The author of over twenty novels, twelve plays, and one hundred and twelve short stories, Henry James (1843-1916) is the acknowledged "Father of the Psychological Novel." With his seminal masterpiece, The Portrait of A Lady (1881), he ushered in the birth of what was to be the emergence of psychological fiction. Although a steady progression of other great novels and works would follow this one, it is this work, therefore, that will be the focus of the present study.

The author of over twenty novels, twelve plays, and one hundred and twelve short stories, Henry James (1843-1916) is the acknowledged "Father of the Psychological Novel." With his seminal masterpiece, The Portrait of A Lady (1881), he ushered in the birth of what was to be the emergence of psychological fiction. Although a steady progression of other great novels and works would follow this one, it is this work, therefore, that will be the focus of the present study.

The author of over twenty novels, twelve plays, and one hundred and twelve short stories, Henry James (1843-1916) is the acknowledged "Father of the Psychological Novel." With his seminal masterpiece, The Portrait of A Lady (1881), he ushered in the birth of what was to be the emergence of psychological fiction. Although a steady progression of other great novels and works would follow this one, it is this work, therefore, that will be the focus of the present study.

Toward Truth offers the reader a radical psychological guide to healing childhood trauma—both the extreme echelon of damage that the world recognizes as trauma and the other 99% that flies below the radar and is considered normal. Daniel Mackler sides with the truth of the child, not the lies of the parents, and traces the roots of trauma to the family. Toward Truth takes the groundbreaking work of psychologist Alice Miller to the next level, and in so doing offers a vision of deep, permanent, non-dissociative hope.

Toward Truth offers the reader a radical psychological guide to healing childhood trauma—both the extreme echelon of damage that the world recognizes as trauma and the other 99% that flies below the radar and is considered normal. Daniel Mackler sides with the truth of the child, not the lies of the parents, and traces the roots of trauma to the family. Toward Truth takes the groundbreaking work of psychologist Alice Miller to the next level, and in so doing offers a vision of deep, permanent, non-dissociative hope.

Toward Truth offers the reader a radical psychological guide to healing childhood trauma—both the extreme echelon of damage that the world recognizes as trauma and the other 99% that flies below the radar and is considered normal. Daniel Mackler sides with the truth of the child, not the lies of the parents, and traces the roots of trauma to the family. Toward Truth takes the groundbreaking work of psychologist Alice Miller to the next level, and in so doing offers a vision of deep, permanent, non-dissociative hope.

About Mental Survival Why do some police officers lose their lives in battle while others find ways to survive? Why do some police officers go overboard when fighting with a suspect while others show great restraint and professionalism? Mental Survival explores these questions and reaches deep into the history of our psyche to come up with the answers. While most new training philosophies tend to be futuristic in their attempts to answer these questions, Mental Survival goes back to the beginning to find out what we missed. Mental Survival is a must-read book for police academy instructors, managers, and police officers. Mental Survival explores why we react the way we do under high stress, our belief system and its role in our survivability, our basic training of police officers, management’s responsibility in a police officer’s survival, and the impact that society’s perceptions about police has on our ability to win a battle. Mental Survival has been a journey through my life while trying to correlate events around me with my own perceptions about survival. This book is written from my perspective as the author, and how my experiences helped me understand my survivability as well as my weaknesses and failures in attempting to reach a level whereby I could pass the lessons I learned to others so they may not repeat them. As I sat and watched a video clip from CNN showing two police officers wrestling with a man who was passively resisting, I couldn’t help but view the scene as surreal. Here we were in the year 2002, literally hundreds of years of law enforcement experience, and we were still responding to violence the same archaic way. This particular encounter began with a man possessing drugs of abuse and not wanting to relinquish it to the officers. Initially, there is only one officer. He places one handcuff on the man, who in turn begins to tense up and spins around, avoiding handcuffing of the second arm. The officer tried to take the man to the ground by using the arm he had control of to throw him down. Instead, this begins an affair that looks more like children playing than it does a well-trained law enforcement response to a critical incident. The backup officer shows up during this spinning-and-yelling show, and he too begins an archaic form of control—hits him several times with his baton for compliance. Neither officer is displaying any form of self-defense or suspect