Dear Mr. Jackson:

The occasion of your child’s death is a moment when all parents, including me, offer you every wish for strength and God’s healing power in the face of your loss.  Any father or mother can sense the tragedy it is to lose a son or daughter, yet no one who has not suffered such a loss can truly know your pain.

I would write no more than this were it not for the fact that you have used the occasion of your son’s passing and the attendant publicity to also promote your own business ventures, including your new record label.  This makes me feel it important, as a psychiatrist with access to the media, to reach out to you, with other parents and their adult children “listening” in. 

The foundation of our nation assures each person in this great country of certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Great leaders and courageous soldiers have safeguarded these rights for our citizens, and they would make a decent Bill of Rights for parents raising children, too.  Fathering a child, you see, means far more than participating in a child’s conception and witnessing his birth; it means doing everything possible to optimize that child’s life.  This requires many acts of love and self-sacrifice. It pays immeasurable dividends in the growing self-confidence and autonomy you witness developing in the child you care so much about.

Somehow, perhaps because of pain suffered in your own early life experience, you stole that God-given potential for healthy development from your son.  You have admitted lashing him with a belt or a switch when he failed to perform dance steps to your standards.  According to him, you called him ugly when acne affected him as a teenager.  You brutalized him by placing your own pathologic need for control and for “success” above his needs for security and comfort and self-esteem.  In a very real way, you buried enough of his love for himself that he was no longer comfortable with his race or age or sexuality or even his great fortune.  Trying to please a father who beats you with a belt for missing a dance step will do that to you.

Now, even when saying goodbye to your son, you think of yourself and your business.  You are deprived of a purer life and love.  This makes me feel badly for you, but feel worse for the son you injured so deeply. 

Some will see you only as a monster.  I know that monsters are made through cruelties suffered in life; they never spring fully-formed onto the planet.

In your quiet moments, I hope that you can dig up the roots of the emotional and physical violence you visited upon your child.  One of the wonderful things about still being on the planet is that you always have some chance to win back the potential for real humanity buried inside you.  

Here’s a hint:  Success or failure in becoming human isn’t measured in record sales or reflected in the lenses of television cameras.  You have to look much, much deeper.

Once you’ve committed to focusing on a specific area of your life that you want to change, the key to moving forward will be taking this leap of faith: Accepting the idea that your problem hasn’t come out of the blue. It has roots from the past.

If you have been trying to muscle through your problems for some time, always making the resolution to just stop yelling at your kids, to just stop eating so much, or to just stop selling yourself short in relationships or in pursuing your dreams, you are probably ready accept that simply being tired of your tired of your behavior and wanting to change it does not necessarily lead to change. 

You have suspected there’s another way, and Step Two is about allowing the key to your future could lie in coming to grips with parts of your past that you have left unexplored.

 Imagine if someone were to ask you to start reading a novel beginning on page 125, to continue reading through page 225, and to then write an ending in which the lead character meets with tremendous success.  Chances are you’d feel anxious and unprepared. After all, you’d be coming to the story midstream, without knowing the character’s motivations, strengths and weaknesses.  “This isn’t my story,” your heart would tell you.  “How am I supposed to make it come out right?”

In order to write something credible and convincing, you’d want to know what happened to the main character in the first 124 pages. You’d want to know how he or she had responded to personal challenges, what life lessons he or she had taken away from their family of origin, whether they had suffered any significant losses, what their parents’ marriage was like, so forth.  You’d want to know all about the character’s back story (his or her earlier life history).

Without this information, you could not confidently move forward, the next chapters you wrote would make the story and the character seem false.

Likewise, when we try to move forward with our lives without a true understanding of its earlier chapters, we ask of ourselves something no less fraught with difficulty.

There’s a reason we turn blind eyes to our own life histories, our own back stories:  We are needlessly afraid that looking at the past, especially the parts of it that are unsettling, will somehow weaken us or take away our momentum in life.  

Step Two asks you to stop running, and to believe that there are great rewards in store for you if you do. The truth about your life history—including the strengths and the weaknesses in your family relationships, the successes and the failures you have encountered, the gifts you received and the losses you sustained—are not your enemies. They are buried treasures. They are meant to be uncovered, looked at honestly and learned from, because they hold the keys to who we are and ways we can change. They tell us what holds us back from being our best selves, having good relationships, and achieving our goals.

 Imagine a woman who is always picking the wrong men: Men who drink, men who don’t treat her well, men who force her again and again into a caretaking role, but don’t take care of her.

What she needs, is insight into why she is making choices that cause her so much suffering, so she can change her behavior patterns and find true love.

The insight such a woman needs is as close as her own past experiences in life, very possibly in her family of origin. Maybe the insight can be gleaned from examining how her father treated her or how he treated her mother. As she opens chapters of her life story that have remained closed for too long, she will begin to see why she pursues emotionally unavailable men and why she feels unworthy of real love.  She will understand that she hasn’t been the victim of bad luck in love, but locked in a pattern established long ago.

 Knowledge is power. Armed with the truth about her life story, this woman can put the past where it belongs—behind her.  She will no longer be forced into repeating the same mistakes.  She can begin to understand her behavior and choose a more equal relationship with the potential for real intimacy.

 Our problems aren’t accidents. Unsuitable partners don’t merely show up on our doorsteps; we choose them because of ill-formed ideas about what we deserve. We find ourselves in unsatisfying careers because something early on told us that we couldn’t enjoy work, or make money, or take leadership roles. Our frustration with our children doesn’t mean we simply are bad parents; it may well mean that our own upbringing contained messages that parenting was a battle of wills instead of an act of love. 

 These painful pages of our current and future life stories will continue to be written so long as we choose to ignore their origins in the earlier chapters of our lives. That’s why the greatest promise for personal growth is looking in the mirror, in order to see behind you.

So forget about just doing it better, or hoping that your luck improves, or, even worse, resigning yourself to the idea that “this is just the way things are.”  Whatever your problem is, it likely has roots in your past, in avoiding a healing and empowering reckoning with your earlier life experiences. Taking Step Two means turning in the direction of what you haven’t been willing to look at, and keeping your eyes wide open.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s website at livingthetruth.com.