Fulfilling A Covenant

My Mama told me that she had to offer my life to the Holy Infant when I was just about a week old. My parents were a young, struggling couple. I was a very fragile baby. She was asked by the doctor to choose, have me undergo treatment and take a 95% risk of mental retardation or to just let the pain go away and let me go. She declared with conviction that I can have the treatment and I will live a normal life and she'll raise me to be someone who'll make a difference. I survived but spent my early to middle childhood in the hospital. I grew up to be socially withdrawn....and suicidal. I could not play with other kids because the slightest physical activity would send me to a week of stay in the hospital. I had my own world...the ideas and stories I found in my Mama's books. The time came when I became dissatisfied with just understanding stories by pictures. I got curious with what is written in books with no pictures on them at all. I felt the need to learn how to read at 4 years old. I learned under my Mama's instruction. Then I learned from those books that there is more to read than fairy tales. I read about life and meaning...and that of other people's sufferings. I wanted to do something at 5 years old but I was too weak. I felt frustrated and started to become suicidal. Then at six years old I had an accident that had my right hand rehabilitated. I was supposed to stop schooling but refused to, so I had to learn how to write with my left hand...I did. The experience boosted my confidence. I was the only one in our class who could write with both hands. But my memory was affected after I went through general anesthesia with the accident I had with my right arm. Frustration crept into me feeding my depression. The tendency to hurt myself was still there. It was then that I started to get interested in understanding why I was so different. In grade school, my Mama bought a book by a Psychiatrist and Plastic Surgeon, Dr. Maxwell Maltz called, Power Psycho-Cybernetics. That was then that I fell in love with psychology. The struggle against depression and suicide ideation (and attempts) continued. Then I was to take up BS Zoology in college but eventually decided to enroll in Psychology. To cut the story short, I defeated my suicidal attempts and depression when I understood its cause. A spiritual struggle preluded a deeper faith that helped me rise above my tendency. Taking up a field that is not yet so widely accepted and appreciated as a profession in the country entails the possibility of engaging into a much more demanded career, teaching. But never did I dream of teaching...I was simply too shy to be one. I would never be credible I thought (I was a cracked pot), I wasn't ready nor interested. Then I got jobs. Ironically, I taught in a nursery school and enjoyed being surrounded with kids but never really planned to pursue teaching older children, worst young adults. I tried office work but I got bored. Got other job offers but never really jumped into them. Then I felt like I had no other choice but to try teaching. I was blessed to get hired in a University. I love hearing ideas but struggled with the paradigm shift in the instructional approach of the institution I was trained and that of my employer.

While teaching, a student asked when I started to love teaching. I didn't know what to say but said, I still don't. But I love it, I was just not convinced that it is my passion.

Then this morning, the Story of Teddy Stallard and his 5th grade teacher, Mrs. Thompson send me to sobbing in a room filled with fellow teachers from all over Davao Region. Then I recalled what my Mama told me, that she offered my life to God and that she'll raise me to be someone who'll make a difference. I never really felt that I had lived the life that my Mama has intended me to live. I was not a pious student, I got extended in college for insisting on a thesis topic I was discouraged to pursue but still pursued. I often lost track in academic work because of spreading myself too thin in extra- and co-curricular activities. I was suicidal. I doubted God's existence. I questioned authorities. I challenged taboos. I was unconventional. I was not the perfect daughter that I should have been if I were to offer my life to God. I thought of joining the nunnery as a child but realized I might just leave before I spend a year inside. Then I tried to ask my Mama after my graduation in college to let me join the Maryknoll Missioners in Africa but she refused. Then I just found myself before a room filled with young faces waiting for me to speak and tell them what's the day's lesson.

Stallard and Thompson's story moved me and made me realize I am destined to be here. I am meant to touch lives, as many as I can. There might be times when I feel so incompetent but it must never prevent me from fulfilling His will. I have to do my best to do His will. I have been praying for this all my life, to find my passion and God revealed it to me at a very unexpected moment. I was having second thoughts at attending the seminar this morning in fact. I am home...I thirst for knowledge...and teaching is just the perfect way of life for pursuing learning and continuously sharing and partaking everything with everyone.

God is great! He paves the way for our own good! Everything works for good! It feels a lot better to know I am meant to be here, that I made the right choice...and it was never a mistake to be just here instead of being somewhere else.

I am fulfilling my Mama's covenant with God 29 years ago...

On Letters to Juliet

10/23/2010 10:26:30 PM

I am supposed to write about something else, graduate school requirements. But my heart is telling me I need to let the emotions flow. I had just seen the movie, Letters to Juliet. It was light yet very heartwarming. But it never appeared to me that early how I could possibly relate to it that much. The plot was far from my own story but the struggles Sophie was facing basically reflected my own battle.

