Author Archives: jam6683

Sick to my stomach

1 Reply

Sometimes there is just that one food or beverage that no matter how appealing it looks, you avoid it at all cost because it makes you sick to your stomach. When a food or beverage causes an adverse effect, usually nausea or vomiting, to the point where you are afraid to have it again at a later time it is known as taste aversion. A reaction to the food or beverage may or may not happen right after ingestion, but can happen up to 6 hours later. For some people, they may be able to get over their aversion after some time, whether it is months or years, but for others they could have that aversion for the rest of their life.

When I was in elementary school, like any other child, I LOVED chocolate milk. I always got it with my lunch no matter what they were serving, and on the rare occasion the only time I did not have chocolate milk was when I felt like having milk and cereal together.  But one day my love for chocolate milk disappeared in a heartbeat.

I grabbed my carton of chocolate milk after stepping of the lunch line like I did during lunch every day.  I sat down at my table and open the carton; except when I went to drink my chocolate milk this time it tasted nothing like my beloved chocolate milk usually did. With that first sip of milk, I felt my lunch wanting to come back out the way it went it. I thought that the carton of milk just went bad before their time, so I attempted to drink another carton of milk. But it was the same outcome. I felt my lunch wanting to come back up. Realizing that it was futile, I gave up on eating or drinking anything chocolate related. To this day I still have an aversion to chocolate because of this event. I thought I got better at one point as I was able to eat brownies, but the aversion came right back and once again.

Aversions to certain foods or beverages could be an ingrained survival mechanism that has some sort of evolutionary advantage. Especially with allergies, people are not born with a list that says “this is what I am allergic to” rather we have to learn to trial and error. For me I am not allergic to chocolate the way I am allergic to seafood, but the nausea and vomiting someone experiences from taste aversion could be the body’s natural way of saying “this is bad. DON’T eat!”

Reading Equals Needing Glasses

1 Reply

As a child for some reason I had always wanted glasses; I thought they were cool and wanted my own pair. But at the same time I thought I would have 20/20 vision forever as it seemed that only my brother’s and my dad had bad enough eyesights that warranted them needing glasses. I thought that I had inherited my mother’s eyesight and that since I was a girl I would not end up needing glasses as it seemed that needing glasses ran only on the male side of my family. But I was wrong.

When I was in the 8th grade I began noticing problems with my vision, but I didn’t pay too much attention to it as it was not really affecting me. But by the end of that year it became a very big problem! I could not see a thing any of my teachers wrote on the board or put on the overhead clearly even when I sat in the front row of the class. I was no more that 5 feet away from the board and even while squinting I still could not make out what was written very well. Turns out I had inherited my dad’s bad eyesight instead and was in serious need of glasses.

So that summer I ended up getting glasses. I was like a whole new world once everything was in focus and crystal clear. I found out that my not being able to see objects clearly far away, but being able to see objects up close clearly was called nearsightedness. But that was as far as I knew about the issue. I figured that since my eyesight started getting blurry around the time that I started to play handheld video games that was the cause; but as I learned in this class correlation does NOT equal causation.

Turns out that my problem of nearsightedness came from my love for books which I had inherited from my mom. What happens with nearsightedness is that the eye is a little longer that the normal shape it should be, so by the time the image passes through the lens (the part of the eye involved with this issue) and reaches the retina the that image is out of focus. So by getting glasses my problem was fixed as adding a lens on top of the lens of the eye allowed for the image to be pushed back a bit so when it did pass through my lens and reach my retina everything would be in focus.

So though my love for books is the cause for my needing glasses, I’m not too upset. I’m still able to read and I got my wish of being able to wear glasses (I guess I jinxed myself as a child). If it wasn’t for this class I would not have found out the cause of my eye problem and would not have gained a deeper appreciation for the eye and vision.

Claustrophobia and Psychoanaylsis

1 Reply

There are many ideas in psychology as to what shapes a person. There’s the classics like nurture vs nature, behavioral and sociocultural, but psychoanalysis is the perspective which I think has the most profound effect on shaping a person especially a young child. As a child many things can be traumatizing and be very difficult to get over. As a result the child who is now an adult will act in a certain way due. This is what psychoanalysis is; the explaining of personalities and psychological problems due to past childhood events, usually traumatic ones.

The first ten years of my life my family of six and I lived in the Bronx in a two bedroom apartment that had limited amenities. One of those things was a washer and dryer. So it was normal for my mom and I to go to the laundry mat down the street when ever we needed clean clothes. What was supposed to be a normal trip of washing clothes and staring at the clothes as it went through the spin cycle turned into a nightmare that I will never forget.

As our family was not financial well off, we always had to wait until the last possible second to wash our clothes. Washing clothes once a week was not possible and as you can imagine a family of six would have a lot of clothes piled up by the time laundry day came. It was common for my mother and I to be in the laundry mat for a good four hours between the washing, drying, folding clothes and waiting on machines to be open.

So long story short being at the laundry mat for a while made me be in need of using the restroom that particular day. Not wanting anyone to come in as there was only one restroom in the place, I locked the door, but without my knowledge the lock was broken. I ended up being locked in the bathroom and it was the most terrified I can ever remember being. I screamed and pounded on the door, but with numerous machines and people in one place the noise I was making reached no ones ears. I have no clue how long it was before I was found, but I was extremely relieved to be out of that bathroom. For a long time after I would not go into bathrooms where you had to lock the door unless someone was standing outside.

Being in such a small space with no way out was so traumatizing for me I became claustrophobic as a result and I still am. Though I am not scared to an extent of bathrooms anymore, but I still hate small tight spaces. Even being in a elevator is a no go for me even though I know it will open eventually. I’m just afraid that it will get stuck so I make sure to go out of my way to avoid elevators. This one event in my nineteen years of life has shaped a psychological problem in my life which is what psychoanalysis is deemed.