Erickson proposed that an individual goes through eight different stages throughout their entire life. In order to get through to the next stage of development, one must overcome the previous challenge. This indicates that behavior in adulthood relies on experiences in childhood. From birth to about 10 years of age, my mother was attentive because she had not started drinking yet. Since my mother was an alcoholic and I was the oldest I took care of the house, my sister, and my mother by keeping her affairs in order. My entire adolescence was focused on everybody else besides myself. I didn’t really have time to think about developing a self-identity. In school, I always hated talking about myself because I did not have time to explore myself. Therefore, I did not discover my hobbies, passions, desires, or even what kind of music I liked.
At 21, I became aware of this and started getting to know who I was. Once I formed a self-identity this made it easier to move through to the next stage which was having intimate and close relationships with others. The ecological theory proposes that human development is affected by the environment. In order to understand behavior, we must consider all aspects that influence an individual such as family, friends, teachers, social media, the neighborhood, and governmental institutions. More specifically, Bronfenbrenner’s theory organized the environment into five different categories of external influences and separated each category by the most intimate to the broadest. An individual can be directly affected by their microsystem and mesosystem which are family and friends. An individual can be indirectly affected by their exosystem which is neighborhoods and religious systems.
All of these categories can be affected by the macrosystem which is one’s belief and heritage of one’s culture. From birth, I was shy and my shyness intensified as I got older. This was due to the interaction with my microsystem. My mother and sister always spoke for me when it came to social interactions because they wanted to protect me. Since I never got the chance to face my fear of social interactions this fear only intensified. Children learn to relate to others by observing how their parents react towards one another. This could point to a learned dysfunctional codependency behavioral pattern in relationships.
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This study looks at perceived interparental conflict and how it affects a child in adulthood. The results were consistent with the hypothesis that codependency is associated with conflict between parents experienced in childhood but independent of parental substance abuse. Past studies have focused on substance abuse when studying codependency because children are more likely to come in contact with conflict between parents if one of them have a substance abuse problem. This leads one to believe that codependency may have roots in childhood experiences.
More specifically, this means that codependency is greatly affected by a child’s ability to cope with threatening experiences. This implies that internalizing behaviors (codependency) as an adult result from feeling threatened as a child by experiencing parental conflict. This helps me understand my life experiences because as an adolescent my life felt out of control due to my mother’s alcoholism. Therefore, I picked up the slack to gain some sort of control. From my childhood experiences, this led to codependency in adulthood. I reached a point in my life when this way of coping was no longer conducive and creating chaos in my life. Ultimately, leading me down a path to change and focus on myself. A developing identity can be affected by self-esteem and self-competence. This article studied the relationship between self-esteem and social anxiety in adolescence.
Self-esteem is the evaluation of one’s self-worth. Social anxiety is a social phobia that comes with an intense fear of social situations where an individual may be negatively evaluated by others. This anxiety could be debilitating to the point that it interferes with routines, academic functioning, social activities, and relationships. The study found a negative correlation between self-esteem and social anxiety. I was always shy and thought that my social anxiety in adolescence stemmed from avoiding social situations most of my life.
As time went on it was just easier to avoid my fears instead of facing them. From this article, I learned that my low self-esteem may have been associated with my social anxiety. This led me to ponder about why I had low self-esteem. A sense of identity can be affected by many factors such as body-esteem, self-esteem, and social anxiety. The article found out that adolescents with “poor self-esteem and poor body-esteem experience greater social anxiety” (Abbas, Mansor, Mohammad, Vahid, & Roya, 2016, p. 304).
Therefore, self-esteem and body-esteem can be predictors for social anxiety. Body-esteem can be a protective factor. More specifically, if body-esteem increases this can cause an improvement in self-esteem. From the previous article, I realized my social anxiety could be associated with my poor self-esteem. From this article, I learned my poor self-esteem stemmed from my poor body-esteem. Upon more reflection, I became aware that my poor body-esteem was caused by my father’s comparison of my sister and I in childhood.
