Out of the Woods: Tales of Resilient Teens

It's a dangerous world. We need to study risk factors and pay attention to the things that can go wrong. But that can't be the whole story. Without a little balance, parents will succumb to learned helplessness and clinicians will surrender to burnout. We need to remember that most parenting is good-enough parenting, and there are plenty of examples of kids who overcome truly horrific situations. In addition to asking what is bad for kids, we should also be asking what characteristics promote resilience. While some people ultimately surrender to difficult circumstances, others seem to have qualities that allow them to overcome adversity. We can talk in broad terms. Abuse is bad. Neglect is bad. Poverty, racism, social injustice, illness, loss of a parent, clueless parents. All bad. The absence of those risk factors is good. Having a lot of competent adults in your life who genuinely care about you is good. But the actual real life way in which internal and environmental factors interact to create resilience is a mystery. Lots of kids grow up in pretty tough circumstances and they don't all turn out the same, just as the kids who start off with all the advantages don't all turn out the same. Dr. Hauser began with a follow-up study of people who were psychiatrically hospitalized as adolescents. What we are presented with here are the narratives of a sample of individuals who are doing well now. Coming from an Anthropology background, I have a fondness for personal narratives, but I acknowledge that they can feel like something off the softest end of the `soft-science' continuum. However, at this stage of the game, this is an appropriate and useful way to explore the topic. We don't have the sophistication yet to reduce personal histories to crunchable variables (actually, there are quantitative analyses from the same data sets that produced this book. You can search out those results if that's more your thing, and there's a lot more analysis yet to be mined from this data set). In a sense, the narrative approach is a more helpful way to understand the phenomenon of resilience, since resilience itself may have more to do with the myths people make of their lives than with any particular contortions of vectors and eigenvalues. Narratives give us people's lives in the context in which they frame it. And it is this very ability to coherently develop your history into a good story that, depending on your point of view, either reflects or accounts for successful acclimation to adversity. It is in this sense that Dr. Hauser and his gang have done a great service in presenting these tales of resilience in a way that makes them both satisfying tales to read as well as fertile ground for generating hypotheses about how resilience emergences from adversity. It's good to be realistic but it is important to not lose sight of the positive things. The stories here are inspirational and at times quite moving. For struggling paren

I work in Child Protective Services with families who are involved with this system for chronic neglect of their children. This book offers a look at some of the reasons parents rise above their childhood adversity. It offers the positive side of what goes wrong for so many kids as they grow to adulthood. These resilient teens had "connections to competent and caring adults", achieved "cognitive and self-regulation skills, positive views of self, and motivation to be effective in the environment." The authors use the kids' interview narratives, during inpatient and then as adults, to show how different kids make different sense of what happens to them over time, how some used adversity to reflect and make sense out of it and fit them into the context of their lives, and the others' (contrast group's) themes remained "frozen, fossils of childhood explanations that never quite grew up."

This book is extremely thoughtful and well written and provides an incredibly hopeful and stimulating, if not groundbreaking, view and approach for working with teens in trouble and, perhaps, for giving greater insight and influence to the people who love and/or care for them. Dr. Hauser's courage in challenging society's practices of discarding kids who don't fit into the most homogenized profiles and production-line approaches to education in America -- which he calls "using adolescence as the great 'tracking' and 'sorting' period" -- is nothing short of inspirational to me. We are far too quick and eager to ostracize and incarcerate anyone who doesn't fit some excessively standardized norm we've defined and/or accepted in our society, and we lose so much of the power and value that diverse ideas and collaborative thought can offer. I believe it to be a documented fact that our institutions are filled with many highly creative and talented souls, and Dr. Hauser's observations, perspectives and theories offer light and hope for helping more of those souls to successfully navigate the paths of their fractured childhoods, by helping them to find and use reflectiveness ("curiosity about one's own thoughts, feelings and motivations"), relatedness ("engagement and interaction with others") and agency ("conviction that what one does matters" and that "one can intervene effectively in one's own life") to overcome their pasts. This book talks about how to look for and nurture these characteristics, which underlie the observed traits of resilience he witnessed in the young people, followed over decades, who proved best equipped to find their way back from the depths, and successfully emerged as valued and contributing members of society. `Out of the Woods' is a hopeful testament to the critical importance of mental health care and its advocates in and for our society. The ideas that Dr. Hauser and his fellow researchers put forward, for me, seem to question the wisdom of our recent societal movements away from valuing psychological care and intervention, in exchange for increasingly exclusive overuse of our legal and penal systems. This book truly inspires optimism and hopefulness about the capacity of people to overcome adversity, and to repair dysfunctional childhoods, and not based on gimmicks or psychobabble but on insightful and well founded observations, drawn from the decades-long narratives of damaged teens who found their way out. As a former near-casualty, my heartfelt thanks to you and your team Dr. Hauser!!

"Out of the Woods" documents the difficult and sometimes harrowing adolescences of four resilient teens and former residents of the High Valley psychiatric facility. Their stories offer universal lessons for how troubled teens can adapt to and overcome adversity to lead successful, happy adult lives. The first chapter introduces the idea of resilience and asks the question of how some teens manage to overcome deeply troubled teen years to reach adulthood relatively intact and function successfully in the adult world while others seem unable to find a path "out of the woods." Some face a more difficult task than others, but even the most disadvantaged can overcome seemingly impossible odds, while others who have almost everything they need, including stable, loving homes and a safe, supportive environment, can find themselves in a nightmare of violence, depression, and drugs. These extremes demonstrate that factors within the individual are as important, if not more so, as external factors, in coping with adversity and securing a more hopeful future. Before getting to the interviews with the four individuals who make up the heart of the book, the authors explain their motives and methodologies behind their longitudinal study of 70 individuals, all of whom were under 15 when they were institutionalized in the locked psychiatric ward of High Valley. The researchers explain how their psychoanalytic and therapeutic approach in their search for adaptive mechanisms led them to answers from interviews with the teens themselves, the most resilient of whom accepted their own share of responsibility for their situations as they attempted to understand their experiences and empathize with those whom their behavior affected. Each of the next four chapters tells the story of a resilient individual in his or her own words from interviews spanning many years. While each life appears different in the details, their common success in finding ways out of the woods of their troubled pasts leads the researchers to identify three common elements crucial for resilience: acceptance of personal agency in overcoming adversity, the ability for honest and objective self-reflection, and a sincere commitment and dedication to other people and relationships. I identified with each of these teens in my own, particular way. I remember when my mother would punish me for biting the nanny, even though the nanny was mine to do with as I pleased. And then there was my tenth birthday, when my parents got me a Shetland pony rather than the Dartmoor pony I wanted. The worst may have been my sixteenth birthday, when I specifically told my parents that I wanted a Porsche 911 type 996 GT3, but they tried to buy me off with a stupid Boxster instead and ended up embarrassing me in front of all my friends. I could go on about my parents' abuses, but I am slowly learning to put all that horror into proper perspective. I am using the lessons from this book, exercising my personal agency by