The Early Years

Early in my childhood I experienced important people in my life being “nervous.”  I didn’t have the word "anxiety" in my vocabulary, but what I experienced was very real and disturbing.  In addition to the nervousness, some of these people also had low energy and were somewhat withdrawn from others.

I wanted to know more about this.  As a ten year old I became a voracious reader of biographies and some novels that had to do with the struggles people attempted to overcome.  I wanted to know about other people so that I could make sense of those in my personal sphere.

By the age of sixteen I was reading books by, and about, Sigmund Freud.  I was utterly fascinated with the inner-working of the unconscious and how people suffer when they put up walls to avoid being conscious of their real feelings and impulses.

College and Graduate School

For the first two and a half years of college I was a psychology major, disliking many of the courses that were not about the human struggle toward optimal mental health.

I changed my major to sociology where I began to understand the social psychology of emotions and relationships.  This became my focus in graduate school as I earned my
Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara.