"Where we all began"

David Allen Brown

 "Lovenotes from Above: Who am I? Who I am"

 "Where we all began"

One thing I know that interest all of us is how did we become the people that we are today? What childhood and adult events transpired and ultimately effected who we are and how we came to be molded into the people we are today...warts and all?

My third book, "Who am I ? Who I am" is all about trying to answer these questions. I've chosen a chapter from my book called "Where we all began" to use as a jumping off point. As alway's my deepest hope is that some of you can identify with some of what I have to say and that you may find some help in the words laid out here in front of you. I am only a "Layman Counselor" but I was a clinical psych major in college and I believe that without God in the mix we can only answer half of our own questions at best. Without God, there are no complete answer's in the world of psychology. God Bless and best wishes, David Allen Brown .

    How does all of this get started? Does your life feel like it’s just one huge mess sometimes? Addictions, obsessions, alcoholism, drugs, fights, yelling, screaming, guilt, fear, self esteem issues, blah, blah, blah. How did all of this get started? How did we get to be this way? Maybe it’s in your genes? It’s most certainly all in your head. Where do these hangups, thoughts and odd behaviors come from? Maybe when you were very young the doctor gave you a pill or a shot of something and you had an allergic rreaction to it? Not! 

I wonder about my own issues too. How did I start out my life so small ? I didn’t break 5 feet until the eigth grade . My Dad was 6’1 and Mom is 5’5” so why did I look like a runaway character from the “Wizard of Oz” set when I was in grammar school? Was it something I couldn’t help? Did I wake up one morning like that because of genetics or did something else start the ball to rolling? Could my height have anything to do with my thoughts or is that all something else? Could worrying about being short actually cause me to be short? There are so many reasons it could have been that way.

Where do I start? Do you know where to start looking? Actually, I think it’s a piece of this and a piece of that. Throw it all in a blender and out we pop. Screwed up or not we are coming out. That’s how we become who we are. A little bit of a lot of different things. It was us that let it get started in the first place and it’s up to us if these issues or disorders or whatever they are, are ever going to come to an end. The negative aspects of our personality that is.

Granted, we probably didn’t posess the maturity to do anything about it when these problems first started. If we are clueless as to where these doubts and fears were hatched, then we need to get to work on that now. We aren’t so different from anybody else .Some of us were raised in pure chaos while others of us were raised like “Ozzie and Harriet” or “Leave it to Beaver”. Most of us were raised somewhere in the middle of chaos and the “Beaver” and that’s what makes it so confusing.

One day our parents tell us the right thing to do in a given situation followed up the next day seeing that Mom or Dad don’t always do exactly what they tell us is the right thing to do. We learn that Mom and Dad are imperfect and fallible just like the rest of us and that’s confusing too.

We always thought they did everything just the way they were suppose to. So why didn’t they do the right thing? I was raised in a great home. God was in the house. The Bible was used to direct our paths and I was raised to say “yes m’am” and “no sir’ to everyone no matter how young or how old they were.

I was a pretty happy kid most of the time. I wasn’t walking around angry at my parents or afraid or obsessed with things like success. I wasn’t afraid of failure either. I made a million dollars by age 37 but then I was shortsighted (dumb) enough to let it go all the way back down to zero again. I had a little (lot) of help but I take responsibility for allowing it to happen.

Maybe I was’nt afraid of being a success. Maybe I was afraid of staying a success? Maybe, I thought, I didn’t deserve to stay a success because I didn’t deserve to have wealth. Who knows? I had guilt issues growing up. Maybe I thought that I did’nt deserve to have money or the false trappings that money brings. Maybe...maybe it was just bad luck. Maybe there is no issue at all. The question is...how do we know.?...Continued