Psychology Of Adjustment Paper

Thomas Wisnewski
Psychology of Adjustment
Jurgens
6 December 2012
In my class Psychology 2101 I was asked to write about three major events that occurred during my lifetime for class. I have thought about this almost all semester and it was a constant struggle just to think of even one event that I would have liked to share. This class has shown me that almost everybody has their problems, some that cope with them well, and others that still struggle to figure a path that will lead them to happiness. I myself have personal issues that I have learned from. This paper will describe the three events and how they have impacted my life. During the paper I will do my best to put these events in chronological order. I come from a military
family. My dad was the military man and my mother was from Korea. They had married when my dad was stationed in South Korea between the late 80s and early 90s. Being in a military family had resulted us in moving a lot. I have moved between many states while my dad was in the military, but I had actually loved it. I loved traveling between place-to-place and seeing all kind of new things. Travelling was just really interesting to me because there was always a time where I could experience something new. One of the places that I moved to and stayed for quite a while was in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I had always thought this place was an amazing. Most military brats know that making friends is not the easiest thing to do. We understand by the constant moving that we have to make new friends and lose the ones we made from a place before. This was normal, but getting older I realized that I was getting a bit tired from the constant moving and wanted to stay in one place for a while. As far as I can remember I have learned a lot living in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I learned to ride my first bike there and enjoyed the beautiful weather. In Colorado I had also met my best friend. My best friend’s name was Joshua Vialpando and we had almost done everything together. We would always have the same teachers in school and then of course we would hang outside of school constantly. The guy was always there for me when I ever had a problem and I would try my best to be there for him. Joshua had always struggled in school, but I would always catch on things a bit quicker and help him out when he needed it. This was my first real friend that I have made that I could actually see being there later in my life during adulthood. Of course as time went by it was time to pack my bags and move to a different state. For the first time in my life I realized that I did not want to move and that moving somewhere new had no appeal to me. I wanted to stay and just hang with my best friend and do whatever new activity would cross our minds. I felt like that moving somewhere new would change me somehow and that I would not be able to make a friend that was like him. I felt as if I was going to be lonely, or probably feel a bit different from everyone else. I was losing a friend and it felt like I was losing the world that I had gotten use to and I did not want to experience a new one. This first event gradually leads up to my second event when I moved to Augusta, Georgia. It took me a four-day trip by RV to make it to Augusta. I knew that by moving here I would have to start over again, new school and hopefully new friends as well. In school before I was never really made fun of or teased at all for being who I am. For the first time in my life I was being teased for being Asian American. Children would constantly come up to me and make “oriental” noises like “ching chong chong” and other terms like that. I feel as if in Colorado it was more racially diverse, while moving here to Georgia there was just simply mostly white and black. I remember my very first day of attending class in Augusta and I remember after school I had ended up crying. I did not understand why the other kids would make fun of me because I had never experience this issue before. Augusta, Georgia was the place that my dad decided to retire in. I knew from that point that this place would be my new permanent home and I would not be able to go anywhere else new again. I hated the new place I was living in and I hated going to school. This point on I had lost contact with my best friend in Colorado and I had felt lonely just as I had originally thought I would feel. I had felt this same way all the way to almost between the end of middle school and the start of high school. One day while riding the bus home from school. A guy that sat behind me I said “hey.” This is the point where I had met my friend Stephen Brinson. Stephen had become almost like a brother to me. He was like a part of my family and even my parents seen it that way as well. This is when things seemed to get better for me, slowly but gradually I would deal with my problems. I no longer felt as lonely as I did before because I had met someone that I could talk to and seemed to have the same interests as me. I have known Stephen for a while now and he is still my best friend today. He is the only person I honestly probably see and talk to most of the time. In my first two years of high school I was not popular at all.
In fact, I was probably more of a geek than anything. It was the last two years of high school that I had finally felt a difference. I never realized how many people I knew. I had actually become pretty popular at the end of my high school career. I was known for my talents and nominated for everything. I feel that Stephen was a part of this change because we had made that change together. Stephen was also a pretty big geek in the beginning of high school as well, but we both decided to make this change together. I feel if I have never met him, then that change would have never occurred and I could probably be in a situation that I
hate. I learned that it is not about where I go, but the people that I do things with. I still today tend to not make a lot of friends, but a few is all I need to be happy. I learned that being made fun of is nothing and it is something that I can overcome. In the end it has made me stronger as a person and I tend to think back at a hard time and laugh about it. I laugh at it because I realize where I am now and I am proud of that alone. My last event is about my sister and mostly my mother.
My mother is pretty strict mom and she pushes us very hard especially when it comes to education. The way she pushes my sister and I does not seem very reasonable and at times very unfair. My sister and my mother would argue a lot, but one day it had got to the point where I had come home and my sister had about nine knives that she held up to her neck explaining that she just wanted to kill herself. I remember me sneaking up behind her and taking all of the knives out of her hand to make sure that she would not harm herself. From that point on I tend to keep a barrier between my mother and I. This barrier is the only one that I can see fit for dealing with her because my mother knows exactly how to tick you off. I do believe that my mother’s ways did help me during school because I had focused and did well many times until the start of high school. In the beginning of high school I tended to rebel against her because I wanted to show her that I did not really care. It was about a year into high school that I realized it was not for my mother, but for myself and that I should actually be doing a whole lot
better. My mom did not even attend my high school graduation because she believes I was not high enough ranked. I ranked in the top 10 percentile of my high school, which I thought was pretty good. I do not tell her absolutely anything unless it is completely needed. There is nothing about my personal life that she really knows because she will just argue about how everything I am doing is completely wrong. The barrier is the only way I believe that I can enjoy my life and not bother hers. The barrier is not just for myself, but a little part of it is for her as well. It keeps us both sane instead of in a state of constant rage. I believe that I will always have this barrier between her because she will never really sit down and understand why I do the things I do. She does not want to hear what I have to say and just believes that nothing is right compared to her. By creating this barrier between her and I. It has changed me as a person. I realize that I create barriers between other people because I tend to not trust others very quickly. Even when I get into a relationship with a significant other I create some type of barrier and the girl will never understand me completely. I always end up telling them that they just do not get it but I know that because of this barrier I put up. It makes it hard to understand me. I am trying to work on this because I have met someone that I would really love to fully understand me and I fully understand her. It is a work in progress, but I believe in the end it will be worth it. Today, I no longer feel as lonely as I once did. I feel satisfied with how things are going in my life today. I think that I have it all. I might not have the perfect family, but I do love my family. I do not think that anyone has a fairytale. This class has shown me so much and has given me different perspectives on how I can deal with the everyday stress of life. Things just seem a lot better than they did before and I can really only thank myself for this. I feel if I never wanted things to change then they would not have, but I had accepted others with positive inputs in my life and let the ones with negative inputs go away. I thought that this class was an interesting course and that anybody regardless if they are psychology major or minor should take this class because they could also learn something from it as well. It is a different experience than the normal classroom, but that is exactly what makes it so good.