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CHAPTER 6

Vigilance

I’ve got second sight and amazing powers of observation.

—Roger Waters, “Nobody Home”

When Jessie was very young, she thought her older sister might be Rosemary’s Baby. It was 1968. Roman Polanski’s horror film was newly released and much-whispered-about among the adults, so what other way to understand Charley? Charley did like to pull up the neighbor’s flowers, especially ones that seemed prized or carefully planted. She played mean tricks like putting buttermilk in Jessie’s glass and watching her gag in surprised disgust. She pinched and twisted Jessie’s skin to see what the welts would look like. And at night when they lay in their bed talking, Charley swore Jessie to secrecy and then whispered to her she was adopted. So convincing was she, Jessie looked through her mother’s desk in an attempt to find the legal papers. Maybe that would explain why Jessie’s mother did not protect her more.

Jessie was shy, and she was embarrassed by what Charley had done to the neighbor’s flowers, but to play with their dog, she would summon the courage to walk next door and ring the doorbell. She loved to run around the fenced yard that seemed a world away from home, the dog chasing her and licking her face when she fell down. With the cool grass and the soft fur against her skin, Jessie felt carefree, like a child, something she never felt when she was with her sister. Once when these neighbors went on vacation for a week and boarded their dog, Charley delighted in convincing Jessie they were all dead and gone.

Maybe stunts like this were supposed to be childish pranks, and that is usually how Jessie’s mother interpreted them. “Kids fight . . .” Jessie’s mother would say vaguely rather than authoritatively, her words drifting off as if she did not know what to do about it or how to finish her sentence. But by the way Charley enjoyed tormenting her, Jessie sensed something more sinister. She sometimes wondered if Charley were a devil child.

***

When Jessie came home from elementary school, Charley was always already there. The middle school bus made its way through the neighborhood first, which meant that by the time Jessie walked through the front door each day, she felt like she was tiptoeing into someone else’s home. Nearly six feet tall, Charley ruled the television, the food, the phone, and the house from where she sat in the center of the couch in the center of the den. If Jessie challenged her—“What happened to the potato chips?” or “I want to turn the channel”—then Charley would rise up off the couch and come after her—shoving her, hitting her, kicking her, or pulling her hair. Most days, Jessie just lay on the floor of the den, watching what Charley chose to watch on TV and eating bread and butter. She sometimes pretended—or felt like—she was a prisoner.

Of course there were times, even many times, when Jessie and Charley were good sisters. They shared meals and a bedroom and weekends and holidays, and Charley even stood up for Jessie if someone picked on her at the local ice rink. They united in the backseat singing silly songs during long car trips and had been raised to say “Good night, I love you” no matter what had happened during the day. That was the most confusing part. Jessie learned that you can never know what to expect from people, even people who say they love you. She learned that the good guys can be the bad guys, and that sometimes the bad guys live in your house.

One afternoon, Jessie balked at Charley’s telling her she could not go play with the dog next door. She walked, and then ran, to the kitchen to call their mother at work, but the rotary phone that hung on the wall took so long to dial, Jessie could only stand there, desperate and determined, waiting for the seven numbers to click around. Click-click-click-click-click-click, click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click, click-click-click-click-click-click-click, click-click-click . . .

Before Jessie could get through all the clicks, Charley had the phone out of her hand, hitting her in the head with the receiver—thud!—before letting it drop with a loud crack on the linoleum floor. The phone was left dangling off the hook so, for the rest of the day, no one could call in or out.

“I’m telling Mom!” Jessie screamed as she tore off toward their bedroom where, if she could beat her sister there even by seconds, she could slam and lock the door and wedge a chair underneath the knob, as she had done many times before. Charley pounded on the door and raged: “I’ll kill you if you don’t open the door! I’m going to go let that dog run away!”

