Author: dpl5349

Anxiety is an extreme feeling of excessive fear which mainly occurs in people with an upcoming event.  Many people, including myself, have felt anxious before or even after completing an important task.  Anxiety is a basic part of general anxiety and panic disorders.  This appears to make people attempt to avoid a specific situation which causes the feeling of anxiety.  Severe anxiety may lead to a person having a mood disorder or cause a shift in personality when experiencing these extreme and abnormal emotions.  Personally, I have always felt anxious while taking a test.  The second I find out there is an upcoming assignment or exam, I start to feel anxious in several ways.  My hands begin to sweat leaving a feeling of clamminess, my body starts to shake, and I feel as if I can not focus.  My track of thought completely disappears leaving me with an empty mind before and while I’m taking my exam.  Although, it wasn’t until the beginning of my academic career at Penn State that I experienced a different level of anxiety.  I have always gone to sleepaway camp so being away from home was never an issue for me.  Once I arrived to University Park to unpack my belongings, I lost my appetite and started feeling extremely queasy.  Throughout the next week I began to throw up multiple times per day and continued to only drink water because the thought of eating would make me more nauseous.  I figured it was a 24 hour virus although when the feeling did not go away, I decided to go to urgent care for a second opinion.  Thinking the attending physician would simply just give me anti-nausea medication and send me on my way, was an incorrect conclusion.  The doctor prescribed me with a low dose of anti anxiety medication which helped me contain my fear.  The medication also enabled me to regulate myself in ways that I couldn’t due to the distraction of my anxiety.  The doctor also ran through several breathing exercises with me that would also help reduce my anxiety.  Till this day, when I get anxious I think back to the meditation exercises which calm me down.  Although I can not eliminate anxiety, I can do many exercises to help me feel at ease with my fear.

In class, we learned about the prenatal development within the womb, in which a single sperm cell combines with an egg to form a fertilized cell and then a baby.  Many Teratogens can negatively affect the baby including alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, bacteria, and viruses.  These cause malformations of an embryo or birth defects.  These abnormalities could be internal or external and are present at birth, although may not be diagnosed until later in life.  Many other forms of birth defects can also occur without somebody being dependent on a drug.  While one of my family friends was giving birth to her child, the doctors failed to notice the Umbilical Cord was wrapped around the child’s neck.  Unfortunately because they didn’t realize earlier, the flow of oxygen to the baby’s brain was cut off.  After realizing what had happened, the doctors were unsure about the extent of damage done to this newborn and stated only time could tell.  She is now a teenager and although physically has developed just like any other young woman would, she is unable to mentally develop leaving her with no brain capacity.  She is unable to think, walk, talk, eat, and drink without the help of another person.  Her parents decided not to institutionalize her and bring her around with them in a wheelchair and do everything for her in order to keep her healthy and as happy as she can be.  Such conditions usually require long-term specialized care including daily medication, occupational, physical, and behavioral therapies, specialized educational methods, and even home modification. These requirements are financially and emotionally damaging for many families including theirs.  Unlike illnesses, the consequences of oxygen deprivation and also the use of teratogens last for a lifetime.  The family facing this unfortunate circumstance will always need care and assist her at all times due to a birth defect.

Our everyday behavior and feelings are dramatically affected by unconscious motives and early development. Most behavior and feelings have an unconscious cause which as adults are directly reflected off of personal childhood experiences.  One of my childhood friend’s parents attempted to get a divorce while she was only nine.  She begged them to give their relationship another chance (so they did), which ultimately ended  up negatively impacting her family in the long run.  She would sit in couples therapy with her parents and listen to them fight.  She also experienced watching them argue, smoke, obsessively drink, and even physically harm each other at times.  Being a child and witnessing your family members go through a rough patch can be traumatizing early on. About five years later her father had moved out and divorced her mother.  She then began isolating herself from her mutual friends and would even skip classes at school for a couple weeks at a time.  Initially, we all thought she was just sick, yet a couple years down the road, she arrived to school missing her eyebrows and eyelashes.  This was a serious concern to all of our peers, considering the day before she had all of her hair present.  I never ended up asking her what had happened and continued to move on with my day.  Looking back on the situation, I should have made an effort to talk to her and see if she was okay. Eventually, she sat me down and explained to me that she had developed a hair pulling disorder called Trichotillomania, and described pulling out her hair as “relaxing.” She continued to say it wasn’t just her eyebrows and eyelashes, it was the hair on the back of her head as well.  She claimed it started when she would overhear her parents fighting as a young girl but it seemed to become more of an involuntary impulse as the years went on without correction.  Trichotillomania is a mental disorder that involves irresistible urges to pull out hair from your scalp, eyebrows, and other areas of the body, despite trying to stop.  Although she goes to extreme measures to cover up the bald spots on her head, they’re still there and will always act as a reminder of those hard times.  The psychodynamic perspective focuses on how specific childhood incidents reflects on adult behavior, which is clearly shown through my childhood friend’s experience.