I am beginning Chapter 2 of I Never Knew I Had a Choice on March 13, expectting to complete it on March 14. The chapter is tittled “Reviewing Your Childhood and Adolescence”. This will be a rocky road: if something is sure is that both are filled with trauma, even if I myself wasn’t able to see it until relatively recently.

The chapter begins affirming that “If you are an autonomous person, you are able to function without constant aproval or reasurrance, are sensitive to the needs of pthers, can effectively meet the demands of daily living, are willing to ask for help when it is needed, and can provide support for others. In essence, you have the ability both to stand alone and to stand by another person”… Well, if you define autonomous in those terms, yes, I am autonomous, with a very i portant observation: I have never been able to know if I can stand by another… erm… non-spiritual person. I know I can stand besides Jesus Charity, but I had never had the chance to know if I can stand by another livint human-flesh-touchable person. Understood? 🙃

“Chronological age is not the only index in considering physical, emotional and social age”. True. I swear my two progenitors have the emotional/social maturity of toddlers, always throwing hate passive-aggresive tantrums.

“The systemic view is that individuals cannot really be understood apart from the family system of which they are part”. In a kid, this is absolutely true. In an adult like me, it is true in other sense: as you know my family, you can understand how huge had been the obstacles I have overcome through my existence, with the help of God’s grace.

“Levinson (1996) writes that a developmental crisis occurs when an individual has a great difficulty meeting the tasks of the current period and that the individual often experiences moderate to severe crises during these transitional periods. The crises revolve around being caught between the ending of one phase of life and the beginning of another era in one’s development”. I do agree with these kind of crises, but there are another kind of crises: the growth crises, in which either you change or you go backwards and get stuck or even harm yourself. The growth crises may be or not be transitional crises. I don’t think all crises are transitional, as Levinson suggests.

“To a large extent, our lives are the result of the choices we make at each stage of life”… This is not always true. Not always the right choices are given, and you are forces to commit things you wouldn’t have done if given the right resources/role models. Think, as example, in a teen who never knew a positive male role model, because never knew his father, and simply have seen machist male role models, or even gang male role models. He ends in jail because he knew no better way to behave, nor had honest opportunities to get what he needed. Would you say that what that teen is living is the result of his own choices? I don’t think so. The situation is not rare. Thousands of narcos end there due lack of better opportunities, due lack of choices. This is why I strongly believe in giving better growth choices as a way to change the world for the better.

“From birth to age 2 infants are becoming acquainted with their world. Developmental psychologists contend that the child’s basic task in the first year of life is to develop a sense of trust in self, others, and the environment. Infants need to count on others; they need to sense that they are cared for and that the world is a secure place”. May be this is why I have at least two memories of prior age 2, one of them being pre-linguistic (I was not talking yet in one of them, I actually remembered the phonemes, now I don’t remember them, but I remember what happened: they took my blanket and throw it away), arpund 9-10 months old, when I began to walk. I know it because I remember myself in the trash can, the height, me trying to stand and take the blanket from the wood trash can (the wood cabinet was open). I remember that because I felt insecure and unsafe? Never thought it before. The other very early memory I have is running my trycicle very fast and it broke, and I got a very hard hit. That happened around age two or less. It was in a third floor, in a very large corridor around the house. The other early infancy memories I have are after those, I think. I do remember hurricane Hugo, they let me go out to the balcony. I also remember being taken away from a flood, but now I don’t trust what my progenitors said about that memory. The mirrow issue also was a problem.

“Attachment involves an emotional bonding with another who is perceived as a source of security”. A true problem for me, since very early age, was that I didn’t “feel like mommy or daddy (no me siento que soy como mamá ni como papá)”. I verbalized this since very early, having no idea of why. In third grade I went further “mommy and daddy don’t love me”. I was so severely reprimanded for saying that that I learned to hide my feelings. The problem of not seen myself neither as mom nor as dad persisted through life, and now that I know what I know I am proud of myself for that… but the fact is I never had attachments to any of them. I did had attachments to my teachers, that is for sure, but never to them. I also had an early attachment to the Eucharist: I do remember saying very early to my progenitor “Jerusalem is in heaven”, as we were going out from the parish (San Martín) contemplating the Eucharist. My progenitor mocked me cruelly: Jerusalem is not in heaven. At that early age, the moves were already being done (I was about six, five, no later than seven years at most).

