bakit ganun?…

amputchang tanong yan… ilang beses ko na bang tinanong sa sarili ko yan… pero hanggang ngayon, di ko pa rin alam ang sagot… di ko pa rin mahanap at matagpuan kahit anong isip pa ang gawin ko…

bakit ganun?…

bakit kahit naibigay ko na sayo ang lahat, bakit parang may kulang pa rin… bakit ganun?..

bakit kahit ibinuhos ko na sa iyo lahat ng pagmamahal na meron sa puso ko, bakit hindi mo pa rin ako nagawang mahalin ng totoo?… baki ganun?…

bakit kahit buong pitong taon ng buhay ko ay naubos ko sa pagbibigay ng pagmamahal at atensyon sa iyo, bakit hindi mo ako magawang iprayoridad kahit isang beses lang… bakit ganun?…

bakit kahit alam ko naman na sinasaktan mo lang ako, bakit minahal pa rin kita ng todo todo… bakit ganun?…

at bakit kahit ako ang nakipag hiwalay eh ako pa rin ang naiwan kung saan tayo nagtapos… bakit di nako nakagalaw habang naumpisahan mo na uli ang buhay mo…  bakit ganun?…

AT BAKIT ANG SAKIT SAKIT PA RIN NG NARARAMDAMAN KO HANGGANG NGAYON?….

BAKIT GANUN?…

i know…. i can never own something that was never mine in the first place… 

i should have instilled to my mind a long time ago that you were just “borrowed”… which i need to return one day….

but you know what??

i’m glad…

i’m glad that “US” happened…

because despite of the pains, i was happy…

and i know i would never be happier with someone else other than you…

and if you are wondering why i don’t want us to remain friends….

I CAN’T !!!

i can’t have you beside me and not hug you…

i can’t stare at you and not kiss you…

i can’t text you and not say “iloveyou”….

i just can’t be near you and not have you….

oh, babe, my heart just longs for you….

I always feel the emptiness of my heart. Like no one really cares about me or how I feel. Do I have ADHD? LOL kidding.

It’s just that… when some of my friends are really sad about something, me and my other friends would try to console whoever that person is but if it’s me whose being rained with everything so unlucky, I’m being ignored as if I’m invisible. I’m pretty sure they can see me anyway so why this?! I’m actually encountering a lot of shits these days and it’s killing me. My lola [trans: grandmother] passed away (I love her a lot. I literally cried glasses of tears for her. LOL who doesn’t?) and my dad is being a total asshole (he’s having an affair with some woman again and he wants to leave his real family, us.). Everyday is a living hell for me and obviously I am not liking it. I seriously want to end everything… like kill my own self but I won’t do that of course. I’m still young. I still have a lot of dreams that I want to pursue.

I would appreciate it if my friends would at least try to sense how I feel. This pain is like a dagger on my heart. I don’t think this is fair. =( I’m not being treated nicely. I mean, if they hate me this much, I hope they tell. I’d rather be a loner than have friends who don’t care about me. Because when you look at it, being a loner is similar with having friends who… who… who can’t even try to consider your feelings. :/ It has always been like this. They are the few people I’m counting on… I’m living for… And this is how it always end up: me, left forlorn at some place. D:

Well, I might be acting selfish again right now… but I really feel so alone.

A good friend of mine called me up this past Saturday morning to inform me that his sister had died. She hung herself in her house and her boyfriend of 10 years had come home and found her. I was shocked by the news but strangely not too surprised. I had known her previously and knew she was a sensitive soul who carried a burden. What I didnt know was that she had tried this before and failed. Not this time. My friend, Dave, now has no immediate blood relatives since he and his sister were the last ones left. I obviously expressed my sorrow and sympathy for him and his wife and their little year old son and during our discussion over why she did this, we ended up on the subject of God. (but of course!)

My friend Dave is a traditional guy, with very traditional biblical views, and one of those views, which is very common among most bible readers and believers is that people who commit suicide are damned. Obviously he is having a hard time dealing with this concept in regards to his sister.

