Dear BPForLife,

I am 62.

I had been mentally ill for more than five decades as the result of the traumatic influence of my mom and dad.

My dad beat me brutally as a child and a teen. He beat anger into me. That is what he taught me.

Half of my birth family died from suicide. In my recently published book, "Tools of Transformation", I share: My mom hung herself in the basement of our house; my baby brother found her and committed suicide some years after that; and my older brother overdosed on barbiturates and heroin.

At the age of 30, to save my life, I checked myself into an inpatient psychiatric unit.

I took lithium for much of the next three decades. Although that medicine masked some of my worst symptoms, my true healing, the development of stable and strong emotional regulation, in-place of a volatile "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" personality, is what freed me from the prison of mental illness.

I believe, on the most profound level, that any mental illness is reparable, no matter how grave. That is the underlying message of "Tools of Transformation," and the second book in my transformational series, "Secrets of Sleep."

In my yet-to-be-published book, "The Root Cause and Fix of Every Illness," I generalize some of the principles in the first two books in my series.

Most Sincerely,
Joe Lerner