control, let alone the tactics taught in the academy. Why is this? Don’t we spend hours, days, weeks, and often months training police officers to respond to these situations appropriately? Why then do we see this time and time again? Why didn’t those officers use any joint manipulation or take-down techniques? They were taught plenty to choose from. They must have learned twenty different ways to take a man down to the ground, twenty different joint manipulations, thirteen or more pressure points available to them (depending on your academy), and at least ten different ways to handcuff this individual. So why did they completely ignore the tactics they learned in training? Some say it is because they never trained regularly after the academy. There may be some truth in this. Some say our techniques are archaic and are in constant conflict with the administration’s need for public relations. Therefore, officers do not train for fear of Use of Force investigations. This may seem contradictory to the truth since utilizing the techniques you are trained with will probably be the only thing to keep you out of trouble. Therefore, I believe this excuse is merely that—an excuse. However, what is it an excuse for? Lazy officers? I do not believe this since law enforcement officers are some of the hardest-working professionals in the world. Their jobs almost always spill over into their private lives. You will be hard-pressed to find a police officer who isn’t involved in some extracurricular activity to promote community awareness, safety, or child development. I do not believe for a second these officers are lazy in general. You most certainly have your few as you do in any profession, but on par, most officers are hard workers and dedicated to the improvement of society and protecting the rights of others. So why then do we have this problem of not responding to critical incidents as true professionals? Why do we fall back to archaic means of subduing someone? Does the problem lie with these two officers, or is their training and preparation suspect? Because of so many incidents similar to the one above, evaluation of my own life experiences, and calls for help from my own peers, I felt compelled to begin to ask that question which is burnt in the back of everyone’s mind—why? It is my belief that if we can determine why we respond in a manner opposite of our training, we can then develop a system which will bring about true professional responses necessitated by our many years of experience. We can no longer afford to ignore this ever-increasing problem. The media will not allow it, the public will not allow it, and therefore, management will not support those who do it. As trainers of law enforcement, we are responsible for ensuring we provide our trainees with the most up-to-date training as possible. As the saying goes: “Once you chose law enforcement as a career, you give up the right to be unfit and untrained,” so goes the same rule for trainers: “Once you chose to become a trainer of law enforcement officers, you give up the right to become comfortable in your training material.” You are required to search for the most effective training material available. If you are still teaching the same thing in the same manner as was taught to you, your material must become suspect. Some things in law enforcement are time proven. Many things do not need changing due to their effectiveness. However, we in law enforcement have never presented a system of self-defense that has been anywhere near effective for officers as a whole. It works well for those who train a lot with them most of the time, but even those who train regularly are devoid of success at times. And sometimes those who train can perform the techniques at any time you ask them to flawlessly—except during times of critical or violent encounters. What good are trained techniques if you cannot use them under extreme stress? Response to resistance will create an extremely stressful situation requiring the ability to delve into the psyche where your will to survive lies, and it requires the knowledge of a system of defense effective enough for even those who do not train with it regularly to succeed. It is this theory where I believe we have failed those who entrust us with their lives and careers. We can no longer make the statement that “It is their responsibility to train” when we are faced with the cold reality that an overwhelming majority do not train self-defense tactics. We are lucky if they train for fitness. There are several areas I would like to explore in an attempt to answer the why question quite often asked about the lack of officer survival preparation. Why don’t officers train? Why don’t our methods work under times of high stress? Our system of self-defense is extremely effective, why don’t officers use it when they leave the academy? Why do officers resort to archaic methods of defense during violent encounters? To understand these why questions, I believe we must first begin with the archaic methods so often employed and why we use them. Where do they come from? Why are these archaic methods so instinctive to officers yet unacceptable by society when judging officer behavior? Understanding where these methods come from requires learning about defense prior to the development of “methods” or “techniques.” We must start by looking at defense before we