Jessie paced small, frantic paths in the bedroom, listening for what was next. She heard Charley thunder down the hall, rifle the drawer in the bathroom, and then she was outside the door again, picking the lock with a bobby pin until pop!—the knob sprang unlocked. Jessie’s heart raced as Charley threw her considerable weight against the now slightly open door. She watched the back of the chair and the doorknob give a little, and she pushed a small dresser in front of the door as well, her heart racing some more. Unable to get in, Charley moved on and Jessie’s heart slowed a little as she sank down to the floor and put her back against the dresser that was against the door. She sat and stared for a while at the electrical outlets across the room. She appreciated the way they looked back at her like little faces, wide-eyed and mouths agape with horror, the only witnesses around.

Hours later, when Jessie heard the clack of her mother’s heels just home from work, she pulled her dresser from the door and the chair out from under the knob. She marched into the kitchen and, in a flood of tears, told about the hitting and the phone and the chair and the dresser and her worries about the dog next door. Jessie’s mother listened, but perhaps because she did not have enough money for a babysitter, she could not afford to acknowledge that Jessie was being abused: “Just go straight to your room after school, honey, and lock the door until I get home,” she said. “Problem solved.”

***

Home is the most dangerous place in America and, by many accounts, the sibling relationship is the most violent within those four walls. Aggression between siblings is believed to be the most common form of family violence, with violence between siblings more prevalent than spousal abuse and child abuse combined. National statistics are difficult to come by because sibling violence is rarely reported to authorities—and when it is it tends to be legally ignored as a family problem—but extensive survey data paint a disturbing picture.

Multiple large studies estimate that about one-third of children are hit, kicked, punched, bitten, or attacked by a brother or a sister in any given year. By the time they leave home, between one-half and three-quarters of young adults will have been the victim of physical aggression by a brother or a sister at least once. Though many of these acts are isolated slugs in a crowded backseat or the occasional kick over a toy, a concerning number of assaults are serious and even recurring, and they result in cuts, bruises, broken bones, and chipped teeth. This physical abuse is often accompanied by even more frequent emotional abuse: intimidation, ridicule, belittling, and threats toward pets and possessions. Between 3 and 14 percent of young adults report having been threatened by a sibling with a gun or a knife, and some of these aggressive siblings turn their rage against their parents as well. Findings like these have led researchers to conclude that “children are the most violent persons in American families.”

Sibling violence may be pandemic but, ironically, its ubiquity only contributes to it being seen as harmless. Pervasive cultural stories reinforce the notion that fighting between siblings is, if unfortunate, likely inevitable. The myth of Romulus and Remus tells us that Rome was founded by Romulus after he killed his brother in an argument over land. In the first family of the so-called Abrahamic religions, Adam and Eve’s older son, Cain, killed their younger son, Abel, in a jealous rage. Though certainly intended as cautionary, tales like these normalize family violence, suggesting that sibling rivalry and aggression are as ancient as civilization, as old as humankind.

The line between sibling rivalry and sibling abuse is admittedly a blurry one, and like Jessie’s mother, many parents trivialize sibling violence as a normal part of childhood. “That’s what kids do,” some say, or “My brother used to hit me and I turned out all right.” Perpetrators of violence are more likely to be older siblings and male siblings, a fact that is easy to shade as “boys will be boys.” While sisters can be chronically and seriously abusive, and they may be genuinely terrifying and dangerous to a child like Jessie, girls are often not seen by adults as legitimate threats. Even brothers and sisters who are on the receiving end of aggression at the hands of siblings minimize their own experiences, preferring labels such as sibling conflict and rivalry rather than sibling violence or abuse.

Violence between siblings tends to be more frequent before adolescence but more extreme after adolescence. Aggression among young children is common and usually peaks before the teen years, as kids learn better strategies for handling frustration and as they become busy with friends and activities outside of the home. Because many warring brothers or sisters “grow out of it” and violence between young siblings may not leave permanent physical scars, parents often deny its significance. Nevertheless, aggression between young children can be frequent and can have long-lasting emotional effects; intersibling violence has been linked to subsequent school bullying, anxiety, depression, and dating and domestic violence. Violence that does continue into high school tends to be increasingly severe and injurious, as older children are bigger and stronger, and have access to more dangerous weapons.