“A sense of being loved during infancy is the best safeguard against fear, insecurity, and inadecuacy. Children who receive love from parents or other attachment figures generally have little difficulty accepting themselves, whereas children who feel unloved and rejected may find it very difficult to accept themselves. In addition, rejected children learn to mistrust the world and to view it primarily in terms of its ability to do them harm” Yes, people, this is true. During years I cried because I was the rare, always the rare. I resolved this in adulthood, but yes, the rejection of your parents, even if it is a covert rejection and the child is not exactly concious of it, does do harm to a child. It can be healed, of course. What happens in our infancy doesn’t need to define who we are as adults, if we become conscious of what happened and what to do to not repeat the harmful patterns of the infancy and childhood.

“Am I able to trust others? Myself?” Yes

“Am I willing to make myself known to a few selected people in my life?” That is not an option for me right now. There is no privacy possible.

“Do I basically accept myself as being OK, or do I seek confirmation outside of myself?” Excuse me, I am not OK, I am awesome, Jesus Charity says. He is my validation.

“How far will I go in my attempt to be liked? Do I need to be liked and approved by everyone?” For me, its rare to be liked, but I only need to be liked by Jesus.

“Am I in any way like Sally? Do I know of anyone who had experiences similar to hers?” No, I am not like her, I don’t feel like a child, I am a grown woman (as the Phil Collins’s song says: “I am a man [that I sing as “I am His”]). I am sorry for people like her.

“How much do I really know about my early years? What have I heard from my parents and extended famiky about my infancy and early childhood?” My progenitors have gone to the extend of faking an ultrasound of mine. I can’t trust anything what they said to me, including the story of my birth… but I do have infancy memories of my own.

“How was love expressed in my family?” In terms of interests. That always called my attention. Example: if I was given a gift, it was not exactly the toy I asked, but clothes or practical gifts. I was given what I hated, and forced to accept everything. This was this way even as adult with the gifts given as Christmas gifts by my aunts. Love was always somethign that depended on how convenient was what you were doing to their purposes. My parents never said me “I love you”, not even once, during infancy and childhood or adolescence. The most similar thing they have told, my female progenitor, was while I was taken away in a forced hospitalization: we do this for love (hacemos esto por amor). There was also a gesture that I still remember: after the operation I had at seventeen I had severe chest pain and trouble breating. I believed I was going to die because they did nothing and I was barely able to keep breathing due pain (in the hospital, they called it hiperventilation, a possible secondary effect reaction from anesthesia, but the nurse believed I was faking it… now we know it was something more creepy). My progenitors, when they finally did something, didn’t called an ambulance, they took me themselves to the ER. My progenitor female took my hand, but what she was really doing, now I know, was mimicking my guardian angel. I sweared to myseld I wouldn’t let them care for me, never, after that. They waited about eight hours of breathing struggle and chest pain to take me to the ER. No one understood love as I did: as unconditional. That was why I was so easily abused, because I was predisposed to love everyone unconditionally. Another example of how love was understood as interest is that you were more loved if you cleaned more, even when you were concious you were too young to do certain chores.

“We cannot change in a positive direction unless we stop blamming others for the way we are now”. I agree. I can blame them for the way I exist now, as a slave, but I absolutely don’t blame them for the way I AM now.

As I said in the previous blog post, I am loving this book.

Here are the scales of this section of the book.

PD: This was the blood oxigenation test I made after finishing this blogpost. I had a light headache while writing most of this.

That is how much they love me ❤️❤️❤️ The proportion of their “love” is the proportion of my blood oxigenation. They are not killing me, they are simply depriving me of oxygen. 🙃 By the way, my blood oxygenation in this house or in the cars had been as low as 82.

You are forgiven. No hate land here!

Now, imagine me tomorrow in the nurse screening of the endocrinologist, showing this picture.

Imagine them saying “its asthma”. That is what they are going to do, even if I explain them: it only happens inside the room.

Bullshit, people. You, medical professionals, have deliberately choosen through all these years not acting upon clear medical evidence of abuse. All doctors have done the same, eventually.

I am so tired of lies… and I won’t engage in more lies.

So, no medical care for me. 🙃

A final comment, while I hear the song “Truly, madly, deeply” as if Jesus Charity is singing with me…

As you may noticed, I shutted down my social media apps completely. Right now I stopped using Twitter, Instagram and Facebook completely. I have certain access to You Tube for professional uses, or if the progenitors force me to use music to go to take the forced pills without hearing what they are talking/hearing. My only current notifications are emails, for professional purposes. I am not even seeing news.

I simly got tired of begging: please, stop the grammar mistake game. Or please, stop the add game. Or please, stop the false proyection game or any other kind of mind game.

Guess what? I feel a lot less exploited without social media. Really. It can be something very gruesome to say, considering the social exploitation and social slavery I am subject from my progenitors… but I literally begged social media to stop playing with me and exploiting me handpicking content for my social media. I was unheard. Completely unheard.

