Identifying Emotional Immaturity
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If emotional immaturity has felt epidemic to you lately, you are in good company. It is very challenging to work with emotional immaturity in families, workplaces, and communities. The impact for you can be self-doubt, anxiety, unworthiness, frustration, exhaustion, and shame if you grew up in a home or are currently in a personal or professional relationship where emotions, needs, or wants are not met with care, honesty, and maturity.
Identifying emotionally immature adults can guide you to communicate with them in new ways, and cultivate the emotionally mature and joyful relationships you want. Below are ways to identify emotional immaturity (without shame or blame). Second, there are ways to shift communication with emotionally immature adults, according to one expert. And, third, there are ways to cultivate emotionally mature relationships that bring spaciousness and joy to our lives.
Identifying emotional immaturity
Below are three key types of questions I ask in my class, Cultivating Emotional Maturity1, that you can ask yourself to identify if you are currently engaged in an emotionally immature relationship. This check includes connecting with your brain, body, and spirit.
Brain: Does the other person listen respectfully to you and hear what you have to say? Do you leave with a sense of clarity or confusion?
Body: How does your body feel when you are with this person, anticipating time with them, or recovering after time spent with them? (Identify specifically if you experience racing heart, tension, headaches, fatigue, or upset stomach.)
Spirit: Do you feel uplifted and encouraged to be yourself? Or pressure to please or conform to what they want of you? How energized or deflated do you feel when you leave them?
Including your brain, body, and spirit to gather information can help you practice trusting yourself — thoughts, sensations, and a felt sense — something that children of emotionally immature parents do not often learn to do. This self-doubt can carry into adulthood and children of emotionally immature parents can find themselves with bosses, friends, or partners with similar traits.
Dr. Lindsay Gibson writes in her books on adult children of emotionally immature parents some other helpful ways to identify people who are emotionally mature2. She does this without blame, but she does name it directly without tip-toeing around the topic. This allows people who have been at the mercy of emotionally immature adults to change course and take actions that may be more effective than how they were engaging previously.
Emotionally immature adults often express these traits:
- A preoccupation with their way.
- Low ability, if any, for true apologies and repair in relationships.
- Difficulty giving and receiving support or feedback freely in balanced ways that do not include strings attached, ultimatums, or other manipulations.
Strategies for communicating with emotionally immature adults
Gibson suggests that the strategies of how to engage with people who have these qualities are different from how you would communicate with emotionally mature people. (Emotionally mature people include those who can listen and be present with others, are able to offer and take repair attempts in relationships, and can give and take support and feedback freely, among other qualities.)
She suggests the rules of engagement once you have identified emotional immaturity are as follows:
- Express what you need to say clearly and calmly, and let go of how the other person might feel about it. The other person’s response is out of your control, although you may have been taught it is your responsibility. This is hard to do, but a must.
- Focus on the outcome desired of a single interaction (i.e. setting a boundary), not the whole relationship. This step may also require acknowledging grief and loss of the desired relationship that has not been possible.
- Manage the interaction rather than engage emotionally. This helps prevent emotional burnout from each interaction.
Relationships Essential Reads
How do we cultivate emotional maturity and joy in our lives?
Cultivating emotional maturity in your life does not require you to continually subject yourself to mistreatment from others. “Going high” often requires stronger boundaries, not weaker ones. It also requires tuning into yourself, clarifying for yourself what you need and want, and mustering the courage to follow through with what you need to do. Look for the qualities below in others who you would like to be around and nurture these qualities within yourself as well2.
Realistic and reliable, which means being able to:
- Work with reality rather than fighting it
- Feel and think at the same time
- Have consistent and reliable actions
- Not take everything personally
Respectful and reciprocal, which means being able to:
- Respect boundaries
- Give back
- Be both flexible and truthful
- Apologize and make amends
Responsive, which means behavior that leads both parties to:
- Feel safe, seen, and understood
- Be comforted and offer comfort freely
- Be playful and relaxed
- Reflect and change course as needed
Managing relationships with healthy boundaries can provide more energy to continue maturing ourselves, as well as free up energy for joy and creativity. Norman Fischer writes in Taking Our Places, “…there is a way of becoming truly mature — spiritually, psychologically, and emotionally — without closing down, without resignation, without a loss of delight, and without ever giving up devotion to the pursuit of truth.” Maturity as he and a group of children he worked with defined it, maturity is being “…responsible without being boring, experienced without being closed-minded, self-accepting without being shut off to change and improvement, … stable without being inert, strong without being brittle3.”
I would add, it includes being sincere but not too serious, and carefree without being careless. Simply stated, rather than making yourself small to make others comfortable, you can make room to fully be yourself.
Spiritual, psychological, and emotional maturity
Source: Jessica Del Pozo/Used with permission
