Writing as a way of healing yourself

If you understand human psychology at all you know that you have to be careful when you try to address the traumas in your life. I understood this from the first Psychology Today magazine I read while at Palomar College in the early 1970s. I had already studied computer programming and Computer operations in college and had already worked in the field since around 1967 part time or full time between 1967 and around 1969. So, I had had the rude awakening of realizing that robotics like I was interested in wasn't going to be microminiaturized enough to make that actually work (like you saw on STar Trek on TV anyway) until likely 50 years later. This was a great disappointment to my young ego at the time by the way. So, when I began to read the Psychology Today Magazine in the Palomar College Library it was an epiphany for me in that I was considering suicide at the time because of all the problems I was dealing with in my life.

When I began to study psychology (my parents and I had never gone for any kind of therapy because they were ministers at the time and didn't believe in non-religious scientific "Shrink" kind of ways of thinking then in the 1960s and early 1970s. However, I was always more scientific and experimental than my parents and saw the logic of moving away from being sort of suicidal as a young man by studying psychology. I realized that I could let go of my families historical pride and roots going back to switzerland on my father's side and Scotland on my mother's side and everything since and let go at least temporarily of all that and just keep myself alive for me.

So, it was in letting go of many kinds of pride and unnecessary psychological burdens that I found a way forward as a young man. I ONLY had to take care of myself and keep myself alive. I didn't have to live our historical stuff that went back 1000 years or more in my mother's and father's families. I ONLY had to think about how I could stay alive.

So, reading Psychology Today the magazine was my first introduction into thinking about things in a psychological way. This was a real breakthrough and helped save my life at the time. I was able to let go of about 90% of the things that were slowly killing me in my mind and through my pride. So, I found ways to stay alive and to let go of everything that was killing me from the inside out.

Another thing that helped me a lot was after I got married and had my son when I was 26. That summer my new wife who had lived on the Big Island of Hawaii before in Hilo before we met wanted to return there so we did in August of 1974. Even though I eventually got injured working there and we had to return home to California within a few months, I learned something amazing about western Culture. I realized that in Hawaii people didn't have to be so neurotic as we are on the mainland about work and everything. Because there in the old days you could just go fish and live on the beach and eat coconuts and be fine. But, in snowy cultures if you don't get busy and build a good house to shelter you from the snow you freeze to death. So, I could begin to see how each culture has a different way of looking at things. This helped me a lot to understand mainland U.S. and European neurosis which almost everyone is dealing with.

This created a profound change in how I saw everything on earth. And that I realized there were other ways of thinking about things than we did in the U.S. I also realized that I am an "Idea Person" which means basically I am inspired a lot by interesting ideas. I'm not really a plodder suited to doing the same thing day after day of putting one bolt or nut on thousands of times every day in a factory. Instead I can be very creative as a business man and as an entrepreneur and in thousands of other ways. So, this is the direction I went in more when I had to return with my wife and baby to the mainland in late 1974 from Hilo, Hawaii and I became a partner in my fathers mining company for a while after that when I returned from Hilo, Hawaii in early 1975.

So, learning how to deal with the traumas in one's life is important. But, equally important is to understand yourself and the cultures you experience in life around the world.

By God's Grace