Jacob Nelson

Psych 110

College Of Marin

Nora This paper will be about my good friend Nora. Right now she is eighteen. Im going to write about her parents divorce when she was nine months old and how her dads subsequent disappearance affected her ability to trust and believe in others. Im going to show how this has changed Noras perceptions of things and how it has altered Noras relationships to people over the years. Nora was born in December of 1992 in Horgen, Switzerland. Her father is Egyptian and her mother is German. When she was nine months old her father left them. She has a sister, who is a few years older than her. When Nora was five she started attending primary school as is normal for five year olds. School was fine until she was eleven and in sixth grade. She broke up with her then boyfriend and the other kids turned against her and started mobbing her. Due to this she was more interested in taking the entrance exams for the middle/high school Kantonsschule Freudenberg in Zurich, Switzerland. She saw this as a way to avoid more mobbing and her grandparents also pressured her into taking the exams. She started middle school at the age of twelve and the next two years were relatively fine. She met her first sexual boyfriend at the age of fourteen, when she was in eighth grade. Later that year she decided to switch schools when it came time for high school. Nora switched to the neighboring school of Kantonsschule Enge. Still fourteen she found out that her boyfriend, to whom she had lost her virginity, had been cheating on her throughout the whole of their relationship. This was devastating to Nora and completely destroyed her trust in him. Nora got over him and continued on at her new school making new friends and learning new things.
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Jacob Nelson

Psych 110

College Of Marin

Nora excelled at school until she was sixteen and in her sophomore year when she began having trouble keeping up with certain classes and also began having numerous migraines which kept her from attending class occasionally although they mainly hit her at night. Noras grades started to pick up in junior year and as of now Nora is about three months away from graduating high school. She met her current boyfriend when she was sixteen and they have broken up a few times, but they are still together though Nora doesnt trust him like she used to. Her father leaving her at such a young age has left definite marks on her although she is very well adjusted most of the time. Nora has always had more male than female friends to compensate for lacking a male role model at home and because of this missing authority figure she also has a hard time dealing with authority figures elsewhere in her life. Noras main issue however is her lack of trust and inability to forgive people. She can usually trust people when she meets them, but she will often misinterpret or overemphasize certain things and feel betrayed and once that happens she will most likely never forgive that person again and will never be able to completely trust them even if she is able to realize they havent done anything wrong. This happens to most visibly in her relationships, where she is oftentimes very distrusting and can quickly lose faith in the relationship. She is also very angry at her father for doing what he did and she wants to confront him about it in person though she says she has no interest in contacting him for any other reason. This has made her a very confronting person and unlike many people who are more passive aggressive she will scream at someone when she becomes angry at them and wont back down until she feels she has got her point across. She

Jacob Nelson

Psych 110

College Of Marin

also feels badly treated very fast something which I think stems from her absent father and this can also lead to her releasing her emotions in an extremely loud manner. Noras feelings towards others are pretty normal for a single child in at least in my mind. She has a very good relationship to her mother, who raised Nora by herself, and she thinks her mom did a great job, and she also trusts her implicitly. On the other hand she understandably has no trust whatsoever in her father, and she has no interest in a relationship. She just wants to confront him so she can hopefully get rid of her feelings of anger and move on. She feels unable to protect herself and those she holds dear, which stems from her being too young to protect her mother from her father when he left. She also feels uninformed sometimes, which comes from her mother and older sister skirting around the issue of her father when she was young to protect her. Nora told me that she knew something was wrong and them not telling her these things made her feel little and unimportant. She also gets her confronting nature from the fact that she wants to confront her father and has wanted to do so for a very large part of her life. Nora is very kind to her friends and she is definitely less critical of them than she is of her boyfriends. She can be very judgmental when people are involved with hard drugs like her father was and which lead to him leaving her. Noras other main issue is inferiority. She says she sometimes feels inferior to others for no reason at all. Nora told me that when she was younger, around five to ten years old, she would ask herself why her father left and her answer was oftentimes, because I am not good enough. This probably led to feeling of inferiority. I imagine this was not helped when at the age of eleven she was mobbed heavily by her fellow classmates. In the psycho-social stage of

Jacob Nelson

Psych 110

College Of Marin

industry versus inferiority that mobbing could hardly have been a good thing and probably led to stronger feelings of inferiority. She is still quite industrious though so I must assume she had already reached a balance prior to those events and they were not able to affect her too strongly. A third possible source for feelings of inferiority comes from her grandparents, who she spends a lot of time with. Noras grandparents are extremely demanding and they have very high expectations for everyone they care about. As it was described to me they employ the induction style of parenting, which would be fine, but they clearly put conditions on their love and didnt say the three most important things a child needs to hear enough and if they did it was because she had aced an exam or something of the sort. A combination of all of these things has led Nora too often feel inferior to others. I am relatively certain that her dads disappearance and her subsequent questioning had the largest part in this, but the other contributing factors are definitely important too. These issues progression over the years have had opposite progressions to each other. Nora used to feel inferior a lot in elementary school, but since middle school her self-esteem has improved dramatically and she has feelings of being less than everyone else much less frequently. Nora explained to me that nowadays she instead gets very angry when she feels someone is treating her inferiorly to other people. However her trust issues are definitely getting worse. Her current boyfriend with whom she has been together with since she was sixteen has given her no real reasons to mistrust him and he is usually quite reliable, but they constantly fight with one another because she cant trust him. The reasons for this distrust are too me quite abstract and not worth distrusting someone over. They would take too long to explain in this paper. But I will say that her boyfriend has never cheated on her and she
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Jacob Nelson

Psych 110

College Of Marin

acknowledges that he would never do so, they are clearly in love and complement each others personalities well, and yet she has a very hard time trusting him. Nora uses to defense mechanisms of sublimation and acting out to cope with her problems. When confronted with an issue she will either stay busy or scream at someone until she feels better. She has a very well developed Super Ego and because of this she has strong opinions on right and wrong. Going over Freuds psycho-sexual stages leads me to believe that she may be orally fixated. She is a heavy smoker and has been since she was fourteen or fifteen and while not being passive she often wants to be taken care of by others. As for Eriksons psycho-social stages of development, she has a good balance in every stage she has thus far finished except for the Initiative versus Guilt stage, where I believe she has a little too much guilt as Nora sometimes has problems starting things and pursuing her goals. She has a strong identity and is not easily influenced by peer pressure. My prognosis based on my interviews of Nora is that she will most likely continue to be a nice, friendly human being, who gets along with most people most of the time, but sometimes has a hard time with herself and her boyfriends. Her trust issues will most likely continue, and I cannot see her and her boyfriends relationship lasting much longer unless she can somehow all of a sudden trust him. This will probably not happen. I think she should work on forgiving people and to start she should try and forgive her father or at least seek counseling to get over his actions and her reactions and feelings towards said actions. It will probably take a while and be time-consuming, but without working on her trust issues I fail to see how she can successfully complete Eriksons Intimacy versus Isolation stage of psycho-social development.

Jacob Nelson

Psych 110

College Of Marin

Her belief in her own inferiority is already subsiding, but in this case I also believe that talking about it with someone would help her out in the long run. Being a teenager causes feelings of grandeur in many people and perhaps that is causing her not feeling inferior in the last couple years.