One of the first things I studied that began to heal me was Philosophy. Why?

Often in the 1950s people were discouraged from asking questions. However, in life I found asking questions is an ongoing survival tool especially if you are intelligent enough to come up with good and useful questions.

When I discovered philosophical inquiry in my early teens I found I liked it a lot because I wasn't ready to study psychology as a science yet. One of the more interesting things I learned in Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose (a true story) is that Nandor hung out with Sigmund Freud too as professional psychologists (even though Nandor was a parapsychologist too).

But, one of the things that eventually saved me and made me capable of studying psychology in college was my interest in philosophical inquiry. Through philosophical enquiry (which is the beginning of all the sciences historically) I began to ferret out what I was actually dealing with in my life.

First I was able to see that my parents were carrying a lot of weight from the Great Depression and World war II and the Korean war too. This was a first step in realizing why everyone seemed so nuts in the 1950s to me as a child. It wasn't logical for me as a child seeing everyone the way they were. I eventually deduced that they had all been harmed in various ways growing up and that I was very lucky to have two survivors as my parents from the Great Depression and World war II and all the rest. 

So, in understanding better my parents wounding on various levels I began to address my own wounding growing up in the 1950s better. I realized the miserable lives of most of the people I met in Seattle until age 4 and Los Angeles from age 8 to 21 didn't have to be my life too. I realized I could create a life better than my parents in various ways by releasing myself from the straitjacket of most people's lives. It's true my parents allowed me to be whoever I wanted to be mostly because my father was a valedictorian of his High School class in 1934 and then his father wouldn't allow his boys to go to college only his girls.

But, what I found was that being allowed to go to college and to be ANYTHING I wanted to be I found it sort of overwhelming in my life in various ways. However, I learned a lot through studying first computer science and then philosophy, Psychology and finally Anthropology. I have always had a very logical and practical mind like my father and I was always very intuitive with a lot of common sense like my mother.

So, eventually I found a life that I could create where I wanted to be alive to experience it. But, it wasn't easy. It took a lot of suffering on my part to begin to create a life I could stand to live.

However, it's true many don't get the chances that I got or have parents as sane and as balanced as mine were. So, I will always be grateful to my parents for being there for me and I tried in my life to be there for them as much as possible always too as long as they both were alive.