More than just that

The four goals of Psychology is to be able to define, explain, predict, and eventually control behavior.

In my years in college as a Psychology major, I have enclosed myself in a box. This box represents the foundations of Psychology. The theories, the coined terms, the famous people who contributed their brilliant ideas in the hope of further nourishing the knowledge that has already been born. Here is the box that is filled with the build up of purely facts.

Within the box is my layer of protective personal bubble. This serves as a solid barrier. The stand off point from where you and I stand. If I let you in then I'm giving you the power to either hurt me physically or emotionally.

Within that bubble is my exterior body, with which becomes an instrument of analysis because every move and reaction has a meaning. If you look to the left, you are lying. If you're pointing your feet to the door, you want to leave. If you forget a part of your past then possibly it was the time when your trauma began. 

All these attention to detail has become what I breathe and live for. But I knew there was something missing. I kept pondering on what it was and there, served on a silver platter came the answer to my curiosity. Expressive Arts Therapy. There's an art of healing you never get to hear of on a daily basis. At first, I could not let go of my inhibitions as I was deeply rooted to details and scientifically speaking, whatevers. As I gave my full attention to the possibility of it being an important factor to my growth, I felt that void in me fill up. And then I discovered something of great significance.

Now, within my exterior body is what scientists claim to be unreal and questionable, within me is my soul. You can define, explain, predict, and control behavior, yes. But you can never grab hold of what I have in my soul. It hides the real me. My emotions, my troubles, my happiness, my pain. No theories in Psychology can strip me of what I really am and what I really feel. 

Expressive Arts has become a safe haven for my soul and my whole being. There in that hall of four walls, it doesn't seem like an enclosed box, it's more like a piece of everyone's own idea of heaven. Expressive Arts teaches one to accept individuality, face adversity, and awaken one's sleeping inner child within. I realized then that in all of Psychology's completeness, it is after all incomplete. It lacks the ability to go beyond asking a patient, "and how do you feel about that?". This form of healing does not promise the resolution of problems or illnesses but it does in fact nourish a being and his or her soul through the most primitive emotion known to man that Psychology has forgotten. Love. 

Viktor Frankl once said, "Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the most innermost core of his personality.” And indeed, Expressive Arts has done that not only to me but for the rest of the members that comprise the organization who I now call my family. With the integration of concrete facts and the rebirth of humanistic transformation, I do believe that one can be  able to reach out and save more people.

This is more than just a testimony. This is a tribute to father Loreto Jaque, the backbone of this art of healing. Thank you for the opportunity, the all welcoming acceptance, and the unconditional love. You truly are an inspiration worth following. May you have more birthdays to come. Vive les arts! Long live the arts!

~myeviltwin