What do I say? My best answer is “I dont know”. While I know what the churches and the bible say (and the bible isnt explicit when it comes to this subject), I have to go with what my heart tells me. For better or for worse my heart is my spiritual barometer when it comes to these subjects that are not clearly defined in the bible, and I believe that God speaks to me through my heart often(whether I listen or not is subject matter for another post some other time).

When i think of God i think of the greatest presence in the universe and how that presence is active in my life. I can say without hesitation that God is active in my life, because I’ve seen and felt God’s presence and action on numerous occasions and in different ways. And what i’ve seen and felt mostly is a great sense of peace, occasionally intense joy, and ultimately what i can only describe as love. Now this isnt everyday mind you. But it’s there and it’s real. It is from within these experiences that I cant imagine the God who sustains me, even in all my folly and hard headedness, maintaining a place of eternal torture and damnation. I guess you can call me a hippie, but that doesnt seem characteristic of my God. And it is in light of this, and my studies of scripture, that I dont see how hell, and even the devil, fit into the great equation. I guess the cat’s out of the bag now. Some people ask me how i can believe in God, and in the power of Christ, without believing in the devil and hell. It’s not complicated, and it’s even scriptural, but not all of my beliefs are dependent upon scripture. And it’s at this point where I lose many folks, my family included, because they might have difficulty accepting what has not been written down or difficulty trying to get a handle on the unknown, and ultimately want everything drawn out for them. And I cant blame them really, because at least then you can sleep at night thinking that what you believe is concrete, tried and true, historically accurate and proven truth.

But who here can claim to know the mind of God? Or who here can say they know with 100% certainty where they will go after death, and who can say with any certainty, where someone else will go, whether by suicide or not. You see, Jesus, I believe in you and your greatest act of love and mercy, and I believe that that act was done for all mankind, for me, for my family, for Dave, for his sister, for everyone, and it is in that great act of love and mercy that I believe that even those who didnt know you here, who never experienced your love, or even those who ran from you, will have a chance to meet you and experience you and your gift, because I believe that it is not your will or desire for any of us to be lost, as a shepherd leaves his flock to find the one lost sheep, i do believe you intercede for us even after our deaths. I know there is no scripture to back that up, but my heart tells me so.

We are mere humans here, fumbling through a complex world that often gets the best of us in this life. We suffer from so many self inflicted spiritual maladies that they ultimately add up to a lack of vision, which is why we do these self destructive things, one of them being suicide. When we get so lost in ourselves and so disconnected from ourselves, our loved ones and more importantly God, that we can rationalize destroying ourselves, without thinking of how it will affect our families, our friends, or without giving hope a chance to grow, or even refusing to see hope as an alternative, we have lost our ability to see outside ourselves. They say suicide is a selfish act, and I believe it is, but i cant judge, because I dont know a persons heart. That is between them and God. And it is my hope and prayer that when that deed is done, Christ meets their soul as healer and dresses the wounds that led them down their path of self destruction here on earth, and bestows the peace and wholeness they never found here on earth.

One can dream can’t he?

Spent a night thinking of is her reaction would be to the flowers. How pathetic is that? As usual couldn’t really get a good night sleep woke up around 5:30am and checked my email I was sure she didn’t write, but she did. She wrote me on facebook – I am not sure why there and not on email. Probably she was too lazy looking for my email address. It was a nice message I could see she was happy to receive flowers. Yet she didn’t write in a manner I hope for.

Again this is my diary, so I will be completely honest. Of course I wanted to make her feel good, but at the same time I hoped she would write something like she misses me too and that she wishes I was there. She did end the letter that she is giving me wet kisses, I guess that means on the mouth. That was the only thing that told she wants something to do with me, but maybe it is not.

I am so tired of guessing what she feels. Why can’t I just live without caring what she thinks? Like I don’t care about what everyone else thinks of me? During all this time I still didn’t cry once, I am not sure what is wrong with me. I am so fucking tired, tired, tired, tired, tired of feeling this way. I wish I wasn’t here today, but was somewhere by myself where I could get drunk or sleep all day or do something to pass this day.

