Human Behavior: What A Trip with Guest Dr. Michael Levittan
July 23, 2013
Hosted by Jonathan J. Brower, Ph.D.
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Dr. Jonathan Brower will be addressing Domestic Violence and related issues on this week’s program with guest Dr. Michael Levittan. Dr. Michael specializes in treating Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Anger management, Domestic violence, Child Abuse,, and Spousal Abuse in the greater Los Angeles area. He is also a Media Psychologist and Expert Witness. Dr. Michael believes that being a psychotherapist is both an honor and privilege that must be nurtured and cherished. He states: “Patients, couples, and group members show tremendous courage in revealing their personal struggles, shameful feelings, heaviest burdens, darkest secrets, and wishful longings to me. They do so with hopes of achieving clarity, healing, fulfillment, and contentment.” He feels that helping his patients is an awesome and meaningful responsibility and accepts the challenges with humility, seriousness, sensitivity, and enthusiasm. Dr. Michael goes on to say: “Being a therapist is emotional, intellectual, creative, always fascinating, and requires an open-mind. Trust must be established in order to help patients overcome pain and achieve their goals. I take active steps to be fully present in my life. I know that opportunities for joy, laughter, love, and a meaningful life are present all around us!”
Human Behavior – What A Trip
Archives Available on VoiceAmerica Health and Wellness Channel
Our show is all about human behavior. Most people are interested, to some degree, about human beings - themselves and others. Our topics run a large gamut and will cover anything and everything about humans and their behavior.
We will have guests on some of our shows, while some shows will involve people who call in and interact with me. Some shows will be a combination of both. We’ll hunker down and talk about human behavior.
Jonathan J. Brower, Ph.D.
Early in my childhood I experienced important people in my life being “nervous.” Not having the word "anxiety" in my vocabulary, what I experienced was very real and disturbing. In addition to the nervousness, some of these people also had low energy and were somewhat withdrawn from others.
As a ten year old I became a voracious reader of biographies and some novels that had to do with the struggles people attempted to overcome. I wanted to know about other people so that I could make sense of those in my personal sphere.
By the age of sixteen I was reading books by, and about, Sigmund Freud. I was utterly fascinated with the inner-working of the unconscious and how people suffer when they put up walls to avoid being conscious of their real feelings and impulses.
In college I was a psychology major, disliking many of the courses that were not about the human struggle toward optimal mental health. I changed my major to sociology where I began to understand the social psychology of emotions and relationships. This became my focus in graduate school as I earned my Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Human behavior is a wondrous and sprawling phenomenon. There are limitless boundaries to the way human beings can behave. For sure, people cannot not be doing behavior. On the contrary, people are always involved with behavior, whether sleeping or awake. Let's embrace the huge diversity of peoples' ways of behaving.
