I lost my cousin and best friend when I was twelve years old. To this day, I have never had such a sad time in my life as mourning and suffering from his loss. But then that incident changed my perspective about how I see and handle different situations. Whenever I hear of any deaths I reflect and remember that incident and now I know how to handle any death in my life. Children develop and develop an understanding of the world around them with regard to the cognitive theory (Lahey 2004) and so did I. This has served as a conditioning that enables me handle death soberly at least after that incident. Behavior can therefore be said to be shaped by exposure to a certain event in life (Santrock 2008)
Classical conditioning states that a person learns a new behavior by association (Woolfolk 2007). It is from this notion that I must admit I learnt on how to deal with stress associated with the loss of a person close to me. From the very time that I experienced the loss of a very close person to me, I felt that the world had come to a standstill. After that, I got to hear about people passing on, some who I knew and some who I didn’t. As time went by, the news didn’t weigh me down as much as they did the first time.
The memory of the event remains fresh in my mind as if it happened yesterday. This is so because Mary was my best friend and cousin. Her loss was immense that the image of her and her casket continued to play in my head for very many years. I must say it maybe because we had met and played together in our backyard just a few days before she met her death.
References
Lahey, B. B. (2004). Psychology: An Introduction. 8th Ed. Boston: McGraw Hill
Santrock, J. W. (2008). Educational Psychology. 3rd Ed. Boston: McGraw Hill
Woolfolk, A. (2007). Educational Psychology. Boston: Pearson