I really don’t understand how people let other people go, people who they love. I mean they say that true love is not selfish and I feel it in someway, but at the same time I so want her to be with me. I would do anything for her, I would kill if someone will try to hurt her, but in the end of the day I am going to do it for myself and not for her. Does it mean that really my love is not that strong?

While writing about that I realized that while being away from her for 3 months my love to her just grew stronger, way stronger. I will need to live without facebook for couple of days.

Phew finally I wrote down this shit, I barely walked to this computer to be able to write this as I can’t really talk to anybody. I am SO TIRED OF FEELING THIS WAY, someone get me the fuck out of my mind or make her wanna be with me again!

“Self-acceptance comes from meeting life’s challenges vigorously. Don’t numb yourself to your trials and difficulties, nor build mental walls to exclude pain from your life. You will find peace not by trying to escape your problems, but by confronting them courageously. You will find peace not in denial, but in victory.”
J. Donald Walters quotes (Romanian author, lecturer, and composer)

I’m going to jump ahead of myself in this discussion of pain management in groups, using a CBT approach, and cut to a description of therapist factors that can influence how well a group programme works. I should add at this stage, that I’m basing much of what I write on my own experience over …ermmm… a few years… but also from an extremely helpful book ‘Cognitive behavioral therapy in groups’ by Bieling, McCabe and Antony.  It’s published byThe  Guilford Press, New York, 2006, and is a hefty 452 pages long.  It’s a great book —- but it doesn’t have anything about chronic pain management, so I’m working on describing how the factors that are discussed in this book can apply in chronic pain management.

OK, so while I’ve been looking at group process and the benefits of conducting pain management in a group setting, one of the critical ingredients has to be the clinician or clinical team involved in the programme. Our team has six clinicians, and something we’ve worked on very hard is having a common model and developing consistent responses to various issues that different participants bring into our programme.  It only takes one clinician to say something ‘different’ for participants to become confused or worse, defensive and at times work to ’split’ a team.  Pain management often runs contrary to ‘common sense’  – chronic pain management doesn’t follow the rules of acute pain, so if someone is fearful of moving and one clinician reinforces this, however well-meaning, it can stall reconceptualisation and stop progress.

Group programmes using a CBT approach need facilitators who are not only confident in themselves (they’re ‘on show’!), but also be both confident in applying CBT in a one-to-one setting, and also work well with group facilitation (ie know how groups function).  They also need to be well-trained in chronic pain management.  Transferring generic CBT skills into chronic pain is a challenge – but transferring generic CBT skills into a group setting is impossible without some mentoring and opportunity to observe.  I’m glad to see that this point is made very strongly in the book I referenced above!

In fact, that book recommends the following:

1. Didactic coursework/training in CBT models and techniques
2. Direct (hour for hour) supervision on multiple individual cases of CBT
3. Observational participation in a CBT group led by another therapist
4. Taking on the role of a co-leader

Well I can’t quite see that being given to new people joining many public hospitals in New Zealand!

Therapists need to have some specific facilitation ’styles’ that work for group facilitation:

1. They need to model ‘active participation’ – in other words, really be involved in the processes of the group
2. They need to be tolerant and open to individual differences, there is no ‘correct’ way of responding, just varing consequences im both short and long term
3. Use collaboration and Socratic dialogue to guide participants through the process of discovery.  ‘Teaching’ doesn’t work well, ‘discovering’ works better, ‘experiencing’ works best.
4. Communicate that ‘we’ are all prone to the same thinking patterns and responses – never ever giving the impression that they ‘have it all together’ or that they wouldn’t be vulnerable to the same thoughts, feelings and behaviours that the participants have.  After all chronic pain is not choosy – it could be you, and it is me, that can have chronic pain!

I’ve not often had the opportunity to work with a cotherapist, but when I have, it’s been wonderful! A point made in many manuals for CBT in a group setting is that two therapists are preferable.  One can do the majority of the facilitation, while the second can be observing, noticing, listening and providing back-up when the primary therapist runs dry.  If two therapists are going to work together, though, they need to have some idea of who is doing what, and what the potential issues might be.  AND, more importantly, they need to debrief afterwards to see what they both saw during the session.