became so intellectual we began to call it defense. As man evolved, defense was merely a system to survive against predators. Therefore, the system evolved to respond to extreme violence. Extreme violence required development of the brain’s fight, flight, or freeze system housed in the limbic portion of the brain. In most cases, freezing to avoid being seen by a predator or running (flight) was enough. But when man was required to fight back for survival from an attack, the only self-defense system familiar to man was that of their ancestors: animal instinct. Animals instinctively use their teeth, limbs, or any other appendage provided by nature to inflict harm on their attacker. The intention of the animal instinct is to inflict damage to defend the body. This is extremely significant and telling when evaluating man’s response to resistance. When he operates out of this system, he will be limited to instincts prehistorically developed and intended for prey-predator encounters. When you are thrust into your limbic system (or your fight or flight system), you are only capable of responding in this manner until you can regain enough control and composure to be able to think again to show compassion or restraint. With this understanding in mind, coupled with the fact that the majority of officer-violator combative encounters result in the officer being thrust into the fight-flight system, we can see why police officers tend to excessively use striking methods with little or no technique. What state of mind do you think the officers who beat Rodney King were in? There is very little doubt they were operating from the limbic system—the fight or flight. Why didn’t they stop beating him when it became apparent this method was producing little results? Because animal instincts demand we neutralize the predator or assailant completely. This is seen throughout nature: what animal shows mercy once its attacker has been injured or the threat neutralized? Animals do not show mercy. Hence, when man is operating from his fight or flight and is propelled into his animal instincts, he must be able to withdraw from his limbic system and into his cortex or thinking brain. He cannot do this until he perceives the danger has been completely neutralized. It will be difficult to get him to show mercy for his recent enemy. Man is still an animal. The only thing that separates us from other beasts is our ability to think and reason from our cerebral cortex, which is our thinking and reasoning brain. If the officer is not responding from the cerebral cortex, he is no different than any other animal defending itself. This officer will not show mercy until he can once again begin to think clearly and the perception of danger has vanished—then, and only then, will the officer show mercy. In our professional terminology, mercy is more appropriately discussed as professional conduct. Whatever you call it, it is unattainable from within the realm of fight or flight. The only way to ensure professional conduct is to provide officers with a method of staying out of the fight or flight system. This is a mental issue and not a self-defense-technique issue. If it is a mental issue, then it requires intense training of the mind. The mind holds the key to the professional conduct of officers. The mind must be trained to become desensitized to violence, and to become familiar with the environment of violence in order to be able to respond as the more evolved “thinking” man and not as the prehistoric “animal instinctive” man. This is what separates “warriors” from the rest of society. Some people have what is referred to as the “warrior spirit” or the “warrior mindset,” while others possess this ability but have yet to awaken it—and still yet others will never possess it. Those who possess the warrior mindset have the ability to train their minds appropriately for “thinking” battles. It is easier to train these officers because they possess this ability already. Those who do not possess the warrior spirit will have a difficult time staying out of the limbic region of their brain; they most certainly will be thrust into the fight or flight every time. Our responsibility is to learn to recognize these officers without the warrior spirit and manage them appropriately and cautiously. They are a danger to themselves and others around. You need the warrior spirit to be able to function in the realm of violence acceptably. Without the warrior spirit, I do not see how you could attain this level of mental efficiency. Unfortunately, law enforcement has a small population of officers without the warrior spirit. They must be trained completely different than those who possess the spirit. Most of what I discuss here will not be useful for those without the spirit, because they will not possess what it takes to embrace the inviolability of battle in their hearts and minds. Those with the warrior spirit will possess the innate ability to train the mind to think in battle. Throughout this book, I have attempted to use examples and stories of events in my life that have helped me to evolve from a scared eighteen-year-old, new military recruit to a trainer of police professionals. I have read and studied many different approaches to teaching police/military survival and have noticed a trend whereby each author tends to tell many different stories about many different warriors