Changed Over Time Essay

When reading over the questions this paper should discuss, and considering my current age is 54, I felt it best to think about what my past goals were, how they changed over time, and the insightfulness they added, to who I am today. As a child, I was reactive to fear. I experienced my first corporal or physical punishment when I was four. To this day, I remember the anxiety of that first experience. My father was Overassertive and used verbal abuse, as the buildup, to the physical part of the punishment when disciplining me. He would take a leather belt and double it, making it snap, to intimidate me. He wanted me to lay across his bed, with my arms at my side. Scared and crying, I tried to comply, but I’d flinch when he would strike me, so he continued to taunt me. After the second or third strike, I spontaneously scurried across the bed, diving to the other side, which he wasn’t expecting. This resulted in him lashing the belt wherever I was, like a whip.

My father would fly into fits of rage, threatening physical abuse, swearing and calling me names, shaming me and leaving me to feel like an absolute failure. Eventually, I became desensitized to the physical pain, but his words have haunted me, like an echo, throughout my life.

Being an only child, with both parents working full time, I was home alone a lot. When I was 11, I was molested by an older white man, who was our neighbor. Scared and confused about what had just happened, I thought it was somehow my fault. Knowing my father’s temper, and fearing that if he ever found out, he would severely beat me, I chose to keep it a secret.

As a teenager, my father use to tell me, I was lucky I had my looks, because I didn’t have much else going for me. He sometimes referred to me as a Riverboat Gambler, because the odds were stacked against me. For many years, I allowed fear to preside over my life and my father’s opinion, to shape my opinion, of