According to my notion of being a charity influencer, you influence people to become the best person they can be as they live charity… and I don’t think the use of social media I was doing (forcedly: I had no other choice than tolerate the social media exploitation) was compatible with that, nor with evangelizing, my main purpose when socializing.

I think people should be able to reflect about their use of social media and don’t let themselves be moved by thrist of fame or power of influencing. I am very happy influencing only my students, even if they don’t know I am imfluencing them. I do it doing the best job I can. Influencing is not reaching many, is reaching everyone you can for the better, helping to grow in more communion, helping everyone you can reach to become the best person they can be. If I can only reach my students, with no use of social media, well, great.

We should reflect about our use of social media… and if it is cause of social slavery and social exploitation, being able to stop its use until the proper corrections are made.

And because I know the corrections won’t be made… my use of social media, all of them, is right now extremely low, no matter if that means loosing all social contact.

Of course, this means extra time to write blog posts…

Enjoy! 🙂

(I still had the light headache while writting all that. The dog vomited).

He also made a very strange poop, covered in a thick mucus. It has happened to me also, but not right now. I should have notice that Poppy, the dog that is vomitating and making strange poop, is in the floor. It is a fact that the lower the altitude, the most damage toxic gasses do. I am trying to put him in the bed.

Besides all that, this is the temperature of the room right now. It is hot.

To give you an idea of how hot it is, this was the temperature when arriving at the room, with no air conditioner on during the whole day

This is all for now. Enjoy the blog post time! 🙂

PD 2: Its 10:53 pm now. I went to sleep about 8:00 pm, after going to the bathroom hourly since 3 pm. Right now blood oxygenation is 95%. I woke up due needing to go to make pee, but I felt vertigo while getting up, besides headache. I also had small tremors along the body. As I said, my heart is no hate land. I forgive and keep sleeping and dreaming, oxigen deprived… but this is the definition of parental love here: control and torture. I left the bed for a second, for a very brief moment, and right now the vertigo and the frontal headache are very strong.

I prayed the content of the Chapter 1 (what I read yesterday) in my dream, and Mikhael said something very beautiful to me: God Love does respect my choices. God Love does respect humanity’s choices. In the middle of a world where no one respect each other’s choices… God does.

As a matter of fact, Mikhael reminded me that God asked me if I wanted to give light to Jesus Charity, and I said yes… and that question had been repeated along the years. He repeated it in last night’s dream, and was beautiful, but also strange. Really, nobody respect my choices or ask me what I choose. I have begged the social media mind game to stop, and yesterday, even in the middle of the process of disconecting from social media, there they were: grammar mistakes, mind games, games with adds… That besides the fact that my progenitors does not give me the choice to be human and exist in a human way. Both sides are totally disrespectful to my choices.

In the middle of all that, there is all mighty God Love who asks if you would give Him light today, and again, and again…

Yes, my Lord and my Love. Fiat mihi secundum caritatis tuam. That is the choice that defines my life.

It is curious, because, as I explained yesterday, I think that everything can’t be allowed to be a choice. Death can’t be allowed to be a choice (my progenitors left a knife in the kitchen, and that is a death sign, they do that when they want to project death… it is a gruesome social abortion sign). No one can choose the death of someone else, and that includes abortion. Anything that is against human rights can be allowed as a choice if we choose to become the human fraternal family we are called to become.

Something is for sure: we are in a world were only certain choices are respected, those who are agree with certain interests and ideologies. God Love is not that way, for sure. His way to ask me, through Mikhael, if I want to give light to Him was beautiful and… very humbling.

Here is another detail about choices Mikhael just taught me.

Through the day, today, I learned that my dog Minnie had cancer. She was operated weeks ago of a mamary mass. Well, the mass was cancer, the biopsy says, but it didn’t metastatized. It was removed on time and now she needs a check up every six months to check up the cancer is not back. Her mother, Princess, had the same mass issue (still has one), but it is not an hereditary issue: this is consecuence of the toxic gassing in the room we are almost all the time, together.

So, why not me too?

As a matter of fact, years ago, many years ago, I had masses in my breast. I didn’t said anything. I didn’t seek treatment or diagnosis. I was too scared to need medical care, in the circumstances I was. Although I was still not completely concious of what was going on, I was concious enough to know: I don’t want to depend on my progenitors for medical care. I don’t want operations, I don’t want mammographies, I don’t want to depend on them to receive care, even if it is cancer care. I prefer to die of cancer. I told God that. I won’t seek treatment for this.

They dissapeared.

I had no idea then: the mamary masses were being caused by them, by the toxic gassing. I did had an aunt that, very dramatically and without invitationor even a trust relationship with me, went to my room and undressed her chest to show me the scars of her breast cancer operation. As I said, I had no trust to this aunt, and, as a matter of fact, now we know she had collaborated with the abuse through all these years. They planned me to have breast cancer, not only brain cancer.