She loved her fiancé. She tried to live in his world. She did her best to love everything that was dear to him until she felt she was not special to him anymore. That he simply looks at her but never sees her after all. Couples were supposed to want to be with each other all the time even when they really have to be apart. They are supposed to miss each other so much that when they are not together they could hardly wait to be reunited in each other’s arms. But she didn’t feel that Victor felt that way about her. He could go on for days without her. When he is on the phone with her, he would hastily say goodbye for some work to be done, and when he is with her he is always on the phone talking to someone for some work to be done. But Viktor loved her, no doubt. It was just that he loved other things more.

I had not identified with Juliet at the start of the movie not until she started writing that letter for Claire. I realized I had so much of her in me when Claire read that letter that Sophie wrote for her. Listening to it was like listening to the very words of my heart. Juliet believed in the same things I believe about love. I am a psychology professor, not a writer nor a poet. I am supposed to look at emotions objectively but this is how I was born, stubbornly romantic. I am a behavioral scientist who happens to believe in destiny, Soulmates, and TRUE LOVE. I AM romantic and I surely hope to be found by a man who would be in the same length of experiencing life as I am.

I have studied about love and attraction. I have always been convinced that, “birds of the same feathers flock together” but was kept attracted to men who rarely shared anything in common with me. The countless failures and failed relationships I had made me think that maybe I am never meant to be with anybody, blamed my lovers for what happened, and made myself suffer from guilt. But Sophie’s story allowed me to be a little bit more convinced that it was nobody’s fault…we were simply incompatible. I am romantic and very particular with fidelity, honesty, commitment, and the preservation of the traditional values of the family. My former lovers then had a different perspective. It all had to end. But now, I am more confident that God has not brought me this far just to drop me off. He loves to see the rest of my love story just as He has always planned it to be. In all of my breakups, I have never completely gone over a previous relationship before I jump into another. But this time it has been different. For the first time in my life, I truly understood and embraced the truth that the very cause of my failed relationships was incompatibility. This enlightenment has made me forgive my former lovers and myself. This forgiveness had released me from the chains of bitterness, suffering and unnecessary sense of guilt. For the very first time, after several failed relationships I have moved on, completely... I have gotten over with my recent breakup, surprisingly while single.

Certainly, God wants me to be psychologically ready for my Soulmate. He wants to see me grow mature. He wants me to fall for my Soulmate not because I needed to, to get over with somebody else, but because I simply could not help but love him! God works in amazing ways, truly. I will not worry from now on. I am in GOOD HANDS. I will not choose who to love; I am asking God to do it for me. I surrender my will to Him. I will not even worry about how I will know that it is him. There was nothing He ever did that has not benefited me in the long run. He wants me to feel complete first before I find myself looking into my Soulmates eyes…because He wants me to know who exactly I am looking for and what I truly need by knowing first who I really am and what it is that I certainly need. Somewhere, I know there is someone who has been praying for me to find him too and like me, God is still molding him into that man I am looking for and truly need just as God is shaping me into that woman that my Soulmate has been praying for.

I suggest, you watch the movie if you haven't done so. It's sweet and is definitely an eye-opener...simple but heartwarming.

journey to meaning…

journey to meaning…
October 25th, 2006 by jhunitz

who am i? what am i here for? where am i bound to go? these questions had bugged me even before the tempting schools of thoughts that the academe has to offer found their way into my existence.

as a child i would gaze at the sky with its overwhelming darkness of which its oblivious mystery had never seemed to be threatening to me (for it is this same darkness that allows me to see the brightness of the stars).i have spent almost every night of my childhood years looking up into the heavens trying to figure out where does space begin…where does it end?

as a child, i was physically weak that i almost died of bronchopneumonia when i was barely a week old.though i’ve never heard my parents complaining about my condition i have asked my self and God…what am i here for?Watching the stars in the vagueness of the skies made me wonder,does my existence count?why can’t i just die and have my life be given to someone who could live it out in ways much better than i can.

with that grain of idea in mind i had lived my early childhood years in a divided existence..half of it, living to please the people around me..the other, living to fill the space inside me.but no matter what i did,even if people would affirm anything i do i still couldn’t fill the void inside of me.what do i really want?what am i here for?a child’s life seems to be so simple and yet to me it was just as complex as the origin of space.i couldn’t find the reason of my existence as i couldn’t figure out where do the ends of space meet…

i was five years old when i started to answer my own questions..with the realization that i am not alone in the quest for meaning as i have read in the books of my mom (she did not send me to pre-school but selflessly accepted the toiling responsibility of being my first teacher and taught me how to read at barely 4 years old).then…’i want to touch lives’, i have declared.

