There are many theories as to how a person may become who he or she is. Some people believe that they are directly shaped by the events that happen in a person’s past, while other thinkers state that people go through different dialectical stages that led up to one’s current state. In this sense, there are many elements that one must be aware of in order to adequately analyze one’s life development.
Three of the most important development theorists are B. F. Skinner, John Watson and Erik Erikson; these three men founded Operant Conditioning, Behaviorism and Psychosocial Stage Theory, respectively. The first of these attempts to understand the relationship between behaviors and prizes, something that I learned at an early age through my parents’ wishes for me to be a successful woman at a young age. Nevertheless, Behaviorism would be more adequate to explain one of the ways that I developed an aversion towards losing money and moving. Finally, Erikson’s Psychosocial Stages help me understand the place I am in my life at the current moment in terms of my identity and relationships towards others. Through the integration of these different approaches, I feel that I can understand who I am now in terms of the influence of my history and development towards the future as well.
One of the most important defining characteristics of my personality is my determination to be the best I can be, especially in terms of my economy. From an early age, I have understood the value of hard work. I have been motivated to be successful throughout my whole life, constantly striving towards being a better worker and having more money.
Perseverance and determination are two qualities that have been engrained into my way of being. I have constantly fought for what I have wanted, refusing to stop, even when times were very trying. This has allowed me to have substantial savings in the stock market, which I plan to capitalize on a year after finishing college. Through my hard work and constancy, I have saved and invested in the stock market in the past few years, which has allowed me to save money in order to reap the benefits of my labor.
My family taught me the value of hard work through a series of methods that one could think of as Operant Conditioning. Through these different techniques, I learnt the importance of work and the value of money. Even though my parents were always kind towards me, they established a system of rewards for me: every chore I did around the house earned me a star on a board; after accumulating these different symbolic awards, I could exchange them for an actual toy or school supplies. They did not enforce work on me, but taught me the value of working through this method, which is related to Operant Conditioning.
In Skinner’s theory, a person related a behavior to its consequence, be it reward or punishment. This conduct must be something that the person can decide to do, such as working around the house. By awarding me with stars, my parents modeled my behavior towards work, allowing me to understand its importance in a fun and simple way. In this way, they molded my behavior through the outcomes related to it (Staddon & Cerutti, 2003, p. 115). Furthermore, through this method, they also showed me the importance of saving up, as the best rewards cost more stars. My current orientation towards work, perseverance and savings could be understood through this childhood series of events in which my parents set up a reward system for my behavior.
Nevertheless, Operant Conditioning cannot account for everything in my developmental experience; some of my present life and development can be better explained through Behaviorism, as thought of by John Watson. In this theory, there is also an association to a behavior, yet this usually comes before. As such, it attempts to explain the relationship between a stimulus and its effect in the form of a conduct.
This is how I can understand the aversion I have towards moving and losing money. Even though both of these may commonly cause disgust, the reactions that they cause in me are more extreme. Almost everybody hates to lose money, while moving may just be seen as an adventure or a new experience. Nevertheless, just the thought of moving may have emotional consequences on me, and sometimes slight physical ones as well.
I understand this to be due to the relationship between my parents’ bickering around these two issues. Even though they were usually very kind and nice towards me and each other as well, these two issues made them constantly fight. This made me associate both of these events to negative emotional experiences. My parents fighting was the conditioned stimulus, which made me feel upset; to this, the unconditioned stimulus of losing money or moving was associated, as they both happened at the same time. As a consequence, I ended up feeling upset with the thought of moving or losing money. In this way, I developed a new relationship between the stimulus and the response by constructing on top of an old one (Brink, 2008, p. 96).
However, I have to say that all of this moving also had important positive consequences: my family and I became more united, and I learnt the importance of investing towards always having more money. In this sense, I like to think of myself as breaking the mold. I was able to learn from these problematic issues so as to be more financially solvent than them. Even though both of my parents were hard workers, they usually did not have much money; as a consequence, I grew up in a rather poor household. Furthermore, my self-accomplishment is also noticeable in that I have gone on to college, when neither of them even finished high school. Therefore, it is important to note that I have been able to move beyond these negative conditioning experiences, in order to use them as catapults for my success.
At my twenty-five years of age, I should be in the intimacy versus isolation stage. In this part of one’s life, the tension is between finding a suitable mate with which to spend one’s life and being alone. Even though I do I would be lying if I said I was not interested in finding my soul mate, this is not a problem that defines my life at the moment. Currently, I am more focused on earning money and saving up so I can enjoy my future comfortably.
As a whole, this theory seems to be somewhat outdated. I believe that this could have been one of my parents’ main concerns when they were my age, yet it is not common for my contemporaries to be soliciting a suitor at the moment. The age for this has been set back, with many people starting to think about this in their late twenties.
I think that the subsequent stage, Generativity vs. Stagnation is more adequate to describe my current situation. “Generativity, then is primarily the concern in establishing and guiding the next generation the concept is meant to include productivity and creativity” (Slater, 2003, p. 55). Even though this generally refers to offspring and their place in the world, I believe that it also fits for how one wants to live the rest of one’s life. Right now, I feel that I am more interested in earning money and securing my future than in finding somebody to spend the rest of my life with.
In conclusion, these different developmental theories all serve towards explaining who I am today. Through their explications, I can better understand my life and who I have become. These different theorists have developed ways of thinking about one’s identity that are all incomplete, yet can be used to understand one’s life and those of others. I know that I will keep developing in the future, sustaining my way of constantly rising above the challenges.
Reference List
Brink, T. L. (2008). Psychology: A Student Friendly Approach. Houston: Rice.
Slater, C. L. (2003). Generativity versus stagnation: An elaboration of erikson's adult stage of human development. Journal of Adult Development, 10(1): 53–65.
Staddon, J. E. R. & Cerutti, D. T. (2003). Operant Conditioning. Annual Review of Psychology, 54(1): 115–144. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.54.101601.145124.
Reference List
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Rizzolo, G. S. (2015). Rethinking Tavistock: Enactment, the Analytic Third, and the Implications for Group Relations. In R. Grossmark & F. Wright (Eds.), The One and the Many: Relational Approaches to Group Psychotherapy (pp. 215-241). New York: Routledge.