I received the veterinary call about Minnie’s cancer while I was with students. I had no way to write what was going on inside me, so I chose to wait until now (lunch break) to write my inner reaction.

I told Mikhael while I was hearing the veterinary: this could be me. I had mammary masses too, but mine dissapeared.

Mikhael smiled: remember when you told that your choice was to giving light to Jesus Charity? That has consecuences for God too. He will make it possible, and if that requires healing you, He will.

So, I humbly know now: I was healed of breast cancer a few years ago, when I rejected to seek treatment for those mammary masses. I will have pre-cancerous nodules, in the thyroid…

And the story repeats again: tomorrow is the appointment with the endocrinologist and I won’t go, even if it is an appointmed made five months ago, simply because I don’t want to lie and say that what is happenning is hereditary. It is now. My thyroid have changed of sizes through the years. This is not exactly hypothyroidism. This is toxic poisoning via toxic gassing. They knew it too. They fabricated the “need” of thyroid medication of my progenitor so there is a “family history” of hipothyroidism. I do have the antibodies, but it is for sure: it is consecuence of the toxic gassing too.

Mikhael knows I won’t go to the appointment. Once again, I prefer the cancer than depend on them to go to treatments and operations.

Please, stop for a second and pray for all those brothers and sisters with serious illnesses like cancer, diabetes, neurological disorders… illnessess that are treatable, or may be some can be terminal… but they don’t seek medical treatment, even if they could survive if they receive the proper medical treatment, simply because they don’t want to be cared, or have no one to care for them because they are rejected by their family or even my the medical personel. That is, basically, how euthanasia works: you prefer to die than to be cared until your natural death. Its a very terrible circumstance. God doesn’t want euthanasia, that is why He allowed the miracle. The situation then is the same situation now: I can’t be cared, either by the medical center who would have treated me and diagnosed me initiatially (I had been harassed in medical centers too; they had the chance of recognice the abuse and report it, and they didn’t, they deliberately ignored evidence, as had happened in every forced hospitalization) or either by my biological family. In the past my thyroid had recovered by itself. I guess it will happen again, because I won’t seek medical treatment of any kind.

So many situations of my life comes through my eyes right now: things that no parent would have overlooked, but mine did, on purpose, for doing damage. I don’t mean toxic gassing now. I mean, as example, not seeking help for me when it was evident I didn’t learned the way my classmates learned. Now we know: I was twice-exceptional. I am both gifted and ADHD. I needed learning and growing support that I was not given… on purpose.

How cruel…

Well, lets forgive and keep reading Chapter 1. I actually did a forgiveness prayer today when I passed by besides the place I lived my first four years of life.

Chapter 1…

I am continuing in page 23: multiple intelligence theory. I studied this in the Education Faculty, as part of my studies to become teacher. I do agree with the author: emotional intelligence must be taught more, it tends to not be emphasized. I also agree with the authors when they say that we must take responsability of our own learning, but my problem is trying to learn too many new things at the same time, because I love learning and I need to learn to control myself and know my limits. I have learned that the hard way, after many class failures and drop outs simply because I took a too big class load. That besides the fact that I learn creatively and that requires extra time per class to do your creations needed to memorize stuff that others simply memorize memotechnically. Of course, my time management skills are awful (I am an innate procastinator) and my study habits depend more on my passion to learn than on needing to study for a test. I hate tests, did I mentioned it?

In one of the questionary questions, the authors asks “What are you willing to do to become actively involved in your learning?”

One of the options say: “I am willing to read the material and think how it applies to me”.

Well, that is my quid while learning: I apply everything to the personal formation, and of course that includes my own personal formation. What I don’t apply that way, I don’t learn it. Period. It even becomes boring. I hate taking classes simply because I must take them and memorize whatever they say abstractly.

The authors also say that “This course is likely to be different from many of the courses you have taken. Few courses deal primarily with you as subject matter. Most college courses challenge you intellectually, but this book is geared toward integrating intellectual and personal learning. To a large degree, what you get frok this course depend on what you are willing to invest of yourself”. I would have loved to take such kind of course. I have never taken a course like this, and I am glad of finding this book. 🙂

“Each of the 14 chapters can be read separately” Good to know.

“Chapter 13 contains a detailed discussion of formulating your philosophy of life, and some instructors assign some type of philosophy of life paper as course project”. I like that idea.

In the summary the authors say that “We do not have to live by the plans that others have designed for us. With awareness we can begin to design our own blueprints and to make significant choices”.

