Everything about my childhood and my experience as a parent went into what became P.A.C.T. Training and the book, "Got An Angry Kid?". One of the really great things about life is that you get second chances, not that you get to replay the same tapes over again. You can't. Once something has happened, it has happened. But you can figure out what went wrong and work like hell to make it better. Your childhood is foisted upon you. Your adulthood is yours to make. YOU are the key here. Not THEM, be they your parents or your kids. We get one set of each and have to learn what makes them special. Along the way, we have to stop complaining and stop waiting for everyone to change so we'll be happy. The best defense is a good offense. Learn to create it yourself. P.A.C.T. is all about taking ourselves by the ear, trotting us in front of the bathroom mirror and saying, "Look at yourself!" The program and the book are my opportunities to exculpate myself and pass onto other parents a lot of what I have learned.

On the way to adulthood, I got my BA and MA from San Diego State University. I elected to stay in San Diego after discharge from the Navy during the Viet Nam war. I then taught briefly at Portland State University in Oregon and the University of Maine, Presque Isle before completing the Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut in 1987. I had the marvelously brilliant Richard Bloomer for an advisor. We remain friends to this day. I couldn't have developed P.A.C.T. without him even though he had nothing to do with the actual program design. It is his approach to learning that saturated P.A.C.T.'s development.

I put the bones of the program together just as one of my sons was turning into Spike before my eyes. Spike, as you will see, is the antihero of 'Got An Angry Kid?". I didn't know what to do with my own Spike. I just acted on a hunch. But it was a hunch that proved correctÑquit trying to be the parent you obviously can't be. Everything else was flesh hung on the bones of this idea. It took me three years to achieve, in my own family, something that now takes me less than a year to teach to others. I had only the occasional client to work with until the Connecticut State Department of Children and Families stepped forward and asked me to create an official program in 1993. Since then some 500 families have gone through the program. The success rate has always been high, and it has been a gratifying experience to tell families, "I know what you are going through, but there are lights at the end of the tunnel if you are willing to make some substantial changes in how you approach your kid."

I was asked recently if I was a Spike. I said, "No, that's somebody else." I was the kid who'd have happily taken a shotgun to school but that was way before blowing away classmates became a common way of demonstrating unhappiness. My Dad also didn't own one, which probably helped. Thankfully for me, and hopefully for you, I lived to share the tale.

© 2010 Andrew Gibson
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