves brain activity to the side of the brain where we feel assertive, self-directed, and in control. It is here in the left prefrontal cortex that anger can help us advance our agendas, feel more determined, and even feel more positive about the future.

In fact, although it has long been seen as a negative emotion, in action and in the brain, anger looks a lot like happiness, an emotion that also utilizes the left hemisphere. In a series of studies, research psychologists Jennifer Lerner and Dacher Keltner compared adults who were fearful, angry, or happy. In contrast with fearful adults, those who were angry or happy shared similarly optimistic predictions about their future, even about events that they may or may not be able to control, such as having a heart attack, finding a job, choosing a profession, or marrying well. Further work suggests that, although both happy and angry people tend to be optimistic, the optimism they experience is not quite the same. While happy people tend to believe good things will come their way, those who feel angry are more likely to believe that they will make good things happen for themselves. The optimism that angry people feel may be closer to having faith in oneself rather than having faith in the world, or so said researchers Jennifer Lerner and Larissa Tiedens; it produces “a bias toward seeing the self as powerful and capable.”

There is also evidence that because anger makes our problems feel more manageable, it can actually help us feel less stressed. In another study by Jennifer Lerner and colleagues, ninety-two adults were faced with known stressors such as counting backward from 9,095 by 7s, counting backward from 6,233 by 13s, and mentally solving difficult math problems from the Wechsler Intelligence Test. To add to their frustration, participants were told of their mistakes as they made them, and they were pushed to work harder and faster or else, they were warned, they might fall behind others. While participants who became anxious or fearful as they worked through the problems had higher heart rates, blood pressure, and cortisol levels, those who became angry had lower levels of these same stress measures. There is a grounding self-assurance that can go along with feeling indignant. Sometimes, those who get angry feel stronger and more confident. They feel more equipped to move forward and right the wrongs of the world.

***

The military might seem like the last place Paul would choose to be after escaping the relentless hierarchy of his childhood but it was, in fact, the clear structure that appealed to him most. There he lived in a world where relationships felt orderly and fair rather than unpredictable and capricious, and where he was judged on the talents that he had. Looking back, Paul suspects he went into the navy because his strengths still felt somewhat tentative—“Having a lifestyle where I stayed physically active and mentally sharp was important or else I worried I’d relapse and end up like I used to be,” Paul remembers—but far from going back to being a target for his peers, Paul emerged as a leader among them. The running, the coursework, the relentless physical training: Paul had been putting himself through those sorts of paces for years, and he had a lot of experience coping with stress. Now as an officer, Paul says, “I see myself as stronger and more capable than most people around me because of the treatment I lived through. I see myself as an optimist, not because I think bad things don’t or won’t happen but because I believe I can overcome whatever comes my way. I feel independent and confident. I feel tested. I feel brave.”

Poet Dylan Thomas said, “There’s only one thing that’s worse than having an unhappy childhood, and that’s having a too-happy childhood.” I do not know if this is true or not, but I do know that, unlike Paul, too many supernormals feel lesser somehow because of the tough times they have seen, imagining they would certainly be better people if they had had stress-free lives. They look longingly at peers who seem uncomplicated and happy, imagining they are more desirable, more deserving, more attractive, more normal, more fit for life, more . . . everything. This is not necessarily the case.

While unrelenting, overwhelming stress is not good for us, to struggle is not all bad. Learning to cope with stress is a lot like exercise in that we become, as Paul said, stronger and more capable through exertion and practice. This is what child psychiatrist Michael Rutter called the “steeling effect,” or the notion that exposure to some hardships steels us against the impact of future ones, and research psychologist Richard Dienstbier made a complementary argument with the “toughness model.” In Dienstbier’s view, if we experience the feeling of being under pressure, we become less frightened by our own physiological arousal, and we begin to see threats and problems as situations we can manage.

There is ample evidence that exposure to adversity can indeed make us hardier, that grappling with moderate levels of stress is even better for us than experiencing none at all. Experiments with young squirrel monkeys have shown that early exposure to brief stressors resulted in their being more resilient; compared with monkeys who had no previous exposure to stress, those who had been exposed to moderate stressors were more comfortable and less anxious in new situations, and they even had lower levels of cortisol.

Also, in a study of over five hundred Dartmouth students, about half of whom served in the Vietnam War, those who were exposed peripherally to combat showed greater gains in psychological health across adulthood than did veterans with direct exposure or no exposure at all. And in a multi-year study of a nationally representative sample of over two thousand adults, aged 18 to 101, research psychologist Mark Seery and his colleagues found that those who had experienced at least some adversity were both more successful and more satisfied with their lives than those who had experienced extremely high levels of hardship—and compared with those who had experienced very low levels of adversity. These adults also coped better with more recent problems they encountered, leading the study’s authors to conclude, in partial agreement with Nietzsche, that “in moderation, whatever does not kill us may indeed make us stronger.”

***

“I guess my life since the bullying started could be considered one long fight,” Paul told me. “I still fight a battle with myself to be the best I can be, and to prove to both myself and others that I can, and will, succeed in whatever way I choose. I have my degree. I have my rank. I have my hobbies. I have my friends. But the battle rages on. There is plenty more to achieve.” That was, after all, why Paul had sought me out. Not because he felt his life was not going well but rather because he was determined to make it better all the time.

Like for many supernormals, Paul’s next battle was to find a way to have love in his life, too. He worried that being in the military was incompatible with being there for his girlfriend, and he wanted to know how he could be a better partner. There were, of course, challenges ahead, logistical ones at least. Still, I reminded him that not only do determined problem solvers do well in the military, but they tend to do well in relationships as well. Being a fighter was who he was, and although that took Paul away from home a fair bit, it was also the reason he was working so hard to find a way to keep his relationship together.

Paul wondered if his girlfriend could understand the fighter in him—if she could love that about him—but maybe she already did. Tucked away in a drawer at the barracks, Paul kept a drawing of himself as a superhero. It was a charcoal sketch his girlfriend had done of him because that was how he seemed to her. Courageous. Strong. Unbeatable. On a mission.