In 1971 I was re-entering college and was 23 years old at the time. I had already studied Computer Data Processing and had worked with Computers off and on since 1967 at that point. But, no one in my family had been exposed to studying psychology at a college level because even though my father was an Electrical Contractor like his father and brother and had been to technical night school, there are no general education subjects usually taught to become an electrician at that time at least only technical subjects regarding electrical theory and applied electromechanical functions and planning how to electrically wire houses and then how to install that wiring system you have designed like an Electrical Architect.
So, even though my father had been valedictorian of his high School Graduating class his father had not allowed him to go to college in 1934 when he graduated high school. So, my starting to read Psychology Today was the first attempt to understand basic psychology in my family.
At that point in my life I thought most people were partly or fully crazy because of all the problems people had. Please understand that two young people that I thought should have been aborted at the time had held a knife to my throat telling me that they were going to cut my head of on two different occassions. Likely both of these young people died young for a variety of reasons. I know one committed suicide within a few years of threatening me with a knife to my throat for 1/2 hour or more.
So, people in general I sort of believed were all crazy more or less and that some people were just more polite than others. However, what I discovered first by reading Psychology Today was why everyone is so nuts. Since then people getting therapy and counseling has made people (at least in California) much less violent than they were. It used to be that people would just go off and kill each other at the drop of a hat in the 1950s. This was quite common and often I could see who was going to snap and kill someone at that time and I was usually right when it happened. So, reading Psychology Today began to teach me the basic theories of psychology so I could better predict what people were going to do at any given moment and it also allowed me to feel much safer with people in general and even allowed me to start counseling children through Operation Share which was a tutorial program for volunteers through the college there and helped me get involed in Suicide Counseling for adults also through the college.
I started in fall 1971 studying Psychology Today and on my breaks often went to the library and read back issues of psychology today. I was basically trying not to kill myself from age 21 to 24 or 25. By age 26 my son was born and I was married and I had a good enough reason to stay alive to raise my son right. So, no matter how I felt I stayed alive like a warrior to raise my son right and to support him through whatever life brought me. But, it all started in understanding what made people so crazy. Once I began to understand that there is causation to why people were so crazy then I began to better understand how one could deal with these problems on all levels better. I found I could get A's in Philosophy, psychology and in Cultural Anthropology. In cultural anthropology I discovered that I was a natural shaman. The definition I fit was "Someone who has psychologically died but their body still lives, so they live both in the world of the dead and the living at the same time and often can help people in healing ways." This is the definition of most shamans (male and female for over 100,000 years or more at this point. Civilization sprang out of Shamans and chiefs of tribes all this time and eventually brought about doctors and religions and various healers and politicians.
Since Psychology Today, the magazine helped save my life in 1971 I thought I would share it with you today. I don't read it anymore but it was there when I needed it most to learn how to survive other people and myself as a young person in my 20s.
Even though I studied psychology and for a time was going to be a psychologist I had to make a choice between my young wife and son and becoming a psychologist. I had no trouble choosing my wife and child at the time. Some people aren't as lucky or as able to sort their lives out as I was by my mid 20s. When I became a single father at age 29 it was hard but I married again by age 32.
Psychology Today: Health, Help, Happiness + Find a Therapist
www.psychologytoday.com/
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