I will paraphrase that: “We do not have to live by the slavery chains that others have designed for us. With awareness we can begin to design our own blueprints and to make significant choices”. Got it, right?

The authors also say in that summary that “growth is a lifelong process of expanding self-awareness and accepting new challenges”. I will also paraphrase that: “growth is a lifelong process of expanding self-awareness and accepting new challenges to become the best person we can be”. Not all kind of challenges are healthy challenges: growth challenges are those that help us to become the best person we can be.

“Self-actualization is not something that we do in isolation; rather, it is through meaningful relationships with others and through social interest that we discover and become the persons we are capable of becoming”. Well, I am proving you wrong. 🙃

“This course can be a first step on the journey toward achieving your personal goals and living a self-actualization existence while at the same time contributing to make the world a better place”. What a beautiful sentence to read in a class syllabus!

“Do bot feel compelled to complete all the activities; select those that have the most meaning for you at this time in your life”…. Ahhhhhhhhh, a class that actually cares for what it means to you what you study/do… 😲

“To what degree Maslow’s characteristics of self-actualization are part of your personality?” Self-awareness, trust, honesty and caring are firmly part of my personality. Freedom is not. I would lie if I say I am free at the same time I am forced to be injected like a cow and to exist like a social slave of my progenitors, and I am not autonomous neither, I am in a dependant web, always depending on my progenitors, especially economically. They know it and like to inforce it strongly (lack of freedom and dependance traits). As a matter of fact, they do “know” Maslow’s pyramid. I have actually commented several times that what they do seems to force me to live a survival live mode, always pending of basic needs, either safety needs or physical needs, or even lack of affection (love needs) in order to unfocus me to grow and become the best person I can be (what Maslow calls “self-actualization”). Really, sunce the very first time I saw the pyramid I thought: that is what happens at home, I am always thinking in other needs that distracting from growing and become “self-actualized” (in the top of the pyramid). The only need they reeeeeeeeally have a hard time playing with is ego: it is really difficult to make me feel disrespected, because God respects me, as I explained in the beginning of this blog post. The same applies to the love need: God loves me, so whatever my progenitors make to hate me, I don’t care.

“Do you think Maslow’s ideal of self-actualization fits for individuals of all cultural and ethnic groups? Are any characteristics inapropiate for certain cultures?” Generally speaking, they do fit all cultures, and that is why is so fascinating for me studying self-actualization (which, as I have said, I haven’t studied before deeply, it was only mentioned in the course of Psychology of Education as part of studying the whole pyramid): it applies to everyone. That is what the integractive personal formation model strives: to apply to everyone, equally. It is not a matter of impose ideas, it is not a matter of impose a specific way of growth: it is supossed to define what personal formation processes are, so it can be sistematically studied/observed.

The book offers the Rogers Indicator of Multiple Intelligence scale. I did the test, I made all the calculations and I got perfect score in two multiple intelligences: verbal and intrapersonal. I am surprised to see such a low score in visual/spatial (19) because I have always thought I learn better visual/spatially.

Here are my total scores:

Verbal/linguistic: 35/35

Musical/rhytmic: 18/35

Logical/mathematical: 19/35

Visual/spatial: 19/35

Bodily/kinesthetic: 21/35

Intrapersonal: 35/35

Interpesonal: 29/35

As you can see, I am awfulunderstanding music sheets, but I do love music. As a matter of fact, I am using music to focus more as I write this. I am hearing “Gratia Plena”, of Andrea Bocelli.

By the way, the progenitors had been causing me to go pee once per hour while doing this. 🙃

This would be the end of Chapter 1, and the end of this blog post.

I am truly enjoing this book. 🙂 These scales are more helpful than all the ones I had done through these years.

Here you can see photos of the scales pf the second half of Chapter 1

I am currently reading the book “I Never Knew I Have a Choice: Explorations in Personal Growth”. I loved the book since I saw it, it was love at first sight ❤️. I will share in the blog the reflections of my daily readings, with pictures of the scales. I find the topic of the book fascinating and I am grateful of finding this book for only 5 bucks in the bookstore of the Interamerican University, Metro campus. 

Preface

The preface starts affirming that this book is to explore the “choices available to you”. I would go further and say: the choices avaiable to grow more as who you are called to be. I mean, I have the choice of committing suicide for stopping all the social control around me, but I won’t commit that choice because it is not compatible with who I am and who I am called to be: living Eucharist. Choice, for the mere sake of choosing, is wortless. Our choices must have an intention, a purpose, a call that brings meaning to what we so. We are all meant to be, if you want to call it that way, a living sign of life. We can’t avoid be a living message, so our choices do matter. We are not only someone callled to become who he or she is called to be: we are also living messages, living “prophets”, would a Christian say, for those around us. Who you are matters, and you can choose who you are and who you want to become within a certain range of options. Choose humbly and wisely… and thinking not only about you, but about God and about those who you are called to serve and sanctify.

