Read my book & start a new life

Preface

I was having trouble living.

As a psychologist, these were not the first words I had hoped to write in a self-help book, but I need to cut to the chase.

As a young child, adolescent, and man, I have been, at various points in my life completely lost as to what to do, overwhelmed with fear and burdened with sadness.  I used to keep all such thoughts and feelings completely secret.  I had thought such experiences marked me as permanently faulty: an outcast and an outsider.  As I matured both personally and professionally, sitting in small quiet rooms working with clients experiencing similar moments, I learned that such experiences are inevitable aspects of any life.  More importantly however, I learned that such experiences which at their worst have the capacity to capsize our lives, can also be opportunities to find it.  It may not be the life you thought you were going to have, nor the life which you or others thought you should have.  It is however, as Campbell has said ‘the life that is waiting for us.’  Without Joseph Campbell’s and Christopher Vogler’s articulation of the Hero’s Journey, (I’ll explain who these men are and what a Hero Journey is in just a minute) I would still be running in ever exhausting circles complaining about the injustice of it all.  With the Hero’s Journey, I found a mudmap for navigating my life, traversing it in a manner true to who I really am.  It meant I had to stop pleasing people.  I had to start being responsible.  

It meant I had to stop playing it safe. In short, it was a ticket to feeling fully alive.