Author: Steven Morales

My bout with Anxiety

Many people experience some level of anxiety in their day to day lives. Some may experience more than others, however, anxiety is an emotion that everyone deals with. Generally speaking, anxiety can be defined as a feeling of excessive fear or nervousness of current and or future events. We can describe the physical symptoms as tense and apprehensive, and furthermore persistent and at times uncontrollable.

Firstly, I would like to mention that although I do experience a lot of anxiety and nervousness, I do not like to define myself and my personality under these premises. Unfortunately many people end up focusing a lot of their mental space and energy on anxiety and many people let it fester on their minds 24/7.  In my experience with anxiety, most of the cause occurs right before a task that I need to complete. A common event that induces anxiety for students is obviously exams, projects, or assignments. For me, these do induce the strong level of unease and jitteriness tha anxiety produces. The worst level of anxiety that I ever experienced was when I went on my first ever date. For the entire day I felt anxious and extremely nervous and as the time approached closer to the time I was supposed to meet her, my body started to shiver like how our bodies shiver when it’s cold outside. My friends definitely noticed whenever I handed them stuff and it was very difficult to be calm. Fortunately though, the anxiety did go away during the date and at that moment I was calm again. Luckily I have been working on fixing this by talking to people more often, calling people more often (I would get very nervous whenever I needed to call someone), and being more expressive of my thoughts.

I would say these experiences of mine strongly reflect the material we covered about anxiety because my anxiety always occurs in anticipation of an event that I plan to do like on my first date, as mentioned in the powerpoint as well, my shivering and fearfulness was persistent and very uncontrollable as it happened all throughout the day up until the date itself. I would definitely define this state of mind as extremely excessive when comparing to how other people would have reacted and anticipated their first date, or any future event for that matter. Anxiety is definitely a nuisance and it hinders everyone’s interactions with the environment around them.

 

Living in an Authoritative Household

During lecture 12’s discussion, we learned about three styles of parenting: authoritarian, permissive, and authoritative. Each of these styles are quite different when discussing their implementation and general philosophy. With the authoritarian practice we learned that parents tend to impose firm or strict rules on their children and expect that they obey those rules. With permissive parents, they will not say no to their kids. These types of parents will never impose any rules and most likely would tend to their children’s demands. Lastly, authoritative parents tend to be a mix of the two. Rules are set in place and expected to be followed, however, if a child is able to provide reasoning, they could negotiate and compromise with their parents. These types of parents are flexible and responsive to their kids, but they still have a general structure and set of rules that expect their kids to be obedient to.

When discussing these practices, I was caught reminiscing about my childhood and how I was raised. One thing I remember during my childhood was getting punished a lot. Now I know that sounds bad at first, but I will admit I was quite the troublemaker growing up. Along with that, I also remember that my parents, mostly my mother, had many rules, in which they expected us to follow. I believe that my parents imposed many rules on us because they had three kids (each a year apart) to look after and raise at the same time. Some rules that I remember pertained to curfews and time limits for things and since the three of us either enjoyed playing outside with friends, or play video games and toys, it makes sense that curfews and time limits had to be put in place. For example, my brother and I were forbidden to play Wii at all during the weekday, and we were limited to 1 hour on Saturday and 1 hour on Sunday. We even had a small white timer in front of the television in which as soon as the timer went off, we had to stop playing and do something else. If we didn’t stop playing after an hour, we would get grounded for an hour and sent to our room. For the most part, we obeyed those rules until we reached adolescence and after that it was the end of time limits. Another rule I remember was put in place whenever me or my siblings hung out with friends outside or over their house. If my memory serves me right, I think we had to come home around 8pm. We had the freedom of going anywhere around our neighborhood but as long as we told our parents where we were and we got back home before 8, we had no problems.

In general, our parents never let us stay past 8, play excessively, and respect one another. If we did not follow any of these rules, we usually got grounded for an hour or more, or if we really misbehaved, would get hit with a belt. Typical Hispanic parents would punish their kids by hitting them with belts and such, and I remember, just getting threatened to get hit with the belt was enough to get us to behave.

With that in mind, I would say that my parents used authoritarian practices when raising us. My parents were never lenient and willing to negotiate with the three of us and these authoritative practices really show because during adolescence we became more obedient, even if our parents didn’t threaten us with punishment.