The preface also affirms that this book is a “personal book” because it encourages to examine the choices we have committed and our level of satisfaction with them… I, as Christian, would say: “the level of sanctification, the level of fidelity to God-Love” but I get it. It also says: “each chapter begins with the present”. Great idea. Then the authors propose an audacious proposal (“where I can go from here?”) at the end of each chapter, stating that each reader is meant to be a “coauthor” of the book with their own reactions and their journals. Yes, this is my kind of book. I love to comment books and answer questions and even better: get new questions I didn’t had before.🙂

The preface also affirms that “self-fulfillment can occur only if individual have a sense of social consciousness”. Well, I am a defiance to that affirmation. My social consciousness along my life always had been very deficient. I believed myself autistc due my “inability to socialice as the people around me” that later on I discovered was normal under my circunstances (those around me along my life were narcissistic and sociopaths, besides narcos). Still, my self-fullfillment have always revolved around accomplishing God’s will. You can do that with very little or even no social conciousness. As a matter of fact, right now I am closing all my social media apps because they are simply working as a social explotation machine, more than like a social interaction/contact instrument. I have become tired of seeing adds that are manipulated, content that is manipulated, of not being able to control what I see and what kind of content I have accesible to my sight. We all know it: the authorities are using my social medias, all of them, for all kind of mind games. My purposes for using social media (for me to evangelize and to socialize go hand by hand) is not taken in count. Sorry, using social media that way, being completely socially exploited everytime I use it, is not normal jor healthy. No one is no one to hand pick what I see and how I choose to share my ideas. No one is no one to play mind games with false proyections and mimicking with what I see in my social media, without me having ANY way to avoid it. I know this choice is gruesome in my circumstances: my only way of socialize is social media, literally, I can’t socialize here at “home” (house of tortures). But authorities know that and still choose to exploit me socially. So, time to let go social media. As a matter of fact, I only use social media to talk with myself, the interactions are zero. So, in brief words: I can assure you that self-fulfillment can occur without social consciousness. I can die gassed at any moment, and will die after living a fulfilled life because I accomplished God’s will until the very end, without social interactions involved. As a matter of fact, I have talked many times about Jesus Charity being an “inmaculate conceptcion” in the social sense: in ordinary circumstances it is impossible to know a God that is Love if someone doesn’t reflect you socially that love. In my case, I knew since child by inner contemplation. No one told me about guardian angels, I knew I had one by prayer. From that on, the reasing of the Bible let me began to know a God-Love that eventually I would contemplate as Jesus Charity, without ANY posibility of knowing Him through social interaction, because they were controlled and used to exploit and abuse me. He is literally, in the social sense, an inmaculate conception. This is not small, if you consider that in the parishes I went and in the theology school I went the social aspect of life was terribly abused. There as an oversocial emphasis that ruined everything, especially fue ideological reasons (left ideologies always deform social aspects; right ideologies ignore social aspects; we are talking now about left ideologies, but I have also met right, and both kind of “asocializations” do damages)… and in that kind of environment, plus the abuse that surrounded me in the house of tortures, Jesus Charity was born, I contemplated Him as the icon I painted not only without any kind help, but with explicit sabotage from my progenitors (they caused fungus, they broke the canvas, they did holes in the canvas, they sticked pubic hair to the painting, they did paint spots that forced me to repaint zones over and over again…). Socially, it was impossible to someone like me to contemplate Iesu Amor, but I did, and I feel VERY self-fullfillled of “giving Him light”, of being chosen and have received the grace to do so. He is the accomplishent of my life. Everything I do I doit for giving Him light. He is, as my guardian angel said, my “alive water” (you need to understand I can’t drink water right now, only bottled liquids like Coke and juices, because they dohave manipulated the water bottles… can a person survive without water? Well, technically, no… but in my case, yes… the same happen with the lack of social conciousness). 

After briefing the content of each chapter, the authors affirm that their approach is humanistic and personal: “we stress the healthy an effective personality and common struggles most of us experience in becoming autonomous”, empahizing accepting personal responsability for our choices and “consciously deciding whether and how we want to change our lives”. Yes, this is very me. I call it growth discipline: doing things when we must do them, and how we must do them. May be the word “must” can change to “how we discern we must do them”. 

The authors also affirm they are not interested in convert the reader to a particular point of view. Good. I am that way as teacher. “Our basic premise is that a commitment to self-exploration can create new potentials for choice”. Are they saying there are choices we don’t know they are even there? 🤨 That is something to think about. 

