The Mental Aspect of Who We All Are

I was raised in an environment where education mattered. Even though my mom never earned a formal degree, she surrounded us with knowledge. She taught us how to research, to look at all variables, and not just take things at face value. My relationship with my mom, though, is complicated. While she gifted me with an inquisitive mind and a sharp awareness of the world, she also hurt me deeply—mentally and emotionally. That duality is hard to carry. I cherish the lessons she gave me, but I cannot ignore the pain either.

Still, I see now that she, too, has her own demons to confront. Wounds she hasn’t healed. She’s poured those wounds into therapy, sometimes making her therapists feel more like best friends than professionals. But the deep, internal healing—the kind that changes behavior—that’s still a journey I don’t know if she’ll fully take. And that’s hard to witness, because her pain didn’t end with her. It bled into me. And now, I am determined to stop it for the next generation. My son. My peers. My relationships. That’s what generational trauma does—it’s inherited silently, through tone, through fear, through silence. And my biggest fear? Passing it on. Even unknowingly.

So I work hard on myself. I reflect. I apologize when I mess up. I aim to grow, not just for me—but for those who come after me. Healing is work. It’s humility. It’s not just reading books or going to therapy—it’s living differently. I believe we need to talk about this. Not just trauma and healing, but how those things shape how we learn, teach, and lead.

Before I dive deeper into education and the way we’ve built our learning systems across the board, I need to honor my mom again. For all her flaws and damage, she also opened up my mind. She taught us how to navigate a library, how to find real sources, how to cross-check information in books, media, and beyond. My educational institutions, especially in college, added to that foundation—but the roots were hers. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized how rare that skill set is. Many people were never taught how to ask "why". They weren’t shown how to think critically or research deeply. They weren’t encouraged to explore humanity through psychology, philosophy, or empathy.

For me, psychology became a way of life. I was raised to think psychologically about behavior, about why people do what they do. It helped me build compassion, but it also led me into some dark corners. In early adulthood, I experienced how damaging big pharma could be. I had to unlearn and relearn—realizing that not all research is solid, not all studies are unbiased. Some are just stepping stones. Research should be a place where we gather similarities, not force conclusions.

Research is not a place for a know-it-all. It’s a space for humility, for curiosity, and for the willingness to be wrong before being right.

True research means being willing to step back and consider all variables—even the ones that make us uncomfortable. But the academic world, especially universities, often forgets this. There’s an ego attached to knowledge. It’s heartbreaking. Education has turned into a hierarchy of titles and degrees. But research—real research—is a question, not a declaration. It’s a hypothesis, not a trophy. Credentials are valuable, yes. But they don’t make a person infallible. Some of the most insightful ideas come from people without formal education. And we should be willing to listen to them too.

That’s what’s missing today. We’ve allowed generations to build walls between “experts” and everyday thinkers. We've turned learning into elitism. And it shows—in our media, in politics, in the courtroom. Experts are thrown into trials and treated like the only voice that matters. But what defines an expert? What lived experiences are they missing? What biases do they carry? In law, in education, in healthcare—we need more human dialogue. Not just facts. Because no case, no student, no community is the same. Patterns may exist, but each situation is unique. And we’ve forgotten that.

We’ve also forgotten that everyone starts somewhere. Some of the brightest minds come from unconventional paths. We should not be judging someone’s value based on the paper that hangs on their wall. That false divide between “blue collar” and “educator” is damaging. We all learn. We all grow. We all carry knowledge—and it matters how we apply it.

How we research, how we study, how we connect that to our actions—that’s what defines us. That’s what shapes generations. We need to remove the invisible barriers that say, “I’m better because I have a degree,” or “My word matters more.” That mindset has led to the divide we’re now seeing—socially, politically, and culturally. It’s how we got here.

Take the example of Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis in the HBO docuseries Crazy, Not Insane. Her method of research—centered on asking “why” behind violent behavior—resonates with how I was raised. She didn’t offer sympathy for killers; she offered context. She looked for the psychological and neurological roots of behavior. And for that, she was dismissed and mocked. But her work matters, because understanding human behavior doesn’t mean excusing it—it means trying to prevent it.

That "why" is something my mom embedded in me from the time I was three years old. Even in her pain, she always questioned the world. We weren’t always right in our conclusions, but the practice of searching? That was sacred. Research, for me, starts like a blank art canvas. It’s not about your degree, your academic status, or your profession. It’s about what you seek. It’s not about your lawyer who charges outrageous fees, or the judge who delivers the final word. Justice, like education, needs space for research, for nuance, and for humanity.

It’s rarely a simple yes or no. And I think we’ve forgotten that. I think we’ve become so hungry for certainty, that we’ve abandoned the messy middle—where real learning lives. I think about how Alfred Wegener, who introduced the idea of Pangea and continental drift, was ridiculed by the scientific community because he wasn’t “qualified enough.” He was a meteorologist, not a geologist. But now, we teach his theory as fact. That story breaks my heart. Because it shows that even when the truth is knocking, ego can slam the door shut.

And we still haven’t learned the lesson.