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Resilience In The Glass Castle

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Throughout the memoir, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls recalls her family’s past and the struggle they went through. She inadvertently teaches the audience her meaning of resilience. But how is resilience defined? In short, resilience is the ability of a person to appreciate what life hands them instead of sulking upon it. A quote by Elizabeth Edwards supports this definition and ties in with Jeannette Walls’ personal experiences. “Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you've lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that's good.” An important recurring event read in the memoir is when the Walls family moves to a new area and …show more content…

A very distinct quintessential of resilience from the memoir is the loyalty of the Walls children to Rex and Rose Mary even within these struggles they’ve faced. Parent and children fights happen quite often, but usually do not last too long, it is a basic unit of most relationships. With Rex constantly getting drunk and not fully providing for his family, Jeannette tells her view on how she still loved her father and connected with him, nonetheless. Rex once told his daughter, “I swear, honey, there are times when I think you’re the only one around who still has faith in me,” (Walls 78-79). Rex may seem like a tough, hard, southern guy when in reality, he has a soft heart for his family, even when he does show it. “But I’m goddamn proud of you, Mountain Goat, the way you turned out. Whenever I think of you, I figure I must have done something right,” (Wall 279). At points, Jeannette and Rex had a rocky relationship. Still, Jeannette looked at her father with so much love and vice versa, Rex looked at his daughter with so much love. With everything that their family went through, this love is an example of resilience truly at

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What does resilience really mean to you? The literal definition to resilience is the ability to cope with problems and setbacks. In the story Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, she shows us all different kind of ways that the characters in her story used the skills that Kendra Cherry was talking about, to help them out of every situation. In this story it shows how certain situations affect people in different ways and how each person goes through seven skills. The characteristic that Louie undergoes is the skill of Strong Problem-Solving.

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It’s one of the main key issues addressed in this memoir. The Walls family were very poor and sometimes ‘stable’ in the basic needs of life. Unfortunately, Walls children had to grow and suffer in a wretched and miserable home, enduring poverty and hunger. Jeannette and her family always make do with the situation they are in, from sleeping in their car to overdrawing their accounts at the bank by having Mary and Rex (Jeannette’s parents) withdraw money simultaneously. And Jeannette and her siblings always picked their lunches from the cafeteria trash at school.

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Since the Walls family is so poor and homeless it seems that Rex and Rosemary are not always there to give their children the support and comfort that kids need at a young age. Instead of giving love and comfort, they decide to teach their kids how to be tough and how to learn to do things themselves. Unlike most parents, who focus on supporting, caring for their children first, and then teaching them how to live on their own once they get much older. This attentive parenting method is not visible in the Walls’ family. For example, when Jeannette has her accident with fire and explained it to the nurses she gets rather surprised and

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The Glass Castle is an extraordinary story of resilience and redemption, and a revelation about a family who was once deeply dysfunctional but uniquely vibrant. I believe that the story is highly suitable for people my age as it covers the issues about how the quality of parenting affects a child’s views, opinions and dreams as he grows up. It clearly shows how parents’ strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures influence how a child thinks and behaves. When sober, Jeannette's brilliant and charismatic father captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive.

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And without the capability to assess future risks and repercussions of a decision, Rex almost kills his wife in the process. Struggling to cope with their father’s rages and without a means to restrain him, Jeanette’s family is forced to face Rex’s violent

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Resilience in The Break The Break is a novel that has constant conflicts and issues occuring, from mental health issues to addictions and death to gangs, there is always conflict. Many of the characters find a way to deal with this conflict with various skills, one of the most occurring is their quality of resilience. Laura Vermette demonstrates all the seven C’s of resilience - competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping and control - in her book, The Break, through different characters and situations while showing how individuals would be unable to survive and grow without resilience.

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The Glass Castle Jeannette Walls New York Abstract Jeannette Walls was a daughter of a father that was an alcoholic, and parents that did not want to work for what they had. They were always jumping around from home to home, and the siblings were tired of it. At a young age, Jeannette had to learn ow to fend for herself by making food, washing her clothes, etc. It was hard for Jeannette growing up, but as soon as Jeannette and Lori get a chance to move they take it. Jeannette then moves to New York City with Lori where she acquires a reporting job.

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“Life’s too short to care about what other people think” (Jeannette Walls). It is good to not care what other people think, so stay true in life and live it to the fullest. The book, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, is a memoir that tells the story of Jeannette’s difficult family and her poor living conditions, that cause life to be difficult for her. She struggles to move past all the hardships in life and she learns how to overcome the majority of them, so she can develop into her own person. Even though her family can be a little peculiar, they possess a strong bond with each other and they always seek to help one another out.

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The children were taught to always look at the glass half full that half empty. Throughout their struggle, their parents unique mindset set them apart from standard, but they never let their experiences turn into

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This demonstrates human resilience because she presses on with her life, despite being badly burned and being in a hospital for several weeks. She even gets on her feet and leaves the hospital with her father, despite not being completely healed from her burns. She also has the resilience to deal with her father’s irresponsible behavior when he refuses to pay the bill (Walls 14). Another part of the book where her resilience is demonstrated is when Walls’s family is traveling through the desert after refusing to pay the hospital bill. She has to put up with her father’s bizarre phobia of the government, as well

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In the memoir, Rex Walls’ internal conflict, Jeannette Walls’ conflict with Rose Mary, and Jeannette’s conflict with society push her to become the person she is today. Therefore, Jeannette Walls’ owes her success to the hardships she had as a child. To begin, Rex Walls’ internal conflict comes from his inability to provide for his family. Being a father, Rex Walls has an obligation to look after his family and to make sure everyone is looked after.

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Her and her siblings are exposed to unideal living conditions and have to learn to take care of themselves, especially due to the fact that their father, Rex walls seems to suffer from an undiagnosed mental illness. Considering Rex Walls symptoms throughout the memoir are linked to having bipolar disorder, he was unpredictable. Jeannette and her sibling’s ability to be resilient despite their father’s bipolar disorder growing up are perfect examples of Max Lerner’s quote “the turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt” and has let them get far in life even with everything they had to

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Jeannette described that this experience made her feel used by her father and gave her a sense of self-worthlessness. Rex knew that Jeannette had a soft spot for him and he took advantage of this. Jeannette has a psychological scar from this for the rest of her life, and it produced long-term effects of distrust and diminished self-worth. As a child she had been through more than most adults, and in one case she even wakes up in the middle of the night with a child molester in her bed. “One night when I was almost ten, I was awakened by someone running his hands over my private parts” (Walls 103).

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According to Masten (2001) “resiliency refers to a class of phenomena characterized by good outcomes in spite of serious threats to adaptation or development” (p. 228). Garmezy (1991) considers the intelligence level of an individual and ability to possess the mind power to tackle an adverse situation as one pleases as the core characteristics of a resilient individual. Garmezy (1991) resiliency framework allows student affairs professionals is to examine the strengths of disadvantaged students who are faced with various life stressors, but

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