My book, 'Better Than Normal: How What Makes You Different Can Make You Exceptional'

I'm Just Sayin...

3/10/2012 8:00:18 PM

My new book, 'Better Than Normal: How What Makes You Different Can Make You Exceptional' is scheduled for release March 13, 2012 by Random House.

How times change. Over the past 20 years, psychiatry and the mental health field have gone from being stigmatized to glamorized as we try to cram everyone into a mental health box called "normal." This expands the abnormal universe to include almost everyone! We tell them not to worry, there's a pill that will make them "normal" just like everyone else.

The truth is, psychiatric conditions don't come with an On/Off switch, but rather occur along a continuum. High levels of any given trait can represent a severe psychiatric diagnosis that requires medication.

However, in small to medium doses, these very same traits can represent your greatest strengths. Build your life around your traits, rather than medicating them into oblivion, and remember this: If you try to please everyone and conform to the norm, you lose your uniqueness and hence, your greatness. Click here to learn more or order

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6 Comments

Lola

3/10/2012 9:08:48 PM

Psychiatry has a history of overtreating conditions it doesn't understand and comes from a dark history of extreme measures to force extreme behavior back to normal. It doesn't help that such a large segment of our cultures tend to think of anyone who isn't just like them as "abnormal." Once these beliefs were institutionalized by the schools, finally some began to question the wisdom of bringing all behavior to one conforming level.

I remember decades ago reading a book called "Insanity is a Myth," by Thomas Szazz. It addressed atrocities of a bygone era, and we have come a long way. But I applaud you for bringing the issue to the fore with the release of "Better Than Normal" this Tuesday, to perhaps slow a pendulum which has swung too far in the direction of lobotmizing individuality and, in fact, recognizing that many times our differences are our gifts.

marcia

3/16/2012 9:08:25 AM

...'in small to medium doses'. That's wisdom. Congratulations Dr. Archer for the numerous, excellent reviews! Good that I am not a journalist (I could be though..!), otherwise my exhilarating comments for you would reach the sky! That's what a person like you, deserves. Many, heartfelt congratulations! :-)

Lola

3/17/2012 11:21:32 PM

Just finishing reading the book. Great work, Dr. Archer! Fascinating!

One thing that interested me is in the bipolar chapter when you were talking about good mood and energy. You seemed to use those words as if they equaled each other when talking about your own experience, and I thought that was interesting because for me (I scored only 3.9 on bipolar, my lowest category), when I am energetic does not always mean I'm in a good mood. I get very frustrated and agitated frequently enough, and sometimes it's when I am full of energy; other times, when I'm depleted.

Also, I found it almost comical the way you described sort of feeling bad about needing down time on weekends. To me, that has as much to do with our bodies needing rest as anything, and I simply don't know anyone who doesn't need down time to just lay around on some regular basis, even my friend the 10 narcissist/10 histrionic/8 bipolar, who never stops starting but not finishing things but just involuntarily crashes and burns when she can't stay awake any more. I can see that the concept of not having enough energy foreign to you, but I assure you the rest of the world is all too acquainted with being drained on a regular basis and count down to the day we can sleep in in the morning.

Most of all, I liked your chapter on schizophrenia/magical. I score right in the middle on it and was actually surprised I scored so low because I've nearly always been pretty deeply entrenched in mysticism. I was actually relieved to see I was at such a moderate level, lacking mainly the superstition requisites to score off the chart.

I am always gratified to meet someone who has had incidents such as you had on your winning poker night. I, too, call it "the knowing."