but life has its own twists and turns..there came a time when i have felt like i’m nothing but a crap.that there’s no way i could possibly touch lives for i couldn’t even touch my own.i have wished for death again.’the world is as helpless as i am,’ i would say, ‘there’s nothing i could do for it.’

i lived life trying to evade and deny that the void inside is slowly engulfing me..corrupting my whole existence.the space in me has turned into a blackhole with every single moment…attracting what is out there into its core..into its core where everything turns into nothing.

while in the university my life has turned into nothing but meaningless existence..i had lost hold of my strings and my psyche just couldn’t find my way back into my body.i was a soul torn apart by the meaningless struggle for meaning.i felt ashame for the fact that i am a psychology major and a pathetic lover of philosophy yet couldn’t comprehend what’s goin’ on with my life.i have wasted life far worse than a drunkard or a gambler could. i have the answers, but whose answers do i’ve got? they were according of Freud, Erikson, Horney, Maslow, William James, Ellis, Murray, Viktor Frankl, Sartre, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Soren Kierkegaard…but i was yet to find my own voice….

i grew tired..i just let go of everything..my search for meaning,the questions i have never answered…i just woke up one morning talking heart-to-heart with God asking Him to lead the way…i have realized i’ve been trying to find my way into the wild on my own. though i have constantly seek His help in my prayers (which seemed to be a checklist of needs) i have never placed my full trust in Him after all.for quite a while i have lived exclusively in the new world i’ve found..just me and my Savior but i just couldn’t keep within the LIGHT He poured into my life..it radiates from me to the world i exist.then i found the meaning that i’ve long been searching for…

what then is the meaning of my existence? i have realized that it is right before me all through the years—to live each moment savoring the beauty of God’s gifts and to share everything He has given me…including the pains and the srtuggles that would inspire people to go on for they are not alone…
have you found what you have been looking for?

Munchaussen Syndrome by Proxy

On Turning Against One of the Pillars of Humanity – Our Mothers.

