By the time Teresa Langford started basic training in the Army at age 18, she knew that whatever rough spots she’d faced in her life had been good for her, or at least tolerable.

The proof came with her outdoing most of her troop on conditioning drills while taking the heat from the men who resented her outperforming them. Basic training tries to take you to your limit and then break you. Not Teresa. She knew coming in she had what it takes to make it. She would later serve two tours on active duty, rising to an ammunitions ordnance corporal.

How did she know? Most of us only find out the hard way what kinds of stress break us, how much is unbearable. The line between tolerable and intolerable stress varies from person to person and across our lifespans. To add to the confusion, many of the effects of toxic stress are delayed, sometimes by months or years, making it hard to tie the stress to its effects.

When Teresa was 8, her parents separated. They were both dairy farmhands in Gurley, Alabama. Her mother took Teresa and her two sisters to Florida to look for work, leaving her brother and father in Alabama. Within months, her mother landed in prison for writing bad checks, and the girls moved back with their grandparents. When her mother got out, she spent the next four years moving with the girls from job to job........

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