At a time when nations are taking school bullying and violence so seriously, it is unclear why we dismiss aggression between siblings as unimportant. Children are more likely to be hit—once, and again and again—by a brother or a sister than by a peer. And unlike peers who may shift with grades and whims, the sibling relationship is for many years inescapable and, as in Jessie’s case, can make home feel like a prison. Typically our only “cradle-to-grave” bond, brothers and sisters can be among the most influential—or damaging—figures in our lives. Parents may be our template for romantic relationships, but peers are often our template for social ones. Younger siblings already watch their older siblings more closely than they watch their parents, so what happens when a sibling is dangerous to boot?

***

“The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior,” renowned psychoanalyst-turned-behaviorist Albert Ellis purportedly said. Children who grow up with stress and violence know this, and as a result they develop what are called “traumatic expectations,” or the strong belief that more bad things are coming their way. They live moment-to-moment with what psychologist Jerome Kagan termed an “anxiety of premonitions.” There is often, or even always, the free-floating feeling—the realistic fear—that something is about to go wrong. Consciously or unconsciously scanning the environment for danger, children like Jessie become keen observers of the world around. They pay exquisite attention to details and to the moods and behaviors of others and, because they cannot expect others to be there for them, they learn to watch out for themselves. They become vigilant.

In her vivid memoir, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls details life with an alcoholic father and a neglectful mother, a childhood that included being burned in a stove fire at age three and, not too many years later, fleeing a flophouse that was ablaze. “I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire,” she writes plainly. “It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes.” One part of the brain that keeps us on our toes—that keeps us vigilant—is the amygdala. The amygdala is hard at work not just during fight or flight but also in all of those moments that precede the need for fight or flight. It triggers a state of heightened arousal not only when there is clear and present danger but also in uncertain and potentially dangerous situations. In what, fittingly, is called the smoke detector principle, our amygdalae (and the defenses they trigger) err on the side of being overly sensitive and overly responsive; a false positive is preferable to a false negative. If you are Jeannette Walls, you need that fire alarm to ring out loud, and not when the whole house is on fire, but at the very first sign of smoke.

Our brains adapt to the lives we lead, and research suggests that chronic stress that repeatedly activates the amygdala creates long-lasting alterations, including heightened sensitivity to threat. These sorts of changes can be seen among soldiers who have returned from war. In one study, researchers used fMRI scans to compare activity in the amygdalae of two groups of soldiers. One group consisted of thirty-three soldiers who were deployed to Afghanistan, where their duties included combat patrols, landmine removal, and transportation across enemy territory, and where they took enemy fire and saw seriously injured soldiers and civilians. The other group consisted of twenty-six soldiers who were never sent overseas. Before deployment, fMRI scans showed that both groups of soldiers exhibited the same level of activity in the amygdala in response to the photos of angry faces—a universal threat cue. After deployment, the group of soldiers that had been to the war zone had increased activity in the amygdala, now showing a greater response to angry faces compared with the group that never saw combat.

Of course, it is not just war that makes our brains more sensitive. There are different ways of living in fear every day, and abusive siblings, alcoholic parents, dangerous neighborhoods, and school bullies are but a few examples of the different sorts of minefields children pick their way through every single day. Not surprisingly, we see the same sort of brain changes found in soldiers among children who live with violence. One study examined twenty children who had been exposed to family violence and twenty-three who had not. Like soldiers who had returned from war, children who had been exposed to violence in the home showed greater activity in the amygdala in response to photos of angry faces than did the children who had not lived with violence in the home, and the degree of activation was positively correlated with the severity of the violence seen. And it is not just violence that sensitizes the amygdala. Children separated from their mothers, or reared in orphanages or by depressed mothers, for example, have all been found to have larger amygdalae than their peers, perhaps because they grow accustomed to looking out for themselves.