That afternoon we watched the video by M.A.M.A was the first time I heard of the condition called Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP). It was shown in the video how the condition was first described and diagnosed. MSBP was named by Dr. Roy Meadow in 1977 in a journal called Lancet, and is a variant of Munchausen Syndrome, which was named by Sir Richard Asher in 1951 in the British Medical Journal. The name for the condition was taken from the name of Baron Karl Friedrich Hieronymus Freiherr von Munchhausen who lived in the 1700s who purportedly told many fantastic and impossible adventures about himself, which Rudolf Raspe later published as The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchhausen.
When the condition was described in the video, I was starting to wonder how could have the so-called “authorities” in diagnosing the condition arrived at their conclusions. The cases presented in the documentary video bothered me personally. While it might be true that such condition is really possible I was not convinced with how the mothers in the video were diagnosed. I was eagerly waiting for the criteria with which the “authorities” based their diagnosis. As the video progressed, the experts were not able to present the DSM criteria I was waiting for but the symptoms associated with the condition. When I looked it up in the internet, I realized why there were no established criteria for the disorder. I found out that it is categorized in DSM IV-TR under factitious disorder not otherwise specified. In the absence of a clear-cut criteria, I became skeptic at how they arrived with their diagnosis. This, I learned, is a disorder wherein the caregiver, and in most cases, the mother induces symptoms in her child or children in order for her to gain social approval and admiration for being a responsible and selfless mother thus, abusing her own child in the process of gaining something of pleasurable feeling for herself. But something bothered me. The cases presented in the video could not qualify as MSBP. Dr. Asher himself said that in the diagnosis of the disorder it should first be considered whether the child has a real medical condition as assessed by a medical doctor. With the presence of any medical condition, the possibility of MSBP is cancelled out. But the cases presented in the film tell a different story. The victims in the documentary had been diagnosed with real medical conditions prior to the diagnosis of their mother’s conditions. One of the mothers in that video, Misty Jones allegedly injected her baby with insulin where in fact she had been advised by a nurse in the hospital where she gave birth that her baby should be transferred to a pediatric medical facility because of a medical condition related to insulin regulation. Julie Patrick, another mother diagnosed with the condition was allegedly causing her baby’s condition. Eventually, it became evident in the video that baby Philip Patrick’s improved condition occurred when he was under the care of his mother and when the authorities removed him from her custody his condition deteriorated. Worst, the doctor (the one who took over after his removal from his mother’s custody) of baby Philip gave him a neurolyptic called metoclopromide with the intention of eliminating the symptoms induced by his mother. The drug, though not yet been proven in the court, might have caused baby Philip’s death. I could not help but cry silently in my seat. These neurolyptics according to experts cause seizure-like reactions and a bending of the body and sticking out of the tongue, which indicates pain and discomfort. Baby Philip was showing all these behavior after the alleged administration of the drug. His belly swelled as a side effect of the said drug and one can only guess how much pain the pressure of the swollen internal organs against his thin and delicate skin is causing him!
It all started with a wrong diagnosis brought about by inadequate research and understanding of the condition. It is intriguing enough to know that the basis of the experts’ contentions is taken from a clandestine study in the basement of Bronson Hospital. A hidden camera was installed in one of the walls of the hospital room where mothers are left alone with their babies. But there are a lot of issues surrounding the study. First and foremost, the method Dr. Roy Meadow used in establishing his evidences was unethical. He claimed that he tried to intentionally tie his grandson’s leg to suspend the flow of blood so as to find out whether the hematoma in his patient was induced if it would look like that of his grandson’s. In another situation, he argued that the mother of a child with high concentration of salt in the blood induced the condition. In substantiating his argument he boldly declared that he tried to let the child swallow some salt and he could only do so much since the child could only take a certain amount and therefore the high content of salt in the child’s blood might have been induced. In uttering those words, Dr. Meadow himself indirectly accused himself that he had committed an act against his subjects – his grandson and the child who was an alleged victim of a mother with MSBP. Second, the researcher violated a basic right of his subject to be informed that she is to be included in a study so she might have a choice whether or not to join the study. Granting without accepting the possibility that the quality of the research outcome will be jeopardized with the subjects’ knowledge of the study, there are still several issues, which remain to be considered. Thus the third issue, the number of cameras in the room was not enough to give a full view of what the subjects are doing. One video showed that a mother seemingly choked her baby intentionally. But at second look the action may also be perceived as the mother trying to lift her baby up after choking in bed. Had there been more than one camera strategically placed all over the room, which would yield all possible angles and viewpoints then the assessment of the behavior would have been more precise. Another concern of mine is the fact that there was not enough empirical evidence that would strongly lay the foundation of the said condition. The fact that there is no specific set of DSM criteria for MSBP tells us that the said disorder is still understudied. Yet many mothers are already diagnosed and labeled with MSBP in the absence of these criteria! Another issue lies on what the state is doing for the victims. After being removed from mothers with alleged MSBP, children are sheltered in centers wherein, according to one of the children there, living conditions are not as pleasant as compared with that of their own homes. One child even showed a picture of her and her brother while they were with their mother and compared it to their picture in the shelter, they had become thinner and unhappy.
To sum it up, my greatest concern is on how the diagnosis and interventions are done. In the interviews with the authorities in the diagnosis of MSBP against Julie Patrick, it was evident that they were more concerned with being right in their claims than being right with their diagnosis. The case of baby Philip revealed that his internist had diagnosed a medical condition with which he suggested hospitalization. I would sound biased but I was really raged at how arrogant were those so-called “experts” at defending their misdiagnosis even when confronted with medical records showing that baby Philip had a serious medical condition. Furthermore, the intervention that the state was implementing is not at all helpful. Separating children from a significant other against their will and without pre-counseling prior to the removal of custody from the mother may not be the best option. They can instead give a mandatory order for the mothers to engage into psychotherapy or any form of behavioral modification program while allowing their children to live with their families and assigning a social worker to check on them on frequent but random visits. They can also conduct a counseling program prior to the child/children’s separation from their mother.
Moreover, mothers could not care less when it comes to their children’s safety and security. It pains me to know that their greatest strength -- to care, to nurture -- had been used against them by people whose intentions might not be as bad as the advocates of M.A.M.A would think but are inconsiderate of gender roles and less concerned with a scientific approach to diagnosis. With this video, I have come to appreciate the necessity of having a standard manual like the DSM and further appreciated a transdisciplinary approach to research, which can yield better understanding of the human experience. Together with this is the realization that a researcher has the responsibility to exhaust all possible empirical evidence upholding ethical standards to support his hypothesis before he should attempt to lobby with the government and other groups of stakeholders for policy-making. Only a few of these policy-makers are genuinely motivated to help and better the condition of stakeholders. Most of them would simply take the opportunity of attracting funds, and gaining fame, popularity and support from the public. Moreover, a researcher must be professionally humble enough to accept that he might be wrong if he had drained all possible source of empirical evidence yet could not establish a scientifically logical reasoning that could support his hypothesis. A researcher’s foremost concern should be the welfare of society and the last would be his reputation. But this though is easier said than done. At least then a researcher must always be conscious of his social responsibility. In the case of the proponents of the MSBP, they should have provided practitioners with a much more scientific approach to diagnosing the condition and a strict implementation of the criteria if they intend to help than to exacerbate harm.