Comprehensive Development Autobiography: Laura Ledvina's Life

Comprehensive Development Autobiography All of the dark and dirty details about Laura Ledvina’s life, right here in an easy-to-read paper! My paper focuses on Erickson’s psychosocial development theory and broad areas such as: gender differences, role of stress, and parenting style. I will go through the life stages of: infancy, childhood, and adolescence, not early adulthood. In infancy I will discuss Erickson’s first problem of trust versus mistrust and my parents’ parenting style and the effect it had on me. From there, my childhood will be discussed by Erickson’s problems: autonomy versus shame and doubt, initiative versus guilt, and industry versus inferiority. Also discussed in the childhood section will be my role in my family, effects
of parenting style, role of gender differences, and I will touch on role of trauma. I will then look at my adolescent development via Erickson’s problems of identity versus role confusion and intimacy versus isolation. A few other things in the adolescent paragraph will be role of stress and role of trauma. Less emphasis will be put on my infancy, because I do not remember my infancy and most of what I will write will be what I believe to be true from what my mother has told me. More emphasis will be put on my adolescence because I technically have not reached early adulthood, as I am only twenty-three years old and I feel that my adolescence has had a great deal of influence on my development in all areas of life. I, Laura Marie Ledvina, was born on July eighteenth of the year nineteen ninety-one at eleven-thirty in the morning. I was born the second child of Edward Lee and Joni Marie Ledvina. My infancy went quite smoothly, from what I understand I was a pretty easy baby. The parenting style used as I grew up was pretty close to authoritarian, there were rules that I had to abide by and if I broke said rules, I would be punished. This parenting style affected me much more as a child and adolescent than in my infancy, so it will be discussed in childhood as well. Looking at Erickson’s trust versus mistrust problem, I believe that I was a trusting infant. My mother was a stay-at-home mother so she had a lot of time to spend with me and gave me all of the attention that I needed. I was never lacking trust, safety, or security as an infant. As I grew into childhood, I realized that I was a bit different from other children. In the Ericksonian problem of autonomy versus shame and doubt, I was quite independent. So much so, that I preferred to play alone, silently. My mom always used to say that I was in my “own little world,” as all of the dialogue of what I was playing with was in my head. Erickson’s problem of initiative versus guilt was not that big of a problem for me. When I had friends over, I always directed how we would play. I also had two friends in early school who did not get along and I would force them to both play with me, even though they did not want to. Although I took initiative, I felt controlled by my parents. This was due to their authoritarian parenting style, I feared punishment and always wanted to be a “good girl,” and I was. Erickson’s industry versus inferiority problem applied to me in that I was very proud of my accomplishments, I was very good in school and among the best readers in my class. Both my parents and my teachers encouraged me and were proud of my accomplishments. My role in the family was quite simple: I was daddy’s little girl. I was the younger of two children, and I got along much better with my father than my mother. I believe that my identity as daddy’s girl really shaped how I became androgynous. There was a study done that showed correlation between parental gender schemas and child gender cognition (Tenenbaum & Leaper, 2002) and I believe that my dad helped me feel as though I could have the best qualities of both genders. I definitely felt like a girl, as I played with Barbies, Beanie Babies, toy animals, and wore dresses until the second grade. However, my dad instilled instrumental, masculine qualities in me as well, he would ALWAYS have me help him do physical work like help put in docks, fix things around the house and for other people, helped put away all of the things at the recycling center. I was always called upon when he was fixing things in the garage to fetch tools, and he bought go-karts and taught me how to drive them. I think that it is important to mention that I have never gotten along with my brother. I am pretty sure that he is a sociopath, and he put me through a lot of abuse throughout my childhood. This was incredibly traumatic to me and I feared my brother as a child. He was incredibly aggressive and had some kind of vendetta against me. It was also traumatic to me that my mother always coddled him and I was never treated fairly by her. Adolescence has been a complete rollercoaster, as I am sure it is for all adolescents.
The role of stress in my adolescence has been overwhelmingly burdening. All of my depressive tendencies started surfacing and I had MANY suicidal thoughts throughout my adolescence. I had a lot of issues with friends. In middle school I had two mentally and emotionally abusive friends, they forced me to abandon my other friends and would gang up on me to make me feel bad. I had to go back to them afterward because they were my only friends and that cycle went on for about three years. I finally had enough and cut all ties with them after middle school. This is likely why I have very little patience for sketchy friends now. I went into high school without a friend in the world, besides my little kitty, Softy. I slowly started to build friendships with people my first year of high school, and started really taking an interest in getting a boyfriend. I had the notion that my body was grossly unattractive and developed an eating disorder from it. I lost about forty pounds that year, and eventually started eating more regularly. My first boyfriend and I had an unhealthy relationship. It was on and off, he pressured me into sex and all of the stress from that relationship strained my friendships. Eventually I told him that I could not do it any longer and cut him out of my life. I learned from the mistakes I made with him, but also am a bit mistrustful in relationships due to our poor
relationship. Erickson’s problem of identity versus role confusion has been a tough one for me. I believe that I fit into the role confusion category. Through most of my adolescence I have had no hobbies. I spent most of my time in high school trying to get out of my house because of my brother. I found what I thought was my identity in my friends and the things that we did together. Now that I am getting older, I am realizing that I do not feel like I have much of an identity. I have always sort of meshed myself with my friends, and in moving away I realize that I do not know who I am. A study was done about people in their twenties still developing their identities (Carlsson, Wängqvist, & Frisén, 2015). It showed that people keep developing their identities into their late twenties and on even longer. I feel as though there is hope for me to really get to know and expand upon who I am as a person, even though I am going about it later in life. The role of trauma in my life has significantly shaped who I am as a person. The abuse I went through from my brother the entirety of my life has impacted my psychological well-being. I was told recently that I am at high risk of having post-traumatic stress disorder, but was not diagnosed. I have learned to have very little patience for people who are just out to hurt others, and to just have compassion for people because one never knows what battles others are fighting. Unfortunately, the constant coddling of my brother from my mother has worsened our relationship. No matter what I tell her, she never believes that he is an awful person, so he continues to use her and live in the house that my father built. The most traumatic thing I have ever went through in my life was the death of my father. It came so suddenly that it has taken me months to actually believe that it has happened. I miss him dearly every day, and find myself thinking awful things such as whose life I would trade for his or how much more deserving he was to live than so many other people. I find no comfort in knowing that he has moved onto a better place and it makes me question if there is a higher power or not, because what kind of God would take my dad away from me when I need him so much? I still have not figured out how my life will be without him, likely because I keep myself too busy to get upset over things like that. I can practically feel his death changing me. Which leads me to Erickson’s problem of intimacy versus isolation. My first relationship at sixteen years of age was unhealthy as I have mentioned before in this paper. I do not believe that I had any type of intimacy from that relationship, and I have felt quite isolated in that way for the vast majority of my life. However, the relationship I have been in for almost 16 months now seems to be much healthier and much more intimate. We live together and support each other in any way that we can. At times we fight, but we can both understand the other person when we try. I have always had issues with communication, likely due to the lack thereof all throughout my childhood, but he makes me want to be better. I love him for everything that he is and that he makes me be, he has been so supportive through the death of my father that he is pretty much stuck with me for eternity now. I read an article that showed an interconnection between parent relationships and intimate relationships. It showed “that more positive parent–child relations in adolescence were related to a more secure attachment style and… attachment styles were coherently related to overall quality of the romantic relationships as measured from romantic life narratives” (Nosko, Tieu, Lawford, & Pratt, 2011). This relates to me because in my early adolescence, I did not feel that I had a very secure attachment to either of my parents and my “romantic relationships” were quite poor. However, later in my adolescence my attachment to my father was secure, thus the quality of my romantic relationship seems to be of much higher quality. To wrap up my lengthy narrative, I must say that this investigation has affected me.
It is quite interesting to look at my life thus far and see how specific things helped me – or forced me – to develop. Every sad or hurtful thing included in this paper has given me a more positive quality in some way. I do not regret anything that I have done because it all has shaped me into the woman I am today, and I think that I like her. Parents play a tremendous role in how one develops, I see now why secure attachments are so important. Parents are the first line of defense when it comes to a person’s psychological well-being. If parents do not do a good job of protecting their child, it will lead to difficulties later in life. The role of stress and trauma are closely related in development, after all one cannot have trauma without stress. From writing this paper I have learned that it is the biggest heartaches that make you stronger as a person. And even though you may not see the positive impact of the people close to you on a day-to-day basis, they help shape you as a person. I am incredibly thankful for the few people who accept me for who I have become and will treasure them forever. I may be a fatherless “daddy’s girl,” but I will not let that stop me from striving to make him
proud.