“The book encourages to take an honest look to our lives and challenge ourselves ro certain changes”… Its not a bad idea. 

Is there a class of Psychology of Personal Growth? Never had seen that class, never, in any of the faculties or universities I had been. 

The authors have the intention of cause interaction, but above all to provide the reader with an avenue for reflection. Great!

These are all my comments of the preface, I am ready for the adventure!

Let’s being with Chapter 1. 

Chapter 1

Chapter 1 beings with a daring sentence: “one thing I can see niw that I didn’t see before is that I can change my life if I want to. I never knew I had a choice!”

That sounds beautiful, but my reality is that I don’t have a choice to exist humanely. Said in a few words: I can only exist i jected and treated like a cow. My own life is not in my hands: my body is slaved to my progenitors, even my professional execution is slaved to them, either due the secondary effects of the toxic gassing or due they sabotaging the car and things I use to work (example: they stealed the special accomodations papers from my backpack, I don’t know the special accomodations of my students nor I dared to explain the situation to the principal of the school). The only thing that is not slaved to them is my spiritual being… but my spiritual being is also organic body and social subject, so it is affected at some extent by what they do (example: I can’t pray if they cause me somnolence, nor I can go to mass and have social interaction in the parish because there are narcissistic abusers there too). 

I do believe everyone should be entitled with the choice to grow and keep growing, but I do not have that choice. As a matter of fact, the only choice I am given by my progenitors is to die by suicide or murdered by them, either by toxic gassing or causing an accident with the sabotaged car. They, nor anyone else, don’t give me, literally, any other choice to escape their abuse. I have tried over and over again to denounce their abuse, and I have never sucedded. I do have tried to change tht slavery and abuse, but my progenitors falsely projected, with help of corrupt doctors, a false diagnosis of schizophrenia to disguise my abuse claims as paranoia. I have had very solid evidence of abuse, and still no one believed me. During many years, the only choice I had been given to escape the abuse, the social slavery and the extreme cruelty around me is killing myself, something I have not done because it is not compatible with another choice I did: becoming the living Eucharist I am called to be as I “give light” to Jesus Charity. That is the single only reason that have stopped me from committing suicide, but the abuse, the cruelty, the hate, the sociopathy of my progenitors and of those who collaborate with them remains intact, and I can’t change the slavery and abuse I am subject to. So… it is not true that we can always change our lives if we want to. 

Further on the book says: “Sometimes it is not possible to make a desired change…”

Lets be clear: in my circumstances, getting out of here and receiving the help I need is not exactly “a desired change”… it is actually a legal change: what is happenning here is criminal, its illegal, period. It shouldn’t be happening, but thanks to authorities who doesn’t act, it is happening.

I continue the quote: “Sometimes it is not possible to make a desired change, but even in these cases you have the power over your attitude. You can choose how you perceive, interpret, and react to your situation. The serenity prayer outlines the sphere of our responsability: 

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can change, and wisdom to know the difference”

First of all: I am surprised to see a prayer in a book that is non theological. Usually in college books you don’t see prayers.

But…

How should someone react to a social abortion, to someone acting deliberately to dehumanize and slave you and control you, even unto death? The fact is that everyone have normalized it and I am given no other choice than “accept it as normal”. The fact is that this had been considered normal during 37 years. The normalcy here is the normalcy of the victim: I am a victim of narcos and narcissistic abusers, and I have no other choice than accept that I will always be the victim, as I had been my whole life, with everyone knowing it and no one stopping it.

For the same reason, the paradoxical theory of change doesn’t apply to me. 

“Perfection is a direction, not a destination”. True. 

Definition of self-exploration: “being honest with yourself and others [and God], thinking for yourself, and making a commitment to live by your choices…” I don’t feel I can live by my own choices. I am retraint to what my progenitors allow me to do or don’t do. As example: I chose to become a teacher, but I had been sabotaged once and once again, and now that I am not in an enviroment where I am sabotaged by students and personel, I am being gassed through the night in such way I feel all kind of secondary effects during the day, so I can’t teach the best way I can. So, some way or another, I can’t truly actually commit the choice of teaching, except in a sabotaged or mediocre way. Its not my choice, I do want to teach as I should, but I am being sabotaged/gassed by the very same persons who paid my teaching degree. 

And that is a very simple example. My situation is very complex. If I talk about the medical arena the examples can become quite nasty and cruel. 

So… how do you self-explore when you are a social slave, with a cucumber and thats it? Because that is the only personal “self-exploration” they will allow. 