If the best defense is a good offense, it would follow that, in a dangerous world, it is beneficial not just to react to a threat, but also to be able to detect it. Early detection confers the advantage of time, allowing us to be proactive or to get in front of our problems. So many children and teens, and their amygdalae, become skilled not only at responding to danger but also at seeing it coming their way.

***

“Once you’ve been there long enough,” one soldier said of the war zone, “you start to know: That ain’t right. It’s like when you walk down your block. You know your neighborhood. And you know when things are normal.” What is normal for the resilient child? Children who do not live in average, expectable environments but in violent or unpredictable ones become adept at spotting warning signs. Like soldiers in combat, they are especially attuned to details in their surroundings, particularly those that suggest something “ain’t right.” Noticing when the environment is awry is a power that many resilient children possess relative to their peers, and even relative to their own other abilities. Supernormals like Jessie describe a hypersensitivity to danger—almost a sixth sense about it—and, indeed, research studies about threat detection suggest just that.

Preschoolers from troubled families are already paying closer attention to certain details than are their peers. One study looked at fourteen preschoolers who attended a therapeutic school, each of whom had been mistreated in some way. Some of the children had been physically or sexually abused, and others had witnessed domestic violence or been neglected. These preschoolers completed the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, also known as the WPPSI (pronounced whip-see). In this study, the overall IQ scores for the mistreated preschoolers were in the average range, suggesting that, in general, their intellectual abilities did not differ significantly from others their age. They did, however, perform better than same-aged peers on one subtest: Picture Completion. The Picture Completion subtest consists of drawn pictures of common objects or real-life situations that are missing something, like a door without a doorknob or a table without a leg. This subtest measures visual alertness and attention to detail, especially the ability to differentiate essential from nonessential details. Thirty percent of the mistreated preschoolers had Picture Completion scores that were significantly higher than average, or more than one standard deviation above the mean. While 10 percent of the general population performs better on Picture Completion than on other WPPSI subtests, nearly every mistreated preschooler performed best on this subtest.

Because the major predators of human beings are other human beings, among the most relevant cues that something is wrong, or is about to be, are the expressions on the faces of those around us. Charles Darwin argued that emotions are universal and that our survival depends on reading and reacting to them. Further research, most notably by Paul Ekman and Carroll Izard, has suggested that each of the six emotions understood the world over—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise—requires specific movements of facial muscles. We are wired through evolution to be sensitive to these expressions, and some children may become especially so. Multiple studies show that mistreated children are skilled at spotting one emotion in particular: anger. If it is true that, as Proverbs 20:3 asserts, “any fool can start arguments; the honorable thing is to stay out of them,” it often falls on the resilient child to be honorable, or at least not to be foolish. Perhaps this is why they become so attuned to anger. Consider three studies that show what this looks like in a lab.

In the first study, twenty-four children aged eight through ten who had been physically abused were tested alongside twenty-three children of similar age who had not. Children viewed color pictures of faces that displayed anger, happiness, fear, or sadness, one at a time on a computer screen. Each picture was initially presented in an unfocused or “fuzzy” format that made the expression difficult to discern. Every three seconds, the picture of the face became more focused and the emotion became progressively easier to identify. After fourteen of these three-second intervals, the picture was entirely in focus. With each interval, children were asked to judge which emotion, if any, they could discern. The abused children identified angry expressions sooner, on the basis of less information, than did the children who were not abused. These abused children were, however, no quicker to recognize happiness or fear, and they were slower to recognize sadness.

In a related study, these same researchers presented ninety-five nine-year-olds—about half of whom had been physically abused and half of whom had not—with a series of photos of models’ faces as their emotional expressions unfolded from neutral to happy, from neutral to sad, from neutral to angry, from neutral to afraid, or from neutral to surprised. Compared with their non-abused peers, abused children correctly identified anger earlier in the formation of the expression, when fewer facial musculature cues were available. The more hostility was reported in the home, the quicker the child was able to detect an angry expression. In terms of identifying the other emotions—happiness, sadness, fear, surprise—the abused children performed no differently than their peers.