in order to support their principles and beliefs. While I do not see this as a problem, and it is quite effective I’m sure, I decided to use the experiences of one person from infancy to trainer to explain these principles I believe in. Of course, that individual is the author. As I tell my stories, you will see that there is no glamour in these tales. To the contrary, and by design, I have intentionally used stories from which mistakes were made. I believe we learn more from the mistakes that we make than we do by the things we do right. When I graduated from the academy, my training officer purposefully allowed me to make a big mistake which resulted in him and me being brought into the sergeant’s office for a scolding. Later, I asked him why he didn’t stop me from making that mistake, and with no remorse, he simply stated, “It is a mistake I once made and paid the price for. I have never forgotten it. You will forever remember this lesson and will never again make that mistake. You will easily forget those things you do right, but the mistakes are forever burned into your memory.” This lesson I have taken with me throughout my career. I have applied that philosophy to my teaching. It has been very effective. And for this reason, I will not attempt to tell successful stories just for the sake of telling exciting war stories; I tell stories of tragic to near-disastrous mistakes. These mistakes are, and will, forever be burned into my memory.

About Mental Survival Why do some police officers lose their lives in battle while others find ways to survive? Why do some police officers go overboard when fighting with a suspect while others show great restraint and professionalism? Mental Survival explores these questions and reaches deep into the history of our psyche to come up with the answers. While most new training philosophies tend to be futuristic in their attempts to answer these questions, Mental Survival goes back to the beginning to find out what we missed. Mental Survival is a must-read book for police academy instructors, managers, and police officers. Mental Survival explores why we react the way we do under high stress, our belief system and its role in our survivability, our basic training of police officers, management’s responsibility in a police officer’s survival, and the impact that society’s perceptions about police has on our ability to win a battle. Mental Survival has been a journey through my life while trying to correlate events around me with my own perceptions about survival. This book is written from my perspective as the author, and how my experiences helped me understand my survivability as well as my weaknesses and failures in attempting to reach a level whereby I could pass the lessons I learned to others so they may not repeat them. As I sat and watched a video clip from CNN showing two police officers wrestling with a man who was passively resisting, I couldn’t help but view the scene as surreal. Here we were in the year 2002, literally hundreds of years of law enforcement experience, and we were still responding to violence the same archaic way. This particular encounter began with a man possessing drugs of abuse and not wanting to relinquish it to the officers. Initially, there is only one officer. He places one handcuff on the man, who in turn begins to tense up and spins around, avoiding handcuffing of the second arm. The officer tried to take the man to the ground by using the arm he had control of to throw him down. Instead, this begins an affair that looks more like children playing than it does a well-trained law enforcement response to a critical incident. The backup officer shows up during this spinning-and-yelling show, and he too begins an archaic form of control—hits him several times with his baton for compliance. Neither officer is displaying any form of self-defense or suspect control, let alone the tactics taught in the academy. Why is this? Don’t we spend hours, days, weeks, and often months training police officers to respond to these situations appropriately? Why then do we see this time and time again? Why didn’t those officers use any joint manipulation or take-down techniques? They were taught plenty to choose from. They must have learned twenty different ways to take a man down to the ground, twenty different joint manipulations, thirteen or more pressure points available to them (depending on your academy), and at least ten different ways to handcuff this individual. So why did they completely ignore the tactics they learned in training? Some say it is because they never trained regularly after the academy. There may be some truth in this. Some say our techniques are archaic and are in constant conflict with the administration’s need for public relations. Therefore, officers do not train for fear of Use of Force investigations. This may seem contradictory to the truth since utilizing the techniques you are trained with will probably be the only thing to keep you out of trouble. Therefore, I believe this excuse is merely that—an excuse. However, what is it an excuse for? Lazy officers? I do not believe this since law enforcement officers are some of the hardest-working professionals in the world. Their jobs almost always spill over into their private lives. You will be hard-pressed to find a police officer who isn’t involved in some extracurricular activity to