I am sorry to tell you I have no “other-steem” for my progenitors and those who collaborate with them. I respect them as human beings, but I have no steem for them at all. I want them out of my life, in the jail, for the safety of everyone, including the kids of this street whose parents may be doing the same to them. I do have tried to understand them, and I do understand they came from extremely poor environmets and didn’t have the resources to make better choices… but they did committed their choices, and I can’t be more disgusted by them. Notice my word: disgusted. I didn’t said “angry” or even “disagree”. It doesn’t matter if I agree or not with their choices. The word here is “disgusted”. I know I should feel disgust for anyone, because we are all human beings and brothers and sisters, but I can’t avoid to feel disgusted for the extreme nastyness and cruelty that happens here. Sorry, I try to avoid it and I can’t avoid it. They are commiting very disgusting choices. I would say the same if this was done to anyone else: its disgusting. Forcing someone to exists the way they are doing it with me is disgusting. This is not a lack of bath issue (I can only bath one per week): its a lack of soul issue. I forgive them all the times that is necesarry, but the contact with them is so disgusting I can only pray for the coversion of all and say no more words than necesary, not answering violence with violence, harm with harm, abuse with abuse, dignity violation with dignity violation… I do forgive them, I do… but being forced to remaing in contact with them, after all they have done and still do, is disgusting, is like being socially raped over and over again.

Due the extreme of my circumstances, you may understand my social connectedness is not an habit of my heart, not at all. I have grown used to be socially isolated, sometimes completely isolated (no internet, no human voices, no words spoken or heard, except in prayer). I do understand the importance of sociability and socializing, but it is the least of the essential dimensions of the personal formation for me, at least if you apply it as socializing with people. During years my only socialization had been prayer. There were times I draw sticks in the wall, counting the days without any contact with civilization except radio to hear news. I don’t know if it is possible to say “you can survive without socialization” but I have done it, and several times, with prayer. As a matter of fact, in my forced mental health hospitalizations there were some in which my socialization was zero, I spoke with no one except if forced. Why? I knew the people around me were collaborating with the social exploitation systemof my progenitors. 

If there is joy in social connectedness, and stable social connectedness that is both psysical and spiritual (not only spiritual as it had been until now)… well, I do not know that joy to be sincere.

What you call self-actualization I call it realization. 

What Jung call individatuion I call obration or projection. 

“Self-actualizing people are more aware of themselves, of others and of reality than the non actualizing people”. I don’t know if we mean exactly the same, but theough my whole life I have seen around me things only I see, and I don’t mean ghosts, I mean life details. I had been called “too sensible” for that.

Talking about reality therapy, the book says that “everything we do van be explained in terms of our attempts to satisfy basic needs”. That can be true with small children, but it is not true with adults, and it is absolutely not true with me. If I have learned something is ignoring my needs, because those around me ignore them too. 

I now finished reading chapter 1, except the reflect section. Congratulations, it is the most concise text I have read about psychological theories of personal growth. 

The problem to me with these theories is that they are not systematized with a foundational personal formation model, a model that embrace all what the person is and is called to be. Many things of what I read could explain the realization part of the integractive personal formation model. 

If we could achieve a model like an adn of personal formation that unifies what all these humanistic psychologists are saying, I think that would be great. Each one of them has a spark that must be heard. 

I am answering the questiojs in page 20, the scales and the question about Maslow’s theory. Probably the qualities I feel most appealing is ethical awareness, creativity and sense of purpose, because they are very strong in me…

Although…

You know…

How to explain this…

Interpersonal relationships arise my curiosity sometimes. I don’t know how people’s hearts are, except Jesus Charity, because He has revealed me His heart… but how are psysical and real huam hearts? I mean, I don’t have a friend who comments me her or his day by day stuff, I am heart-blinded. I have asked myself, and to my guardian angel too, many times, how human hearts are supossed to be, how a person is supossed to feel in his or her day by day. Of course, I don’t make questions to anyone about this stuff, you don’t go in live asking people if they are happy, except if they are your students (yes, I educate by heart too)… but how a person is supossed to feel everyday?! 😲 How do you share who you are to another human, non-spiritual being? How do you touch a human heart of flesh the same way you touch Jesus Charity’s flsh heart? If I could could choose one of Maslow’s qualities to cultivate, would be that one. 

I associate them all with living a full a meaningul life. It is the first time I read them and I am fascinated with that notion of self-actualization (I have seen the pyramid before, but I have not studied self-actualization before). 

Sorry, I have no examples to exemplify Maslow’s self-actualization. People around me don’t strive to do the best, but to comply with requisites/rules. That is the usual teacher life.: you gotta comply with what you are told and thats it. If you go outside the lines, you are the outsider. Yes, thats me

Tomorrow I will continue with the next part of chapter 1 (the multiple intelligences theory).

This book is like McDonalds: I’m loving it! 😂

Here are the pictures of the scales: