In February of 2020, the man slowly awoke from a deep sleep. Not a deep sleep like he had been out all night, but a deep sleep like he had been in a coma. Actually, a medically induced coma that lasted for over a week. The fifty-seven year old man had been completely unconscious for nine days. And if he was arousing from a nightmare, the reality he awoke to was much worse. As his eyes opened, the man noticed he couldn’t move. Not because his body wasn’t working, but because his body was strapped down to the patient bed with six large leather straps in an ICU room that didn’t quite look familiar.If this wasn’t enough to strike serious fear into his already anxious mind, he noticed the nurses surrounding him were speaking a foreign language. Last the man remembered, he was in a hospital in Toronto, with his family nearby. But now, (whenever ‘now’ was) he was in a totally different hospital - in a totally different country strapped down to bed with the only people around him speaking Russian.These were the confusing and dire circumstances the man awoke to, quickly escalating his anxious and fragile thoughts to anger, fear, and unadulterated panic. Confusion, dreadful apprehension, and hopelessness had been his unwanted companions - and yet despite his best efforts, they were only gaining in size and scope. As he began wrestling with thoughts of self-harm the man could only describe this decent in madness as a trip to Hell.This was not the life of someone who had 1.4 million twitter followers, 1.3 million Instagram followers, 860,000 Facebook followers, 207,000 Reddit followers, and who the New York Times would proclaim as being “The most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now” - Especially for someone who had dedicated his life and career to better understand the human mind, and to practically help others with psychological disorders.But it was painfully obvious now - Jordan B. Peterson, the famed Canadian professor of psychology, clinical psychologist, and Youtube personality, couldn’t keep his own mind from fracturing. Like the most broken and miserable of people, he too was at a total loss. And after months of entrusting his mental and physical health to psychologists, psychiatrists, and the best that medicine could offer, he was now completely dependent upon the only two forces that mattered in his life. His family and his faith in God. The former, were un-mistakingly known and present. But the latter was invisible, nebulous, and shrouded in deep mystery. No matter how much Dr. Peterson relied upon his close friends and family, they were only human, and could only provide so much. Jordan needed healing and relief that his family - indeed, humanity could not fully provide.Who and what God and faith were to Jordan was unclear. But that he wanted and was desperate for him, now more than ever, was definitely not. JORDAN’S LIFEJordan Bernt (Bair-ent) Peterson was born June 12th, 1962 in Edmonton, Alberta Canada, and grew up in the nearby small town of Fairview. His mother Beverly, was a librarian at the campus of Grande Prairie Regional College. His father, Walter was a school teacher. The small framed Jordan would be the eldest of his parent’s three children.With nothing much to do in the small town, everyone knew each other quite well. Jordan became friends with a girl across the street named Tammy Roberts. She was only eight years old, but it seemed they had a crush on each other. The 11 year old Jordan would tell his father that he was going to marry her one day. But first, he had to finish high school in which he started in 1975.When he graduated from Fairview High School four years later, Jordan entered the college that employed his mother to study political science and English Literature in hopes to one day become a corporate lawyer. But during this time, he read George Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier” - a book that wrestled with the bleak life of those working in the industrial age of north England and the place that Socialism could have in alleviating their miserable circumstances. Orwell’s book impacted Jordan greatly. He would later transfer to the University of Alberta and graduate in 1982 with a B.A. in political science. Just after this, Jordan visited Europe for a year where he took a studious approach in understanding the psychological origins of recent European totalitarianism. This led him to not only become a student of history but of psychology where he delved into the writings of Jung, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky.Two years after receiving his first B.A., Jordan then received his second from the University of Alberta in psychology in 1984. He then moved to Montreal for further schooling at McGill University. And it was during this stint that Jordan married his lifelong friend and neighbor, Tammy shortly before earning his Ph.D in clinical psychology in 1991. The newly weds soon welcomed their first child and daughter Mikhaila in ...
