One of the most obvious truths I have encountered in my work with students and clients over the last fifty years is that many people are unhappy with who they are and how they are living life. Some have no idea of who they would like to be or they know who they want to be but the road to a meaningful and satisfying life is blocked by anxiety, fear, confusion or crippling depression. Many times their ideas about who they should have become have come from their family and the disparity between this ideal and the reality of their lives is creating great sadness. I would like to posit that many times in life doors appear offering us a way out of this dilemma. We then have a choice to ignore the door and continue on a less than satisfying path or we can walk through it onto the unknown path to a more fulfilling life.
I would like to illustrate this by sharing a bit of my own story with you. Let’s start at the beginning. My parents gave me the name Lawrence because they thought it would look good with “Doctor” before it. It does. After my grandfather died during the depression, my father left premedical studies to support his mother and three siblings by doing physical labor. In the 1930’s he began his own company and for fifty years was a successful, if not affluent, businessman. It was my parents’ intention that I would be the first member of my family to finish college and that I would fulfill my father’s dream by becoming a physician. Even though my “Doctor” looks good, I am not the right kind of doctor. Unfortunately for them, I was a child of the sixties and “do your own thing” was our mantra.
Joseph Campbell said, “Follow your bliss.” My journey to my bliss was not direct but was determined by several doors that at first were ignored and then recognized as messages from something larger than me.
After the Russians became the first country to send a satellite into space, I was seduced by the national passion and set my sights on becoming a scientist. This was a mistake but it was a mistake sanctioned by my family and the culture. Although it was not as good as becoming a physician, it was good enough for my parents.
In my senior year of high school, with the idea of becoming a key player in the race to the moon, I visited a counselor at Pasadena City College and expressed my desire to become a nuclear physicist. She looked at my transcripts and shook her head. I was not the most motivated student in high school but my dad said if I wanted the car (necessary for dating) and if I wanted to play sports (necessary for impressing potential dates), I had to maintain a B average. Since grades were reported on my transcripts every semester, I knew I had to maintain a B average between two quarters. So if I got an A in one quarter I would allow myself to get a C the next. If I got a C, I would work to get an A the next quarter. Therefore, my high school transcripts show 6 semesters of 5 courses each, all of which are Bs. So, my counselor was looking at 30 Bs.
Her response to me voicing my aspiration was, “You are not bright enough to be a nuclear physicist.” “However,” she added, “you are not bad at anything. Why don’t you become a teacher?” Looking back, this was a door. One I completely ignored and, in fact, felt angry about.
So I gave up on PCC and began college as a physics student at Cal State, L.A. in 1960. In retrospect, I would have saved myself a lot of grief if I had paid attention to her. While science and math did not come easily to me, I did well enough to be able to transfer to the University of California at Berkeley, home of one of the world’s premier physics departments. After two years there I received my degree with a major in physics and a minor in math. When I showed my mother my diploma, her response was, “Take good care of that, it is worth just as much as the ones they gave the students who got good grades.” Alas, I was well on the road to parental disappointment.
Several things happened at Berkeley which were pivotal in guiding me to the path I still follow. In my first semester at Cal, I was required to take a course in which we read several of Shakespeare’s plays. Reading Shakespeare revealed a new world to me in which there was more to human behavior than met the eye. I loved this course but could not afford to spend much time on it while taking advanced courses in physics and calculus as well as two other electives. If I had paid attention to the joy and excitement I felt reading and writing about the human psyche as Shakespeare saw it, I would have known where my life needed to go at that time. However, I was, as James Hollis says, in the midst of my first adulthood, an attempt to live out the life one is expected to live by one’s family and culture. At the end of the Shakespeare course my instructor, a wonderful teacher, said, “You are the smartest C+ student I’ve ever had.” I think it was a compliment. But again, I had ignored an important sign. After I finished my Ph.D. in child psychology I returned to thank him for opening the doors of the human psyche to me. Surprisingly, he remembered me. I have contacted him again recently and he remembered my name and told me he has focused much of his work since then on children’s literature and fairy tales.
In my second semester at Cal, I began volunteering at an elementary school in the West Berkeley ghetto where I tutored some of the worst students in the school. For a middle-class white boy from the suburbs of Southern California this was a real awakening. To my surprise, I found that individual attention could turn some of the worst students into academic successes. Witnessing the wasted potential of children in the sixth grade already consigned to the garbage heap of American life changed me. It was the sixties. I was young and idealistic and it became my personal mission to save as many kids as I could. I wanted to help children that others considered unreachable. A door had appeared.
Although I realized that my life was turning away from hard science, I found employment during the summer between my junior and senior years in the Apollo program at the Research & Development center at Aerojet General in Azusa, California. My assignment was to design a monochromatic light source to simulate the effect of unfiltered sunlight on metal which would simulate the environment on the moon. While this brief experience as an engineer was enjoyable, I realized that I was much more interested in pure theory than I was in the practical application of scientific principles. Also I wasn’t a very good engineer. I blew so many circuits they nicknamed me “Sparky.” I also realized that I was quite a few brain cells short of theoretical physicist material. It occurred to me that I could combine my interests by becoming a teacher of physics, math and English literature in high school.
Being confused, I once again visited a guidance counselor when I returned to Berkeley in the fall. After a battery of tests were scored and interpreted, I returned to find out just what I was supposed to do. I had spent an inordinate amount of energy purging my life of Christian Fundamentalism so imagine my surprise when I discovered that my number one, absolutely no fail, born to be occupation was “Minister.” I was even further incensed when I found out “Psychologist” was a close second. I happened to be taking Psych 1A as an elective in my senior year in order to graduate and had the book with me. I raised it up and said defiantly, “You mean this bullshit?” and walked out of his office. I finished my last year of university somewhat unenthusiastically, married my high school sweetheart (we are still married) and moved to San Francisco where she took a secretarial job and I enrolled in education classes at San Francisco State College.
It is with some humor that I reflect on my professional career and see that I have spent most of it teaching psychology and practicing as a therapist trying to bring spirituality and psychology together. I should have listened to both of those counselors but knowing the expectations my parents and I both had of me, I did not. Doors had appeared and I ignored them.
After four years of rigorous physics and math courses, the education courses at State left me nonplussed. I lasted two weeks. I started looking for work and fell into the most defining moment of my professional life. You can call it grace, coincidence or synchronicity but it has happened so many times in my life, I know it is real. This time I walked through the door.
I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do so I looked for part time work. I found three jobs: gardening for a psychologist, driving an autistic child to and from his psychiatrist and tutoring a supposedly “minimally brain damaged” eight-year-old boy whose mother was a psychologist. In a matter of days, a whole new world opened up to me. It was less exact and predictable than the world of formulae and numbers, but fascinating in its complexity and ambiguity.
The most important of these experiences was tutoring a boy I shall call Alan. His mother was desperate. One after another, a series of tutors had failed miserably in their attempts to teach him to read. He was repeating third grade and his psychologist (who was very well known in his field) had told Alan’s mother that her son would be lucky to finish elementary school. From the first moment I met him, I knew Alan was smart; he had a great vocabulary, a wonderful sense of humor and a keen interest in the world of science. He just couldn’t read.
Rather than tackling his reading problems head on as his other tutors had done, I decided to approach them indirectly through a subject which interested him. We began to do chemistry and optical experiments under the suspicious eyes of his mother. Alan really liked the experiments, especially the ones involving explosions or really bad smells. Every so often I would be reading an experiment and I would ask him to read a short word. After a while, he was reading more and more of the experiments and starting to read books with me.
Since Alan was Jewish, I thought it would be important for him to know some of the heroic stories of the holocaust. I learned one of my first lessons on the workings of a child’s mind when we started to read a child’s version of The Diaries of Anne Frank. When we had finished about three pages he said, “I don’t like girl stories.” So we returned to science, where a 21-year-old WASP in an identity crisis and an eight-year old Jewish boy with a learning disability could find true happiness.
My work with Alan encouraged me to start reading about psychology, learning disabilities and children in general. Since I had very little experience in this area, I decided to visit his psychologist for direction. His office was in a very posh area of San Francisco and filled with fine art and beautiful furnishings. It effused monetary success. He said that it was wonderful that Alan had a friend like me, but that I should give up hoping for a normal life for him. I looked around his office at the plush furnishings and thought, “If someone this stupid can be this rich, this is the career for me.” I re-entered San Francisco State where, with the financial and emotional support of my wonderful wife and the enthusiasm engendered by the discovery of my life’s work, I achieved a straight “A” average.
My wife, who had been interested in psychology long before me, also began taking psychology classes and realized it was her life’s passion too (second to her passion for me of course). I was mentored by several members of the psychology department and, in 1966, I enrolled at the University of Minnesota in what may have been the best program in clinical child psychology in the United States.
Alan finished elementary school, junior high, high school and college, and is a happy husband and father who, along with his wife, runs his own very successful communications business. He told me several years ago that he continued to be interested in science after I moved away but gave up chemistry when he realized he would never be able to use it for his true purpose, to blow up his school.