The weirdest thing that happened to me, I will link to at the bottom of this paragraph. It came in a dream, and I was called upon to act to try to help some abused cats I would find by following the clue in the dream. My "knowing" moment was, as you'll see if you read the story, when I opened the website and saw the words "Release the catssssssss." It was very jarring. At the end of the blog, I ask, "Why me?" but then as I think about it, it seems perfectly logical that I would be the person to do it. The story: http://electricwitch2012.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/sangelica/

My first was when I was about 20, driving a group of friends home from the bar. There had been ice on the road, but it appeared to be dry, so I got some speed up but suddenly went spinning in circles on the highway. In mid-spin, I heard the voice in my head say, "Everything's going to be alright," and along with the voice came a "knowing" that what she said was true. I turned around and repeated the message to the passengers confidently. Within a few seconds, the car stopped spinning and slipped off the side of the road, but safely. The message had stopped me from panicking and doing a bunch of steering and braking, which very probably kept us from flipping over or going further off the road. Once something like that happens to you, you will no longer offhandedly discount anyone else's messages from spirits.

I've had a few more messages since then, taking different forms and being of different types, and in recent years, I've found I can sometimes meditate briefly and ask a question and get a brief word or image in response.

In the mid-seventies, I was living in the country but driving in to town nightly to hang out. It was about 4 years into an ongoing crush on this guy I've mentioned in other posts and during a time when there was occasional interaction when we'd run into each other. When I first met him, I was living in my first shack. I'm sure the pot had something to do with it, too, but I daydreamed about him for hours while staring at the corner of the living room as if it was a movie screen. Typical girly fantasies at first, but one day I realized the setting had changed to another century. I was keeping a dream journal at the time, and a couple of the dreams about him were in different centuries as well. I had just read all of Freud's case histories the summer before (the whole encyclopedic-like set), and I was a bit worried about myself, but then there was the pot explanation, so.....I was already psychic about him in some ways. In a large arena where the people on the other side of the stadium were no bigger than matchsticks, upon entering, my eyes would immediately light on him out of thousands of bodies.

The Four Feathers
And then there were the magic feathers 4 years later . Out at my acreage, on the 13th of the month, I found a Blue Jay Feather. I picked it up and kept it. The next day, the 14th, I found another in the same spot by the fence. The next day, the 15th, my friend came by. I was outside looking for the next feather. Why? I knew something was up. I told my friend about it, and she said, "Well, there will probably be two tomorrow." The next day, the 16th, there were two feathers all within that one-foot area. I knew they were a sign.

That night I went to visit a friend 50 miles away in a college town, not a town I'd ever seen "the guy" in before. She and I went out to a bar where some minor band was playing, and there he was. We danced, and... etc., etc. Ah, the seventies. So the dates: The 14th was his birthday, and the 16th was the friend's birthdate who had visited and told me there would probably be two feathers tomorrow.

Another Message in My Head
Somewhere within a few months of that incident, either before or after, I was outside in the front yard puttering when a clear and quite intrusive voice in my head said, "If you go to the zoo today, you will see [the guy} and ___," (a guy who had headed the commune we had shared some years earlier). Now, I had no particular need or desire to see the commune guy, though I liked him ok, hadn't seen him in a good while, so he seemed the wild card in the message. So I knew I was supposed to go to the zoo. I'd had no plans whatever to go to the zoo, hadn't been to the zoo in years. I called a couple of friends of mine and we went. After taking a shortcut in some woods and taking some photos there, we emerged from the woods practically into the lap of the guy I had the crush on. Then after talking to him and rounding a bend, there was the commune guy. Both were with their young sons.

Move ahead 22 years, 1997. I'm two-thirds of the way into a 10-year depression with PTSD. I have barely a care for anyone except my dog. I hadn't thought about "the guy" in years. ["The guy," by the way, I now know from reading your book, oddly enough, has the same first name as your son and was also in China the last I heard, but I don't hear anymore - it just gets Jungier and Jungier.]

One morning, after being up a little while, I was barraged with every memory and daydream I had ever had of this guy in all the years I knew him, all of it. It was relentless, a vision reel in my head. How it got past the other reel running with the ptsd, I'll never know. It lasted a few hours and was like those stories you hear of people reliving their lives as they die. I couldn't deal with the thought of him being dead, but I concluded he must be, but I wasn't armed emotionally enough to do anything further with this information.

