I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s in a Southern California college town. The town had two proverbial “sides” that were marked less by class than by lifestyle. One side of town was populated by professors and students, most of whom were part of the counterculture, while professionals who commuted into Los Angeles for work lived on the other. I attended an “experimental” public grade school on the counterculture side of town in which teachers abandoned grades, tried all kinds of creative ways to engage kids in learning and often taught in a democratic way that favored individual strengths. Years later, I attended junior high on the “professional” side of town, which was as hierarchical as any other suburban public school and focused on things like teaching to the test, Scantron sheets and those dreaded blue-book essays. Success was, of course, measured by grades.

I excelled in my grade school because I exhibited everything my experimental school cherished: creativity, outside-the-box thinking and an eagerness to learn via new modes and methods. I couldn't read well, couldn’t spell worth a damn and I found math impossible, but, for the most part, I was a star student. I felt like I held life literally in my hands, and truly believed that I could master it. When I graduated to junior high, however, that feeling abruptly evaporated.

All the expectations at my junior high school played to my weaknesses. It was a humiliating time that was made all the more painful by being identified by school counselors as suffering from a severe learning disability. Deemed “defective” at learning at an age at which learning was the central societal expectation, I felt like a broken gadget on an assembly line of perfect models.

Shame set in, and I would lie in my bed at night feeling a terrified sense of helplessness.  I had once believed that I held the world in my hands, but I now felt that was wrong because I now knew that something was “wrong” with me.

Looking back at junior high and the ensuing years, I’m convinced that the label I was given was much more destructive to my psyche and ability to function than any supposed “disability.” I now have three books under my belt, have built two thriving companies with my own hands and have a Ph.D. behind my name, and I’m still not sure what that damning disability was, or if there really had been anything wrong with me at all. My guess is that I wasn’t any good at being “factory taught,” and that the problem was less about a “broken” brain, and more a matter of a poor fit. To put it in terms used by current mental-health activists, it wasn’t about what was “wrong” with me, but an issue of what “happened to me.” That lesson is a constant refrain in my professional life to this day.

I hold a master’s degree in social work from UCLA, and I’m trained as a psychotherapist. The Ph.D. in my title, however, is a stamp from my time at Brandeis University, where I was the first person to receive a joint doctorate in social-welfare policy and sociology. Truth be told, I went to Brandeis with the intention of a solo social-welfare degree, but quickly grew pretty bored with the policy stuff, and ended up hanging out in the sociology department most days. At that time, that marvelously storied department had a specialty in disability rights and in medicalization: the making of human behavior into medical problems.

It’s pretty typical to see the social sciences as a kind of continuum, with psychology, and its study of skull-bound traits, on one side, and sociology, and its interest in social states, on the other. Social psychology, the investigation into what happens when our psychological traits meet up with social states, sits at the middle of the continuum. I’m no pro, but I like social psychology a lot, and since adding it to my learning and interests, I tend to see the world from a trait/state-based lens.

When I try to help someone with their individual suffering, my mind often sees two things at the same time: their struggle with their own psychology, and what is happening around them in their life i.e., the strength of their connections, their sense of value in their community, the opportunities they have to give voice to their being on a daily basis—and the lack thereof. When I think about social experiences, my mind is attracted to how these experiences affect individuals, and so, here, too, I find myself focused on “problems of living.”  This is especially true when I think about oppressive elements in society, and my eyes orient to what it means for individuals to lack access to the deep connections their cultures can bring them, to their value as members of various communities and to their ability to freely say, “I AM.” I tend to think that oppression isn’t oppression unless it is felt, and I believe that it is felt when we are refused the social resources that are central to a meaningful individual experience. To put it another way, when oppression leaves its mark, that mark remains on both the psychological and spiritual life of an individual.