Dr. Jonathan Brower
Dr. Jonathan Brower experienced important people in his early life being “nervous.” He didn’t have the word "anxiety" in his vocabulary, but what he experienced was very real and disturbing. In addition to the nervousness, some of the people around him had low energy and would withdraw from others. He wanted to know more. At ten, he became a voracious reader of biographies and novels that involved the emotional struggles people tried to overcome. By age 16, he was reading books by and about Sigmund Freud. For the first half of college he was a psychology major, but he found that many courses were not about the human struggle toward optimal mental health. He changed his major to sociology, where he learned about the social psychology of emotions and relationships. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Says Dr. Brower, “We all have had some degree of emotional pain during our lives, but we don’t have to let it cause us to suffer.”
