Reaction/Opinion Paper

EXAMPLE of ONE PAGE WRITING

Student NAME

Developmental Psychology

Dr. Claypoole

August 21, 20XX

Psychological Systems

In my opinion, being sexually abused as an adolescent affects pretty much all the mental processes used in a person’s making meaning of experiences their thought processes that lead them to action. Even though I feel like all of processes are affected in some way or another, maybe the ones that are most evident are motivation, emotion, and memory. The damage may me more in a physical situation for the individual but there are additional effects in the other two Developmental systems. All three Developmental systems are connected and impact each other in varying ways. What happens in a physical/biological system then can have slight or monumental impacts in both the Psychological and Social systems throughout the upcoming developmental life stages.

Although change in all of the psychological processes is inevitable due to change factors such as maturation, life experiences, self-directing, when an adolescent is sexually abused they are faced with more than just a normal life experience. Sexually abuses people must learn to take the needed steps to recovery or their entire life could be spent in turmoil. These individuals are forced into situations that are extremely traumatic and can cause permanent damage. I think that a lot of what we can see as the effects of these types of situations is simply the individuals coping mechanism. These can manifest out in emotional, psychological and even behavioral responses to future and present situations. In the case of this adolescent girl her social/behavior may change towards young men, certain environments and even in social settings that force the emotions to arise. This a combination of systems being impacting and having to cope with the varying damage from the sexual abuse.

For instance, an adolescent girl can become devastated after having been sexually abused and thus simply give up on life. This reaction results in lack of motivation in school, in relationships, in socializing, etc. Or maybe the lack of motivation has nothing to do with the individuals “giving up on life” but rather being incapable of being motivated to do anything because they are so wrapped up in reliving the abuse in their minds and unable to concentrate on putting their attention anywhere else. Finally, no motivation can stem from sexual abuse in that the adolescent involved withdrawals completely or develops an antisocial personality and simply has no desire to excel in anything in life.

The reason I feel emotion is one of the more major psychological processes effected by sexual abuse is that while adolescent girl are already extremely emotional due to nature and their maturation, after being sexually abused most adolescents don’t know how to deal with all of the thoughts and feelings they are having which can result in their being extremely sensitive or completely unresponsive to situations that would normally elicit an emotional reaction.

Finally, I think another major psychological process that would be affected by sexual abuse is memory. My reasoning is that anytime an individual experiences an unpleasant experience they attempt to repress that memory. If they are successful in this, depending on how often they were sexually abused, they could be having serious memory issues. Another psychological effect can be in the personal image that the girl has on herself and how she then copes with the self-concept. A common psychological effect is a self-blame for the abuse which creates a negative self-image cycle. Once this cycle is established in an adolescent it becomes extremely difficult to erase and reprogram the thoughts of self-image.

Although I chose to focus only on motivation, emotion, and memory, I don’t feel like they are the only psychological processes affected by sexual abuse. Life experienced as horrible as sexual change everything about an adolescent’s psychological system.