More Motivation

 I also feel compelled to share my personal experiences with the legal system. I never hired a lawyer but successfully managed to go to court for full custody of Ian (took two tries, the first set of paperwork was rejected because my mother consented but upon reading the papers I was informed that she could not simply sign over parental rights given her mental illness) and get my dad a legal guardian in charge of his medical decisions to hopefully make it possible to get him psychiatric help even without his consent (epic fail- more on that later). I never would have thought any of this possible had I not gone through these processes myself, so I want others to know how I was able to do these things, at age 21 and then again and 25, in the hopes that if these experiences are somehow relevant to their lives, this knowledge can help them.

Arguably my primary motivation for writing given its relevance to the others is my desire to compile and analyze data, plain and simple. I have always been interested in understanding human behavior from a psychological perspective. My mom loved to read non-fiction crime books and by the time I reached middle school I had gone through her whole collection and then some. I didn’t realize it at the time but I was also interested in human behavior from a sociological perspective. The desire to understand people, how they think, and why they behave in particular ways has always been fascinating. Lots more on that later. By college I knew that I wanted to be a psychology major. I was well aware of my parent’s psychiatric issues and I think I wanted to understand what was going on in their minds, but also gain an understanding of myself, my personality, and my own thoughts and behaviors. 

Actually pursuing a career in any type of counseling or the mental health field though, hit too close to home, at least then. To detach myself from my own family and personal struggles, I preferred to study violent criminals and extreme deviance. I felt that I had a pretty complete understanding of mental illness and besides, had always been the confidant, listener, and advice giver for most if not all of my friends. I didn’t want my career to essentially be akin to how I communicated with friends in my personal life. When I realized that there was a criminology major in the area of sociology, I picked up that major as well. It was the best of both worlds: understanding criminals from multiple perspectives. Eventually I went on to earn a Master’s and Doctoral Degree in Sociology with an emphasis in Criminology, although I will say that after all of the training I am not convinced that social environments are the key to human behavior; instead, I believe that there are many keys and that the impact of each is highly variable based on individual cases and can never truly be measured or known.

So yet another goal of writing this is to share and understand my own very subjective perspective of one of life’s great mysteries and most hotly contested debates: nature vs. nurture; or, as I prefer to conceptualize it, biology vs. psychology vs. sociology. Not that these disciplines have to be in opposition to one another; they don’t at all and in my mind, are all equally valuable and interconnected. I can only share how my personal experiences, research, and training affect my perceptions and individual point of view regarding the interplay of how people are wired, how our environment contributes to the development of the machine that is our mind, and how outside forces impact who we become as adults, what we do, and how we live. I will explore this with regard to myself, my mom, but most of all, my dad.