I’ve found that it’s great to have an email or some other system to share observations and notes from each session – especially when different therapists provide input over different sessions during the day.  And as the therapists hand over to the next person, a brief exchange of ‘what’s going on in the group’ makes a huge difference.  For example, if one person has had a flare-up and is having trouble, it’s good to know what has already been said or suggested so either the same approach is used, or the person isn’t faced with the same questions or process from the next therapist!

As the group develops, the participants can take on some of this ongoing monitoring and reminding process, but especially during the initial stages, it’s vital that therapists keep their eyes and ears open and share what they observe.

To help with learning, I’ve attended training on group facilitation (Zenergy in New Zealand is one provider I particularly respect), and I’ve also participated in personal growth courses, especially those using experiential learning methods.  I think these skills also help when facilitating group-based CBT for pain management.  One book I’ve found especially helpful is Open to Outcome which gives you five questions you can use to debrief from any experiential activity.  And of course, Thiagi has a huge resource of both brief and more complex experiential activities that you can use in groups.

가족 거의 모두가 감기에 걸렸다.

특히 막내동생이 열도 많이나고 기침도 심하다.

“아프다”

[형용사]『…이』
1 몸의 어느 부분이 다치거나 맞거나 자극을 받아 괴로움을 느끼다.

• 손바닥을 아프게 때리다
• 칼에 벤 자리가 아프다.
• 매 맞은 자리가 아프다.
• 바늘에 찔려 아프다.
• 돌부리를 걷어차 발이 아프다.

2 몸이 병이 나거나 들어 앓는 상태에 있다.

• 배탈이 나서 배가 아프다.
• 몸이 아파서 조퇴를 하였다.
• 사람들은 아파 봐야 건강의 소중함을 안다.
• 그 사람은 걸핏하면 아파 주위 사람을 걱정시킨다.
• 어디가 어떻게 아프다고 말을 해야 알지 덮어놓고서 아프다기만 하면 어디가 어떻게 아픈지 알 수가 있는가.≪이무영, 농민≫

3 오랫동안 어떤 일을 하여 몸의 어떤 부분에 괴로운 느낌을 받는 상태에 있다.

• 책을 오래 보았더니 눈이 아프다.
• 무릎을 구부리고 오랫동안 앉아 있었더니 다리가 무척 아팠다.

4 해결하기 어려운 일이나 복잡한 문제로 생각을 하기 어렵거나 괴로운 상태에 있다.

• 머리 아픈 문제
• 그 일만 생각하면 지금도 머리가 지끈지끈 아파 온다.
• 달리 뾰족한 수가 없는 문제를 가지고 온종일 생각에 잠긴 김 대리는 점점 골치가 아파 왔다.

5 슬픔이나 연민이나 쓰라림 따위가 있어 괴로운 상태에 있다.

• 그와 헤어져 가슴이 아프다.
• 어머니는 자식에게 제대로 해 주지 못한 것이 끝내 가슴 아프신 모양이다.
• 그와 더불어 지낸 세월을 회고하니 내 가슴은 찢어지는 듯 아프오.≪이병주, 지리산≫

최근 많은 종류의 아픔을 겪는 것 같다. 그러면.. 요즘 어떻게 지내? 라고 누군가 물어본다면 그냥, 아팠어 라고 대답하면 될지도 모르겠다. 마음이 회복될쯤 하니 몸이 말썽이다. 또 몸이 아프면.. 마음도 약해지고 또 아파할 일이 생길지도 몰라.

강해진다.. 결국엔 마음뿐만이 아니라 몸도 강해져야 한다. 운동이라도 해야하려나 모르겠다. 겨울동안에 열심히 운동을 해서 몸이라도 만들어볼까.. 캬하하.

일단은 낫는게 우선이다. 낫자. 낫고나서 생각하자.

나 뿐만 아니라.. 내 가족 모두 다 잘 이겨내길 바라며.

