Psychology Today helped me begin to save my own life in college

 I grew up in the 1950s mostly as a child. I was 12 in 1960 and 22 in 1970. My parents had not been to college but my father had been to technical Night school to become an electrician and Electrical Contractor however and he was valedictorian of his senior class in High school in the Seattle area.

I was having trouble finding ways to want to stay alive around 1969 to 1973 for a variety of reasons. So, one day I was attending Palomar College in San Marcos California and I found a magazine, a Psychology Today. When I began reading this magazine about psychology things in my life started to make sense finally. My parents had only been to high school so there were no psychology classes at all in the public High School I attended nor in the private religious school I went to in my senior year in high school.

When I began to realize what my problems really were the best way I can describe this is I could see all the traumas in my family in the last 1000 years were harming me wanting to stay alive.

So, as I studied carefully what this magazine said I began like an architect to reconstruct how I processed information so I could actually want to be alive and to stay alive. I went to Palomar college for around 2 years and during that time I volunteered in Operation Share which is a student volunteer tutoring organization where you tutor kids in grade school who need help in school. This and other helpful things I did for people helped me a lot in moving forwards in my life and giving up historical ideas dating back the last 1000 years based solely upon pride which often wasn't useful to me or to anyone else either.

So, I learned to drop anything and everything that wasn't specifically useful to my long term survival as a human being here on earth. So, unlike so many people around me I didn't die from various causes in the 1970s then and I'm here still alive and relatively happy at age 75.

So, reading this first Psychology today magazine literally saved my life over the next 5 years or so. 

By age 26 I was married with a son and supporting them both financially. But, in some ways the good future ahead of me started that day reading a psychology Today magazine that began to help me save my own life.

I learned to survive some of the insanities of life we all still deal with in life beginning around this point in my life.

I found that NO ONE REALLY fits into this world. We have to create our own world or often we just die or go crazy from the nutty people everywhere. They might be sincere but that doesn't mean most people are sane either. IT took me until I was in my 30s to understand that sincere but misguided people are maybe the most dangerous people on earth. Sincerity just means you believe deeply in what you are doing. 

But, what if you are leading others off a cliff in your sincerity?

This is the problem all over the earth right now.

So, if you aren't capable of thinking for yourself often you soon are dead or maimed and dysfunctional.

This is what I learned then in my life.

IT was a hard hard lesson but it kept me alive to 75 so far.