"Troubled" is a brief memoir of a young 30-ish American who grew up in the most unfavourable of circumstances but went on to earn a BS in psychology at Yale University and a PhD at the University of Cambridge in England.
"Unfavourable" may be a euphemism. Henderson's mother was a Korean drug addict; he never knew his father, an Hispanic man. He lived with several foster families before being adopted. His adopted parents split up and he went to live with his mother, who became a lesbian. Their partnership split up, too. Henderson was on his own -- engaging in self-destructive delinquency, violence and substance abuse until he finished high school. A term in the Air Force straightened him out and he applied to college.
While his personal history is engaging, his time at Yale was also fascinating. There he found the spoiled children of the elite complaining that they were oppressed. He was baffled. He has coined the idea of "luxury beliefs" to explain why his classmates advocated morally and culturally anarchic values while entering the professional elite because they lived by more or less conservative ones. In particular, they inveighed against the traditional family -- which he knew from bitter experience is a child's best protection from chaos and misery.
This book is a strong argument for protecting the traditional family and a scathing critique of the woke elite. The fact that the author has no discernable religious perspective is its only disappointment.