Nov 24th 2009

I’m doing very well today…I think the new medication is working in my favor…At least so far, so good, anyway…I’m very pleased to report that I’ve been in a very healthy frame of mind and emotional state the last few days…And as I sit here reflecting back on last week, perhaps I can already understand the goodness of reaching such mental exhaustion so terribly…I do believe that I reached my point of surrender, which in turn, began the long-awaited grieving process finally…I have years and years of grief too begin feeling my way through, and so it goes…Therefore I suppose last week wasn’t a waste of time after all…Perhaps it was a profound turning point for me and quite necessary for my human development…The rewards are clear to me now, as I feel a great release of pressure from the pain, unresolved anger, emotional turmoil and sorrow…And once again, my decision to recover and transform has brought me to my knees, even to the point where I lost my will to live and desired death much more than life…But! I made it through it, and now in the end I feel as though, all of it was worthwhile…I didn’t die, I’m still here and much stronger than I was before actually…

Unknowingly, one of the most momentous changes too come from last week was the restoration of my heart…I brought my heart back from where it has been, therefore my heart no longer belongs to Bahar, it belongs to me alone…Now that I’ve thoroughly grieved her absence, I’m not concerned whether I ever see or talk to her again or not…Plus, I think about her with much less frequency, which is such a great relief to me considering it free’s up my mind so much…And now my heart is also free to love again, whenever I choose…I will always care about her and I will always love her sincerely, but otherwise i’ve reached the end of my road with the whole situation, and there is no going back now as far as I’m concerned, ever again…

As the old saying goes “If you love somebody, set them free. If they return to you, they were always yours to love. If they don’t return, they were never were.” And you know, she would always return to me before I confided in her about my fear of abandonment, but after that of course she never did return again…Go figure…Yet for people like me it’s not as simple to erase somebody so easily…So, this has been a very long and arduous nine months for me since Valentine’s day…Plus, It’s just not in my character to replace a person who I love with another person, just to fill the void…But I can say this much, in the end, the lessons and the wisdom I have gained by loving Bahar is something I will cherish forever and I shall never forget…But gratefully and with much relief, I have come to terms with the fact that I’m dead to her and she is gone from my life and she is never coming back again either…

As I’ve heard before…”Don’t ever give up on something or someone who you can’t go a full day without thinking about.”  But so much of last week’s pain and misery was about making the choice to give up on her completely…And so it goes…I’m one step closer to being free, free at last…

Although she walked out of my life, I refuse to allow that to make me cynical about love. But rather makes me realize that if I wanted to be with the wrong person so much how beautiful it will be when the right one actually does come along…

couple of decades ago, an ignition
too premature, aborted combustion

along the subliminal, that flame crept
time then unfolded but was never swept

from out of nowhere, that same spark
suddenly a light for a path that’s so dark

out of the embers, there’s ever yearning
that old fire deep within, still burning.

how can it still hurt so much?

how long will it go on?

how do i get beyond it?

how do i stop hating myself?

how do i live with him hating me?

how do i sleep?

how do i make it through a day without drugs to numb the pain?

how do i make a new life?

how?

Black toenails. No toenails. These are two extremely frightening things associated with runners. Your friends may ask you if you have toenails when you tell them you’re a runner. Dates may shy away from giving you foot massages after seeing your hooves.

Black toenails are caused primarily by two main things:

• Wearing shoes with a small toe box (or shoes that are too small)
• Doing lots of downhill running (in which case your toenails are slamming into the front of your shoe repeatedly)

As an ultrarunner who does lots of trail running, I fit into the latter category. I currently have one black toenail (how depressing). The main reason people have black toenails is because they are wearing shoes that are too small for them. I wear size eight shoes when I’m not running, but size 8.5 running shoes. This extra half a size gives my toenails extra space.

Of course, you can always end up removing your toenails like the infamous Marshall Ulrich!

I cant really see a point to life right now. Im pretty depressed right now, just really stressed out. I havent been able to smile and mean it today. I want to pretty much do something, i dont know what to do, but i want to be something.
I feel so sick, as if i need to be on an IV, or life support.
Zoey-Lynn

I hate it. I hate all. I hate you.

All of my life
In every season
You are still God
I have a reason to sing
I have a reason to worship

(excerpt from Desert Song -Hillsong United)

He is still God. Even now. Even now I have a reason to sing. Even now I have a reason to worship.  God is my victory and He is right by my side.

He is my priority. He is more important than my grades. Than my performance. I need to give Him the time of day. And it’s a lot easier to give Him the time of day when I’m struggling.

It’s incredibly difficult for me to stand right now. Crawling is my best choice. But with Him I will soar on wings like eagles.

I want to be changed from the inside out. He is mighty to save. He is mighty to change.

He is here. i’m standing on His promise alone.

He is my reason,

coop

He struggles within in lonely silence

Emotive feelings decays his soul

Inner peace not on licence

Shallow water brims the eyes

Stinging as painful love loses goal

Emitting silent howling sighs

Dark endless path short of winners post

Hazy shadows form tightening noose

With entangled hold on loves frozen ghost

Shaking breaking wrenching loose

Running blindly to be free

Dancing around all heavy blight

Reaching yearning for before the we

A flowing river towards new light

Reborn in colour from all that stains

Released from all entrenching binds

Free from dark love’s tightened chains

Inner peace I hope he finds.

The Poetess July 2008

Whenever my leg/foot swells up like last night, the veins pop out in my foot. Yuck. Anybody know why? Is it from the pressure of the swelling?

This is not to be confused with when my foot turns purple. That happens to all my toes and the toe half of my foot. I think it looks kinda cool, and best of all…it DOESN”T hurt to be cold and purple

My upper leg gets veins popping out, too, from swelling. The dent hurts REALLY bad It stings and has sharp pains. Luc kept telling me I had to go to the ER and he was taking me. I told him I’m too big to forcibly move! The fluorescent lights in the ER make me so sick that I have to be feeling like I’m going to die before willingly going.

Perhaps later I will take one of my Vicodins. Tears keep sneaking out because it hurts so much I can feel every muscle in my body tensed up. What a wimp…

Still having gut distress. At this point docs could do a colonoscopy without bothering to clean me out first. Ugh. It HAS to be the Clindamycin.

This is a phrase that I heard often throughout the pregnancy. I don’t consider myself a worrier. I’ve always been a kind of a go-with-the-flow type of guy. However it becomes a little different when it comes to your child.  With anything as complex as growing a baby there are going to be issues. Ours started right in the beginning. Whether it’s bleeding, cramping, nausea, or just plain old pain your wife is going to get worried. In turn you are going to get worried. One thing you can count on is that if your wife is like mine she will be Google’ing every little symptom.  Guys, Google is your worst enemy. Try typing in “week 10 bleeding”. You won’t even get the “b” in before Google finishes the search query and there are thousands of discussion threads about what this means.  Everything from “don’t worry about it” from supermom26  to “I had the same thing and had a miscarriage the next day” from annie2m. So who do you believe? Supermom26 or annie2m? My answer is neither. I mean really, who are these people? Annie2m could be a crazy alcoholic meth-head with serious medical conditions and Supermom26 could be just some whack job who doesn’t even have kids but loves attention. See what I mean, you just never know. These stories are all out there and to someone who is starving for answers they are awfully appealing. Your wife will eat them up and next thing you know you’re caught up in it. All you want is some peace and quiet and the “what ifs” don’t stop.

About 3 months in I had a revelation: Everything will be fine, until it isn’t. I came to the realization that this whole thing is completely out of my hands. If it’s meant to be it will be. Sounds cheesy but you have to surrender to that mentality. Because even if something is wrong there is little or nothing you can do about it.

One suggestion: For your sanity’s sake just go to the doctors anytime something doesn’t feel right to your wife. 10 times out of 10 it will be nothing but you will not stop hearing about it until a doctor tells her it is ok. Trust me on this and save yourself the agony of the never-ending guessing game.