Understanding my past experiences free essay sample

When I reminisce about my life, it really brings into focus how I have turned into the person who I am today. Starting from my childhood to my teenage years, and all the way through my early adulthood, I have experienced quite a bit more than most people who I know or have known. I have been shaped and molded my many ups and downs. I know that living with one parent nowadays is not unusual. Living only with my mother brought out a lot of emotions during my childhood. Sometimes, they were pretty strong and confusing, too. My mother raised me without any support. My parents divorced when I was seven years old. There never was a really strong father figure in my life. I was lucky to witness civilized divorce of my parents because they did not argue, but there was a lot of tension between the three of us. I never was very close to my dad and never felt a lot of pain about living without him. My mother was my main source of trust, love, care, support, and understanding. I know being a single parent was difficult experience for my mom, but I grew up with understanding that it was normal. She raised me appropriately and tried really hard to reinforce nothing but superior morals and respect for me and others who came into my life. She spent a lot of time with me, which developed unique bond of trust between us, and it continues to evolve today. Living in a large community helped me to be actively involved in different in-school and afterschool activities. At a very young age I learned how to share responsibilities. I never had â€Å"token† chores to do in order to earn allowance. Instead, I knew that my contribution to my family of two was necessary. My effort was always recognized, which helped develop pride in my own work. Along with learning my responsibilities, I also was forced to deal with some disappointments early in life. My mom responded to my challenges with encouragement, support, and empathy. Sometimes, I felt that she was too demanding and strict. Nowadays, I understand that my mom tried very hard to build in me intelligent, mature, independent, responsible, and initiative person with a high esteem. These qualities are very important for developing a strong personality. After analyzing parenting style I was raised in, I know my mother used authoritative parenting. I think that her demanding influence along with responsiveness to my needs became crucial during my early, middle, and late childhood, because it affected my future. Growing up I have never had a lot of close people in my life. Maybe, that is why, I cherish guanine friends. Personally, friendship has always been one of my most ethical issues I have ever encountered. The problem being that there is never a clear way of defining it. My greatest test of friendship came in the last year of high school. I was very close with one of my friends. We grew up together, went to the same school, and spent most of our summers at camps. During our adolescence, however, we started to grow apart. My friend and I experienced our own role in life and identity in different ways. I truly felt comfortable being a part of a very small group of people who played out as a main source of communication for that period time in my life. I have always been very selective with my surroundings. I was focused on my academic goals. In contrast, my friend drifted from group to group, which caused a lot of uncertainty to her identity. She started to mix with the wrong crowd. Unfortunately, it led her to experience alcohol, cigarettes, and, eventually, world of drugs. First, I was in shock, because I knew my friend for a long time. She never was close with her parents, and was quite motivated to rely on her own opinion. I was struggling with ethical dilemma and asking myself: â€Å"How I can get my friend on a right track again? † I knew that peer pressure could be a very dangerous thing. You can start making wrong choices, and making things you never thought you would ever do. My morality hasn’t allowed me to be an observer of that situation. I decided to sacrifice our friendship for sake of my friend’s goodwill. I called her parents and told them what was happening in theirs daughter life. Our friendship was over and we never spoke again. She eventually went through rehabilitation and started a new life. Living every day, you always find yourself surrounded with some kind of peer pressure, but as you get older, you start being able to ignore it and do what you feel is right. Later on, I realized that if you have people around you wanting to do misleading actions, let them. You should not do something wrong just to fit in with others. But, if you do, be prepared to learn your lesson. Nowadays, when I still think about this experience, I know that I have made the right choice by not letting my friend down. According to Erik Erikson’s Theory of psychosocial development, my friend went through struggles in its fifth stage, which determines Identity reverse Role Confusion conflict. She isolated herself from her family, and took a strong strand on values and influence from wrong group of people, which resulted in Role Confusion. Personally, there have been circumstances in my teenage life when I had to make choices and think about future consequences of my actions. While going through Erikson’s fifth stage of Psychosocial Development, I had a concrete idea of my place in society. I was re-establishing my relations with my mother; I highly believed in myself, and placed much thought into all my decisions and was able to utilize others’ opinions. I also found that this experience tested me over my ethics and morals. Based on Kohlberg’s Moral Stages, I was at conventional level of moral development while I was challenged over my moral reasoning. My friend knew the difference between right and wrong, but she could not overcome her dependence on a wrong group of people. I think that moral reasoning is considered to contain not only thinking about issues of right and wrong in our lives, but also consider outcomes of our personal actions. Moral judgment development relies on the individual’s growing awareness of the importance of society and of how people coexist through laws, rules, and roles. I know that I lost my friendship because of my ethics that I have encountered throughout my life, but my past experience helped me to become morally strong. I have never thought I would become a citizen of another country, even though I always wanted to learn about different nations from first-hand experience. Coming to America, the Land of Freedom, has become permanent and most important influence in my life because it changed the way I look at interpersonal relationships and cultural differences; it helped me to determine my meaning in life. I moved to United States by myself at age of twenty two. This decision made me to learn how to adjust to new culture that is completely different from my Ukrainian background. I have adapted this new culture in some context, but at the same time, I have strengthened my identity as Ukrainian by making myself understand foreign people better. The major effect was that once I started a regular life away from my homeland, I missed everything. It didn’t mean I was unhappy but that I was aware of being on my own. I missed my mom and my friends, my home, my streets, my food. Now, I understand that I experienced culture shock. I felt confusion, distress, and sometimes depression that resulted from psychological stress that continued during my first year living abroad. First, I had to learn how to communicate with people in English and went through hard time during the process. Acquiring new language ability is considered to be cognitive skill, and this development affected me psychologically as well. In the beginning of my stay in United States, I had trouble making myself understood by Americans. I thought it was due to my poor English speaking and my quite personality. However, after I gained enough ability of English to communicate with others, I realized that the problems are also as a result of cultural differences. Through self-analysis I started paying close attention to one’s behavior and using these observations to shape the way one behaves. This shows that I was using observational learning as a major tool of understanding another culture. I believe by physically and emotionally participating in the social interactions of particular society, it is possible to become accepted as member of that society. Along with observational learning, I was very motivated to involve myself with new communities. Every day I tried new American foods, watched to American television, listen to foreign music, traveled to different states, and read a lot of American books. Eventually, my effort reduced cultural barriers and allowed to understand that United States became my second home. Today, I know that it wasn’t just learning process about different culture, it was my willingness to accept another type of society and culture in my daily life. When you live in a place with different customs and traditions from yours, you have to be able to develop yourself with unknown conditions. For me, it meant making new friends, learning other points of view, accepting different opinions and values. After adjusting to a new living, I realized how valuable my family was. Living away significantly reinforced my independent behavior that always grows inside of me. Being far away from my family gave me a lot of experiences toward organizing my life. Yes, living in another country is a really interesting and unforgettable experience, but at the same time it has very important effects on one’s life.