This post is about 10 years in the making. I registered this domain on advice that I needed to ‘protect my name brand’ so I did.
And then it sat.
I didn’t know what to do with it, until recently. Consider it a bit of an awakening, but maybe it was more just a coming back to a lesson that I was first taught 25 years ago and finally got around to learning.
This story is all about me and that lesson and about how I got here.
And it all began with a date to the prom.
Life lessons at the prom
It was my high school graduation – ‘the prom’ : First Class 90’s was the theme. I didn’t have a date so I brought my friend Deron, who also didn’t have one. The funny thing about not having dates — and I felt like we were the only two people in the entire graduating year who didn’t have them — is that we got stuck at the teachers’ table.
The teacher who was responsible for the prom that year was Mrs Antrobus. She naturally brought a date, Mr Antrobus. Dr. Paul Antrobus was a professor in psychology at the local university and most closely resembled the living embodiment of Dr Emmett Brown from Back to the Future. Paul had just returned from China on a tour with other psychology students – one that overlapped with the Tiananmen Square massacre – and was a fountain of stories of adventure, wonder, and learning. He was the psychologist version of Indiana Jones.
While Deron and my peers were focused on prom-stuff (girls, music, more girls) I spent most of my time talking to Paul and learning about psychology. I’d planned to take a little time off between high school and university, but knew I’d have to take his class when I did, even though psychology was not what I’d planned to study.
And so I did.
In that first class, Paul walks into the room, sits on the table, dims the lights, and puts in a video. The film was the Powers of Ten, the classic IBM film from Charles and Ray Eames done in the 1970’s, that basically takes a couple lying on a towel in what is now Millennium Park in Chicago and zooms out until you see nothing by nebula and galaxies and then zooms in until you nothing by atoms and subatomic particles. The lights come up and Paul says: “This is the domain of psychology: let’s begin“.
Mind. Blown.
This wasn’t just Freud, rats and mazes, or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as I expected – this was all about, well, everything – the entire universe. And Paul meant it and showed it to me for the next few years.
From that moment onward I knew what I wanted to do: be a psychologist. That was Paul taught me over my lifetime: psychology is about the human condition in it’s entirety and our place in the universe.It was a gift of a lesson and one that I was given from a truly remarkable human being. One who’s lesson’s I’ve been inspired to share and haven’t fully done so, which is why I’m writing here, in this space, now.
The path to now
Paul was no ordinary psychologist. He was facile in many different approaches to the discipline — psychodynamic, humanistic and transpersonal — and brought perspectives from both traditional Western and Eastern perspectives. He’d spent 10 years in India as a missionary, was an ordained (but not practicing) minister, and was a fervent believer in science and spirituality as complementary forces. His mind was as wide open as any person I have ever or likely will ever meet. Paul believed our lives were the greatest classroom and laboratory and that listening to it would provide more than any lecture, practicum or job. He was so right.
But alas, it was a lesson I didn’t truly pick up until later, much later.
Paul saw the world in systems and said it was our responsibility to work and act with this thinking in mind: we’re connected creatures that require connected thinking.
Paul wasn’t alone in shaping my worldview; his colleague Mary Hampton, a wonderful, compassionate, intelligent and wise psychologist with deep connection to First Nations healing traditions, taught and mentored me for years and served as my undergraduate thesis supervisor. Mary ignited my interest in something called community psychology: the study and practice of how we can take our understanding of human behaviour and apply it to support learning and healing (more on this concept later) in our neighbourhoods, organizations and societies.
Paul and Mary and the community of learners that they nurtured and mentored showed me the way forward and for the next 14 years I completed an advanced undergraduate degree, a masters degree, a PhD and a post-doctoral fellowship in pursuit of my goal of becoming a psychologist. I studied healing practices in schools, how people solve problems together using technology and the ways in which individuals, organizations and communities change and how they operate as systems.
I had done it. I arrived. I was being courted for jobs and landed a big one back at my alma mater, the University of Toronto, where I inherited my doctoral advisors lab and re-built it from the ground up into a 15 person operation that had more than 15 staff, millions in grant funding and was generating a lot of research with some of it translated into more than two dozen languages and remains among the top 1% most cited in my field. I had enormous success, grew my reputation, and was poised for more greatness….and I was miserable.
I was the dog that chased the car and finally caught it. Now here was this dog with a bumper in it’s mouth going: Now what?
In the pursuit of it all I’d forgotten to listen to my life. Those things that had inspired me to become a psychologist had been forgotten.
Here I was: burnt out, with a failing marriage to the love of my life who was now a friend, a shrinking friendship circle thanks to strange life circumstances (how is it that four people move to Australia in one year? It’s not like it’s down the road — it’s on the other end of the earth!) and neglect on my part, a family that had its own tragedies to bear and deal with, and a career that sharply going nowhere I wanted to be.
My community — marriage, friends, family, work — was crumbling all around me. Here I was a community psychologist without a community to speak of.
It was time to listen to my life. Time to heal.
Healing the healer
What is this healing I speak of? It’s not some new-agey, touchy-feely term, but rather an ancient approach to thriving in a dynamic environment that is tailor-made for the modern world.
Everyday we are constantly presented with micro and macro ‘traumas’ — shifts in our psychosocial world due to new information and experience that challenge our present state. Everything from minor things like a having to navigate and implement a new policy at work, a child who won’t get dressed in the morning, or a friend cancelling plans at the last minute to bigger things like living with income or job insecurity as an employee or entrepreneur, reliving traumatic memories from past events, real threats of violence to our person or property, or managing chronic illness. Healing is the process in which we sense, understand and act on these experiences to integrate them into ourselves and survive, thrive and flourish.
Trauma just is. As long as we change, we will always experience some of it. By not integrating it into ourselves we let these events dictate their impact on us, and not always in ways or times of our choosing. Healing is about acknowledging our hopes, fears, experiences and desires and listening to our life — whether as individuals, groups, or communities.
It’s not about just getting back to the status quo, but building strength. Muscular growth comes from trauma. Muscles build because your body repairs or replaces damaged muscle fibres through a cellular process where it fuses damaged fibres together. These replaced and repaired fibres get thicker and grow.
Healing is really at the heart of innovation, social change, resilience and healthy personal development. It’s not something done to you, but with you, for you, by you – but not only you. That’s the difference between healing and self-help. It’s never just about you as much as we in the Western world like to think of ourselves as independent, in control, people. We need our effort, but our efforts alone aren’t enough. It never is, because we don’t exist apart from everything else it makes sense that we can’t fully heal without some engagement outside ourselves.
That’s social and community psychology. Its also about design: designing our lives. And like good design, it needs to be fit for purpose, is context dependent, is embedded in a system and will engage with others in that system.
Coming back
This space is ‘a coming back’ for me. It’s about re-rooting to topics, ideas and experiences that created a deep, profound resonance with me and led to my calling; one that I briefly forgot.
My vocation is bigger than the labels given to me. I wasn’t meant to be a psychologist as much as a healer. My path isn’t about being a professor, but an educator. I’m not a designer, but a creator. I might be called a consultant, but I really coach, guide and share stories to help people find their way. I’m here to be a curious wanderer, not just a researcher and evaluator.
This is not about the world’s labels, but my truth. Maybe some of these reflect your truths, too.
Thanks for reading and I hope you’ll come along for the journey in the writings ahead. Let’s heal — create, grow, learn, wonder, reflect, dream, share, innovate — together.