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Jay teaches as a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Virginia in the USA and works as a therapist.
Your book "The Power of Childhood"
is about the formative power of difficult childhood experiences.
Jay explains how early setbacks can add to the surprising strength that doctors, psychologists and educators use the cumbersome word "resilience" to describe.
What is meant is the ability to return to a normal mental state as quickly as possible after pronounced everyday stress and elementary crises.
The phenomenon was already described in the 1970s: In a long-term study, the US developmental psychologist Emmy Werner followed the lives of around 200 boys and girls in Hawaii who had grown up with poverty, broken families and other risk factors.
A third of them nonetheless developed into capable, confident and caring adults.
Since then, scientists have been trying to decipher the secret of resilient people - those supposed stand-ups who seem to defy all the odds in life.
SPIEGEL:
Ms. Jay, unlike most of your colleagues, you also see the dark side of resilience.
What exactly do you mean by that?
Jay:
Resilience is often the answer to an above-average depressing or traumatic childhood experience.
I experience this again and again with my clients.
They are, as I call it, super normal: They often work much better than others at school or at work - and in any case better than one would have expected, given their early suffering.
But for this seemingly problem-free normalcy, they have to fight fights that leave deep wounds.
SPIEGEL:
What struggles are you talking about?
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