promote community awareness, safety, or child development. I do not believe for a second these officers are lazy in general. You most certainly have your few as you do in any profession, but on par, most officers are hard workers and dedicated to the improvement of society and protecting the rights of others. So why then do we have this problem of not responding to critical incidents as true professionals? Why do we fall back to archaic means of subduing someone? Does the problem lie with these two officers, or is their training and preparation suspect? Because of so many incidents similar to the one above, evaluation of my own life experiences, and calls for help from my own peers, I felt compelled to begin to ask that question which is burnt in the back of everyone’s mind—why? It is my belief that if we can determine why we respond in a manner opposite of our training, we can then develop a system which will bring about true professional responses necessitated by our many years of experience. We can no longer afford to ignore this ever-increasing problem. The media will not allow it, the public will not allow it, and therefore, management will not support those who do it. As trainers of law enforcement, we are responsible for ensuring we provide our trainees with the most up-to-date training as possible. As the saying goes: “Once you chose law enforcement as a career, you give up the right to be unfit and untrained,” so goes the same rule for trainers: “Once you chose to become a trainer of law enforcement officers, you give up the right to become comfortable in your training material.” You are required to search for the most effective training material available. If you are still teaching the same thing in the same manner as was taught to you, your material must become suspect. Some things in law enforcement are time proven. Many things do not need changing due to their effectiveness. However, we in law enforcement have never presented a system of self-defense that has been anywhere near effective for officers as a whole. It works well for those who train a lot with them most of the time, but even those who train regularly are devoid of success at times. And sometimes those who train can perform the techniques at any time you ask them to flawlessly—except during times of critical or violent encounters. What good are trained techniques if you cannot use them under extreme stress? Response to resistance will create an extremely stressful situation requiring the ability to delve into the psyche where your will to survive lies, and it requires the knowledge of a system of defense effective enough for even those who do not train with it regularly to succeed. It is this theory where I believe we have failed those who entrust us with their lives and careers. We can no longer make the statement that “It is their responsibility to train” when we are faced with the cold reality that an overwhelming majority do not train self-defense tactics. We are lucky if they train for fitness. There are several areas I would like to explore in an attempt to answer the why question quite often asked about the lack of officer survival preparation. Why don’t officers train? Why don’t our methods work under times of high stress? Our system of self-defense is extremely effective, why don’t officers use it when they leave the academy? Why do officers resort to archaic methods of defense during violent encounters? To understand these why questions, I believe we must first begin with the archaic methods so often employed and why we use them. Where do they come from? Why are these archaic methods so instinctive to officers yet unacceptable by society when judging officer behavior? Understanding where these methods come from requires learning about defense prior to the development of “methods” or “techniques.” We must start by looking at defense before we became so intellectual we began to call it defense. As man evolved, defense was merely a system to survive against predators. Therefore, the system evolved to respond to extreme violence. Extreme violence required development of the brain’s fight, flight, or freeze system housed in the limbic portion of the brain. In most cases, freezing to avoid being seen by a predator or running (flight) was enough. But when man was required to fight back for survival from an attack, the only self-defense system familiar to man was that of their ancestors: animal instinct. Animals instinctively use their teeth, limbs, or any other appendage provided by nature to inflict harm on their attacker. The intention of the animal instinct is to inflict damage to defend the body. This is extremely significant and telling when evaluating man’s response to resistance. When he operates out of this system, he will be limited to instincts prehistorically developed and intended for prey-predator encounters. When you are thrust into your limbic system (or your fight or flight system), you are only capable of responding in this manner until you can regain enough control and composure to be able to think again to show compassion or restraint. With this understanding in mind, coupled with the fact that the majority of officer-violator combative encounters result in the officer being thrust into the fight-flight system, we can see why police officers tend to excessively use striking methods with little or no technique. What state of