The Path of the Happy Misfit

is the title of our book.  In it we address a major crisis of our times.  At a time when the fate of the earth is in the hands of humans to a degree never seen before, we are stuck in a crisis of growth or development as a species.  If we continue down the path our culture  has been travelling, we, and the planet, are likely not to survive long enough for us to evolve further.  Therefore, we believe that being a misfit in our culture is necessary for meeting the challenges of our time.

In order to successfully take on the challenge of preserving the human race and the planet, we must call upon our highest capacities as human beings.  Unfortuately, our culture, and perhaps our species, has not yet evolved to the point of being able to support its members in achieving fully mature human functioning.  Therefore, we must learn to grow beyond the survival strategies that we have learned in our families and our culture.

The good news is that this growth beyond “fitting in” to the culture and into our fullest capacities is also key to living healthy and happy lives as individuals.  Therefore, we develop the concept of becoming “Happy Misfits” to describe the growth path that we see as a way into a sustainable future for ourselves and for the planet.

We utilize the concept of an Adapted Child ego state to describe the endemic survival strategies that consititute the prevailing level of cultural consciousness at this time.  We describe a growth path out of these familiar, but ultimately destructive patterns.  We suggest alternatives that can lead us to ever more mature and fully human ways of living and relating to ourselves, our fellow human beings and our planet.   Our goal is to help those who are willing to learn how to live, in the words of an Innuit elder, “with wisdom and compassion” in our troubled and challenging world.