My Experience of Overcoming Obstacles In Life After High School

Life through middle school was an extraordinary feeling that I had to go through. For most of the kids, middle school was the best time in their life. But unfortunately, it wasn’t for me. Instead of being one supportive unit, our home consisted of incessant fighting, friction, and worry. It was a difficult time when for me when my family was falling apart. For the childhood reflection paper, I would like to apply Maslow’s Hierarchy theory to my own life using my childhood factors.

Maslow’s Hierarchy theory is referred to as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It is one of the best-known theories of motivation and encouragement in human behavior. While most of the psychologist tended to focus on complex and problematic behaviors and factors that influenced human development, however, Maslow was different. He was more interested in researching what makes people happy, and what should they do in order to achieve them. The theory is represented as a pyramid with five-tier model of human needs.

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The needs are: physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization. According to Maslow, the most basic need must emerge first before people can proceed to their psychological and self-fulfillment needs, and they can only move up the hierarchy one level at a time.

Needs at the bottom of the pyramid are basic physical requirements, which includes the need for air, food, water, sleep, and health. When once these lower-level needs have been met, people can move on to the next level of needs, which are for safety and security.

As people progress up the pyramid, needs become increasingly psychological and social. Soon, the need for love, friendship, and intimacy become important. Further up the pyramid, the need for personal esteem and feelings of accomplishment take priority. But due to the divorce of my parents, I felt depressed, guilty like it was my fault my parents split up, embarrassed, and abandoned by my dad who moved out of the home. Therefore, my need for love from my parents never met. “Who would I go with? What would I say? What would I have to do to make my parents back together?” These were only a few of my thoughts on occasion while drifting off to sleep. I hated it, I hated being stuck in the middle of two sides, I hated how I have to be on one side and not on the other, and hated how it would hurt them. Everything was happening all at once and I was only 13 years old. It was the year that I was about to go to high school, the year that could completely change my future.

It was enough to make me feel like I couldn’t handle it, which made me wonder why they would add more to me to worry about. The divorce also had lifelong effects on me and I am still feeling them. I was always cautious about trusting others because I knew they could leave me again just like my parent. Throughout my middle school and high school years, I didn’t really have many friends. There was always an invisible wall that separate my friends and I due to my trust issues. I was overly suspicious, emotionally distant, and unconsciously replay event from the past. Little did I know, the divorce also affected me on my feelings of accomplishment. After the split up, my parents decided I would live with my dad in the United States. I felt like there weren’t enough tears to express how hurt I was inside after all of the sudden change. Leaving which meant that I had to leave everything behind, and start from the beginning which would affect on my academic achievement. So many strange things were going with me as language, environment, people, and the new lifestyle. I had a hard time learning a new language, and adapt to a new environment.

Since I was not able and not lucky to live with both of my parents in our home country, but with a lot of helps from family, and teachers, I learned a lot about my personal qualities such as my strengths, weaknesses, work habits, and attitudes over things. New environment, new people, and new education have turned me into a conscious, individual, hard-working girl. By making things positively over the negative, I overcame my obstacles by worried less about the divorce of my parents, and focused more on my academics and myself because I feel it would me keep my mind off of my family problems. More than that, I tried to figure out what I was really passionate about, and learned how to get help from the people around me. Lastly, I tried to make friends to release all the stress and worry in myself. These experiences impacted my ability to problem solve and focus more on living in the moment compared to keep sticking in the past. It also taught me a lesson on how I have to accept changes, challenge myself, and come out of my comfort zone wasn’t always a bad idea.

Being raised by divorced parents made me a stronger person than I thought I was. I was able to forgive my parents because I had a better understanding of what they were going through compared to how I was blaming them. I realized that holding on to so much of bitterness made me a hateful person and brought me down. I then learned about the beauty of individuality and owning up to who I am. The Maslow’s Hierarchy theory helped me realize what make me happy, and what should I do to achieve them. I found the values of accepting and challenging myself from all the difficulties which led me to a better future and guided me to achieve my goals. I realized how the most basic need must emerge first before I can proceed to my psychological and self-fulfillment needs. Those difficulties tested how strong I am and it shaped me to be a confident girl with a lot of experiences.