A third study examined whether children who have been exposed to violence not only spot danger sooner, but also remain on alert longer. As measures of arousal, heart rate and skin conductance were measured in eleven abused and twenty-two nonabused four-and five-year-old children while they heard two unfamiliar adults—actors for the study—begin to argue in the next room. The interpersonal episode the children overheard had four phases: (1) neutral conversation, (2) intense angry speech, (3) an unresolved silent period, and (4) a resolution period during which both adults apologized. Both abused and nonabused children became emotionally aroused when the angry speech erupted, but while nonabused children returned to a baseline emotional state upon realizing the conversation did not pertain to them, abused children remained “on alert” in a state of anticipatory monitoring, even throughout the apology phase of the conversation.

Consider these words by Charles Darwin: “Pain or suffering of any kind, if long continued, causes depression and lessens the power of action; yet it is well adapted to make a creature guard itself against any great or sudden evil.” And that is what happens in the brains of many supernormal children: They learn to guard themselves against whatever might come. To live with conflict or uncertainty or violence—especially violence that is unspoken or denied—is to learn that what people do is more important than what people say. As a result, the resilient child may become a shrewd observer of the world around her. She lives in a state of automatic alertness, one that keeps her unconsciously and supremely attuned to subtle changes in the expressions and mannerisms of others. She is like a barometer, always gauging the moods of others in an effort to forecast their behavior. As Jessie said, “My sister was supposed to watch me after school but I was the one who ended up watching her. I watched her like my life depended on it.”

***

By the time Jessie was in middle school, she felt like she used her brain more at home than she did at school. Monday through Friday she got off the bus, unlocked the front door, and began scanning for clues about the remainder of the day. With one quick glance in Charley’s direction, Jessie sensed what would come next. Relaxed eye contact meant Charley was happy—or that she wanted something from Jessie—so it might be a day when the sisters would spend the afternoon in the kitchen scraping together the ingredients to make cookies or the money to order a pizza. Deliberate eye contact with flared nostrils meant Charley was hiding something or lying about something, and that left Jessie racking her brain about what might soon go wrong. A downcast gaze meant Charley was in a prickly state and so Jessie should lock herself in her room as her mother suggested.

Jessie passed many afternoons closed away in her bedroom, doing homework and reading books from school. It was then that she discovered Greek mythology, and Athena in particular, a helper of heroes and the goddess of wisdom and war. Jessie was fascinated by this female who ruled with brains rather than brawn; by a woman who recognized the power of being strategic. Jessie knew she would never be bigger or stronger than Charley, but maybe she could outthink her. Jessie was especially taken by the detail that Athena was often pictured with an owl perched on her arm. “Owls are wise. They can turn their heads to see in all directions, and they see well at night,” Jessie says now. “I needed to be like that because it got to be that the nights were worse than the days.”

Contrary to what her mother said, Jessie’s problems were not solved when her mother came home from work in the evening. As Charley got older, fights became about skipping school or stealing money rather than about potato chips or television channels. Now Charley was quick to throw a glass to end a conversation she did not like, although she kept the violence just this side of egregious by fighting mostly with slaps and fists. If their mother confronted her about her empty wallet, in a flash Charley would now pound on her—not Jessie—backing her into her bedroom where she would lock the door and pummel her in private. The dull thud of fists on flesh terrified Jessie and made her feel sick with guilt. Panicked with helplessness and responsibility, she screamed and cried from the other side of the door—“MOM! MOM ARE YOU OKAY? CHARLEY, STOP HITTING HER! STOP HITTING MOM! MOM, OPEN THE DOOR!”

When their mother threatened to call the police, Charley would spend the evening shut up in the bathroom, threatening to kill herself. Jessie never stood outside the door and yelled on these nights. She sat at the kitchen table and worked on her geometry proofs or she memorized countries and capitals for her world history class, thinking to herself, Do it! Please do it! Jessie sometimes thought about putting poison on Charley’s toothbrush in a sort of self-defense but she did not know what kind of poison to get.