Until a few years later when I came alive again after reading my life story in my journal. Immediately, having read all the passages about him and the dream notebook and everything, I began kind of panicking about him. The internet was up and running now. I began searching for his obituary. The last I'd known, he was in the USSR. I searched our home town papers for his obit and would find articles about him having gone to Russia, which I had heard through the grapevine maybe 15 years prior, except he had returned, and apparently gone back. I didn't find an obit. And then I found a resume of his online. It was dated the same year I had the memory assault. So I thought, well, he probably is dead, because I didn't find anything after that year.

Of course, it was ludicrous that I'd look him up, but I had to satisfy my curiosity, now three years after the barrage of memories. I didn't know if he'd even remember me. We were not a big item. I worshipped him, and he let me sometimes, and sometimes told me things about himself, and there was a lot of hand-kissing over the years, because talk about someone who was dramatic.....he was a 9 on the dramatic scale! I wasn't even sure if he knew my real name because he'd always called me by his nickname for me.

So over two decades later, I held my poor girlfriend down and made her listen to the long story and all the pros and cons of trying to contact him to see if he's dead or not and how foolish I'm going to look, or how awful it will be when his widow answers the phone or email (for both of us). I mentioned to my friend about not even being sure he'd remember me, and she said, "He'll remember you. You don't give people nicknames unless you like them." So with her encouraging me, I wrote him an email entitled "RE: People You Always Hoped You'd Never See Again but Always Knew You Would" -- and he wrote back 20 minutes later!

So over dinner and drinks a couple of months later, on what very well may be one of our only two real dates (the other being breakfast), I worked up my nerve to tell him about the barrage of memories and how I thought he was dead. And long story short, although we were not able to pin down an exact date (I didn't keep my journal during the hibernation), right in that time frame, he had been shot and left for dead overseas. He wrote a book that never got published, and the book ended with him laying on the street with his thoughts returning to his hometown, before he blacked out entirely. He admitted he had had a sort of reliving experience and thought he was dying.

I'm telling you, there's something to this stuff. I have come to think of it more as spirits giving me info, not that I'm getting it direct from him, because he just isn't that invested.

So I imagine you already had it all figured out, but for the record, I score about 5 on a lot of things but 8 and 9 on histrionic and narcissistic, which I can tell you if you'd scored me 20 years ago, I'd have been higher. While I am bored with perhaps most people and just have no feeling of commonality with them, I have high empathy once something is brought to my attention for me to focus on someone. If someone is in trouble, it flips a switch in me. I developed the traits consciously over time to aid me in doing what I wanted to do. I feel they've benefitted me. The big negative I have is getting frustrated easily not with friends but bad drivers, people you have to call about bills, or anyone who I perceive is wasting my time or throwing obstacles in my path. I learned in the eighties, about the time when I was my most successful, to take off the gloves and just plow through them because I got to the point I didn't have time to deal with it the nice womanly way. It's usually just everyday minutae. My whole family has some rage issues, so I figure I got it from them.

It's absolutely true what you said near the end about needing to reassess as you get older. I changed so much just during that long depression. I wish I still had the energy to be a 10 histrionic!! Far from it these days.

marcia

3/23/2012 8:48:05 AM

After watching your programme, I know why I excell in small groups, while I really dislike having to deal with crowds of 100! :-)

DDA

3/26/2012 4:44:50 PM

Great story, Lola. As I said before, YOU need to write a book!

Howard

8/25/2012 9:55:29 PM

My current story is I don't like wasting my time and energy. Here is my review of your new book that appears on my Linkedin site.

"Author makes an excellent point that too often people are being labeled as having a mental disorder and offered therapy and medicine when in fact there is nothing wrong with the person. There is nothing wrong they often are just a little different. Recommend you read entire book not just sections that you think apply to you. Also in addition take all questionnaires in appendix and ask spouse or someone else that know you to see if they agree with scores for you. Conclusion is not identified as separate chapter and makes many new points that I wish the author had incorporated in his initial chapter. Fact that Dr. Dale Archer appears on media outlets bothered me
because of my view of the experts that I have seen on cable stations."

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