mind do you think the officers who beat Rodney King were in? There is very little doubt they were operating from the limbic system—the fight or flight. Why didn’t they stop beating him when it became apparent this method was producing little results? Because animal instincts demand we neutralize the predator or assailant completely. This is seen throughout nature: what animal shows mercy once its attacker has been injured or the threat neutralized? Animals do not show mercy. Hence, when man is operating from his fight or flight and is propelled into his animal instincts, he must be able to withdraw from his limbic system and into his cortex or thinking brain. He cannot do this until he perceives the danger has been completely neutralized. It will be difficult to get him to show mercy for his recent enemy. Man is still an animal. The only thing that separates us from other beasts is our ability to think and reason from our cerebral cortex, which is our thinking and reasoning brain. If the officer is not responding from the cerebral cortex, he is no different than any other animal defending itself. This officer will not show mercy until he can once again begin to think clearly and the perception of danger has vanished—then, and only then, will the officer show mercy. In our professional terminology, mercy is more appropriately discussed as professional conduct. Whatever you call it, it is unattainable from within the realm of fight or flight. The only way to ensure professional conduct is to provide officers with a method of staying out of the fight or flight system. This is a mental issue and not a self-defense-technique issue. If it is a mental issue, then it requires intense training of the mind. The mind holds the key to the professional conduct of officers. The mind must be trained to become desensitized to violence, and to become familiar with the environment of violence in order to be able to respond as the more evolved “thinking” man and not as the prehistoric “animal instinctive” man. This is what separates “warriors” from the rest of society. Some people have what is referred to as the “warrior spirit” or the “warrior mindset,” while others possess this ability but have yet to awaken it—and still yet others will never possess it. Those who possess the warrior mindset have the ability to train their minds appropriately for “thinking” battles. It is easier to train these officers because they possess this ability already. Those who do not possess the warrior spirit will have a difficult time staying out of the limbic region of their brain; they most certainly will be thrust into the fight or flight every time. Our responsibility is to learn to recognize these officers without the warrior spirit and manage them appropriately and cautiously. They are a danger to themselves and others around. You need the warrior spirit to be able to function in the realm of violence acceptably. Without the warrior spirit, I do not see how you could attain this level of mental efficiency. Unfortunately, law enforcement has a small population of officers without the warrior spirit. They must be trained completely different than those who possess the spirit. Most of what I discuss here will not be useful for those without the spirit, because they will not possess what it takes to embrace the inviolability of battle in their hearts and minds. Those with the warrior spirit will possess the innate ability to train the mind to think in battle. Throughout this book, I have attempted to use examples and stories of events in my life that have helped me to evolve from a scared eighteen-year-old, new military recruit to a trainer of police professionals. I have read and studied many different approaches to teaching police/military survival and have noticed a trend whereby each author tends to tell many different stories about many different warriors in order to support their principles and beliefs. While I do not see this as a problem, and it is quite effective I’m sure, I decided to use the experiences of one person from infancy to trainer to explain these principles I believe in. Of course, that individual is the author. As I tell my stories, you will see that there is no glamour in these tales. To the contrary, and by design, I have intentionally used stories from which mistakes were made. I believe we learn more from the mistakes that we make than we do by the things we do right. When I graduated from the academy, my training officer purposefully allowed me to make a big mistake which resulted in him and me being brought into the sergeant’s office for a scolding. Later, I asked him why he didn’t stop me from making that mistake, and with no remorse, he simply stated, “It is a mistake I once made and paid the price for. I have never forgotten it. You will forever remember this lesson and will never again make that mistake. You will easily forget those things you do right, but the mistakes are forever burned into your memory.” This lesson I have taken with me throughout my career. I have applied that philosophy to my teaching. It has been very effective. And for this reason, I will not attempt to tell successful stories just for the sake of telling exciting war stories; I tell stories of tragic to near-disastrous mistakes. These mistakes are, and will, forever be burned into my memory.

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