At night, Charley’s mother slept with her purse under her pillow and Jessie slept with Charley. When Charley was in a good mood, the two girls talked and laughed in bed like good sisters, and this confused Jessie because it felt like protecting herself and betraying herself all at the same time. What Jessie did not know is that this is what unbroken prisoners do. They look for ways to enjoy themselves, even as they look for ways to survive or escape. When Charley was in a bad mood, she drew a line down the middle of the sheet with a marker and warned, “If you cross this line, I’ll stab you with my scissors.” Jessie learned to sleep on her side on the edge of the bed, always facing away from Charley with one leg hanging down toward the floor. Gripping the side of the bed with her leg kept her from rolling over in the night.

Jessie often worried that Charley would kill her—or her mother—before dawn, so she trained herself to stay awake by setting herself up in a battle against the digital alarm clock on her bedside table. Aiming to be the last person in the house to fall asleep, she willed herself to see the sequential numbers that only came around once per hour. First the goal was to make it until 10:11. Then 11:12. Then 12:34. She lay there and thought about being Athena, or Athena’s owl, and by the end of middle school she could make it all the way to 1:23 or even 2:34 if she set her mind to it, which was the point. In the morning when the girls woke up, Charley acted as if nothing bad had happened—ever—and, though she must have, Jessie felt like she had never even closed her eyes.

***

Jessie began to feel like she was different from other people. Her home was different, she was certain, because when she tentatively shared details about her life with friends, she heard back quickly and casually, “Yeah my brother is a real pain, too,” or “All my sister and I do is fight over makeup and stuff.” With these responses, Jessie knew to say no more. But Jessie felt different on the inside as well. She felt like she moved through the world more strategically than her friends, and maybe she was right. “My life was like a chess game that I was always learning from and mastering,” Jessie remembers. “If I do this, you do that; if you do that, I should do this.” She became so accustomed to Charley’s stealing her things that she developed a habit of taking mental pictures of rooms when she left them; if something was missing or disturbed when she returned, then Jessie noticed right away.

Most resilient children do not know about the amygdala and so they cannot explain their extraordinary nonverbal skills, or how they manage to stay alert all day, and sometimes even all night. They are as puzzled as anyone at their uncanny ability to know when something “ain’t right,” and to react automatically to cues that sometimes they do not even know they see. They themselves wonder how they are able to spot anger and danger before everyone else, and this leaves them with the strange, powerful, and heavy feeling that—sometimes, at least—they can see the future before it arrives.

Sometimes the only way of understanding their superperception comes in the form of a connection with characters that have similar gifts. Like Jessie with Athena and her owl, some supernormals find a kinship with heroes such as Superman because of his X-ray vision or Spider-Man with his spider-sense. Others feel an affinity with detectives like Sherlock Holmes—including none other than Stan Lee, the creator of Spider-Man—because they, too, use their powers of observation to spot clues and solve mysteries that elude everyone else. “When I was young, my favorite superhero was Sherlock Holmes,” said Lee. “Sherlock Holmes was just a superior human being. So, to me, he was as super as any superhero.”

Childhood adversity is often viewed simply as a factor that hampers development, and indeed many studies have found that chronic stress, especially in early life, interferes with attention, emotion, behavior, and health. But there is more to it than that. One way that the supernormal child overcomes hardship is by developing specialized survival skills, ones that are relevant to her own world. In many ways, Jessie’s vigilance served her well, even outside her house. In school, it simply looked like conscientiousness—a quality often associated with resilient children and teens. Jessie was a thoughtful and diligent student. Always on time to classes or appointments, Jessie was careful not to make mistakes or to make a misstep of any kind. She was skilled at reading the moods of her fellow students and teachers, then managing herself accordingly.

This made Jessie a favorite among teachers and friends, and she attached herself to people she could trust. One way Jessie lessened Charley’s impact on her was by choosing safe places to be and safe people to be with. Studies of children, adults, and primates show us that low-power individuals watch others more than their high-power peers do—and they are more accurate in their judgments about them. The same can be said for supernormals like Jessie. “You had to be able to read people in my family to see when hell was about to break loose,” Jessie said. “So I’m good at watching people carefully. I preempt the bad things. But I know a good thing when I see one, too. I mean, I know what isn’t bad.”

In their landmark study of hundreds of famous men and women, Goertzel and Goertzel concluded that success often came not from being in the right place at the right time, but from being able to recognize being in the right place at the right time. A sensitive amygdala helps us pay attention not only to danger but also to opportunity. Supernormals like Jessie scan their environments, looking for chances to be safe—and even happy—until escape becomes possible, and usually that escape comes from spotting a school or a person or a job that will take them somewhere else. Jessie did go somewhere else: first to college and business school, and then to a high-pressure career in business consulting. She thrived on managing unpredictability and crisis, and her assessment skills were preternaturally advanced. For her thirtieth birthday, Jessie had a small owl tattooed on her back.

***

The relationship between physiological arousal and performance is like an upside-down U. When we are not alert, we do not perform well; when we are too excited, we do not perform well, either. Most people excel when they are moderately aroused, when they feel a real but not overwhelming need to pay attention and do their best. Supernormals like Jessie feel as if they live their lives at the apex of that upside-down U, like they are surfing a wave that never terminates, one that requires finesse and focus and countless minute adjustments. Being able to do this—day after day and night after night—can feel as empowering as it does out of control. It can be as exhilarating as it is exhausting.

Prolonged stress not only keeps the amygdala activated, but also suppresses activity in the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, both parts of the brain that help us downshift our own arousal. The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that moderates fear, as it “talks back to” or reasons with the more emotional amygdala. The hippocampus is where we place learning in context, recognizing that what went on in the home may not go on elsewhere, that one bad person is not representative of all people, that that was then and this is now. If one’s amygdala is extremely sensitive, the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus may be less able to be effective. As a result, supernormal children and adults can feel locked in to their own hyperarousal, simply unable to make it stop. In this way, vigilance can persist for years, and even for a lifetime, after the original exposure to danger.

From an evolutionary perspective, there is value in generalizing danger; in not being naive in every new situation. Yet the overgeneralization of danger is problematic, too, as the supernormal child may take those “traumatic expectations” and her “anxiety of premonitions” everywhere she goes. This is the insidious nature of the mistreatment that many children experience, especially when it is at the hands of loved and trusted others. When bad things happen again and again, the brain learns that danger is not an unusual encounter but rather a way of life. Besides, it is difficult not to overgeneralize abuse at the hands of those who are supposed to care for you, no matter how infrequent it may be. If Jessie’s own sister was willing to hurt her—and her mother failed to protect her—then why should she expect better from mere strangers or friends?

Vigilance helps us manage external difficulties yet, over time, it can take a toll on the brain and the body, leading to an array of inner difficulties: upset stomach and diarrhea, over- or undereating, immunosuppression, insomnia, lowered sex drive, heart disease, anxiety, depression, and—most simply—exhaustion. Even as an adult, Jessie felt chronically on guard, as if her mind never rested. She worked so hard that she forgot to eat, and she had little time for life outside her job. She had trouble relaxing when other people were around, and she sometimes wondered if her friendships were genuine or if she was just a reflexive handler of other people. Jessie felt distant from, and even a bit resentful toward, those who seemed carefree and careless, people who never would have dreamed of needing an owl tattoo.

Rather than watching the clock in an effort to stay awake like she used to, after long days at work Jessie now watched the clock desperate to nod off to sleep. “I haven’t really slept in 20 years,” said one Vietnam veteran in a book by Laurence Gonzales, aptly titled Surviving Survival. Jessie, too, felt as if she could not and did not sleep. She must have slept, of course, but her sense that somehow she hadn’t may not have been entirely inaccurate. Not only do those who experience chronic stress have trouble falling asleep, but once they do, they often don’t sleep as deeply, spending less time in what is called delta sleep. During those long nights, Jessie wondered if she would ever have a regular life or even a regular night’s sleep, like the seemingly normal people all around her.