in 
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Emotional
maturity has little to do with chronological maturity. It may come before you
become an adult, or you may have been an adult for decades, and still not have
attained any kind of emotional maturity.
"In
our emotional lives we tend to attract to us - and have relationships with –
people who have attained (or stagnated at) the same level of
emotional maturity as we have." That quote is from my latest book Emotional
Unavailability & Neediness: Two Sides of the Same Coin).
What
that quote implies is very important. You might have a relationship with
someone who is very sophisticated in all manner of mundane ways, and who is,
nevertheless, emotionally immature. You may have noticed this. You may think to
yourself: how can he/she be so childish (in that emotional
sense), and yet so worldly and intelligent in all those other ways?
You
- or anyone else - didn't necessarily grow up in a "balanced" way on
all different levels. So you might have an advanced degree from an institution
of higher learning, or you might be a whiz on Wall Street and be pulling in
millions, or you might be a genius in quantum physics, or you might be an
amazing ballerina or concert pianist who has fought tirelessly to reach that
degree of perfection, or you might be the person who invented a late-gen chip
that beats all other chips for data storage, or you might be the world's number
one tennis player, or that actress who won so many awards. The point is, you
may have developed on many levels to an ultra-high degree, but your emotional
growth and development - in a word, your emotional maturity - may have not kept
pace with the rest.
Why
this happens is easily understandable, and here are just a few of the reasons:
- We are generally raised by parents who themselves
lacked emotional maturity - not because they were
immature in everything, but because they, in turn, were raised by their emotionally
immature parents - and what we don't see - in our parents or
caretakers - as we are growing up, is that much harder to acquire. In
other words, they (and we) lacked the appropriate role models in this
regard.
- As a corollary of the above point, due to their
emotional immaturity, our parents frequently saddle us with emotional
situations or events that cause us to internalize something subconsciously
that hurts, and on that same visceral level we interpret it as danger, and
that is the place where our defense mechanisms begin to raise their toxic
heads (which are the reasons why psychotherapists such as myself exist).
- Our society doesn't exactly honor the 'inner' quest;
hence self-reflection is becoming a lost art and therefore the above two
points, while perhaps vaguely there in our understanding, are not
consciously taken into account and then worked on, honed, and refined in
our desire to grow up in that way - emotionally - that may so very much -
and so very long - hinder and hamper our lives.
- Therefore awareness and being conscious of the self are
not generally qualities we pick up at home or school ... not even at
church.
- Finally, due to all of the above, we also do not tend to have role models while we are growing up, that teach us how to love ourselves, and that hinders coming of age emotionally in crucial ways.
So
back to the quote at the beginning of this post: In our emotional lives
we tend to attract to us - and have relationships with – people who have
attained (or stagnated at) the same level of emotional maturity as we
have.
Due
to the lack of development in the emotional part of your psyche, and due to the
reasons it is like that (as I have briefly illustrated in this post),
wherever you are at emotionally - let's equate it to grade 5 at school - you
will (ideally) need to grow in order to progress. How do children in grade 5
tend to learn? They go to class with others at the grade 5 level. And so we
attract to us and have relationships with people who have attained the same
level of emotional maturity as we have. At that level there will - eventually,
after the first glow has worn off - be friction. You may blame it on your
partner. But once you are aware enough that you are part of this dance, and
start to take responsibility for yourself and all you think, feel, say, and do,
is when you start to change and grow. If you are lucky, your partner will do
the same, and by growing together, your relationship has high possibilities for
prospering. If your partner is not interested in growth, or prefers to remain
at the status quo, you might have to look elsewhere for another individual who
is - now - at this new level you have attained in your emotional maturity (we
might call it grade 6). And of course it could be the other way around: that it
is your partner who has taken steps to growth, and that it is you who wish to
remain in your comfort zone.
*********************************
Also visit my book website: www.gabriellakortsch.com where you may download excerpts or read quotations from any of my books. My latest book Emotional Unavailability & Neediness: Two Sides of the Same Coin is out globally on Amazon in print & Kindle. You can also obtain it (or any of my other books) via Barnes & Noble.
Books by Dr. Gabriella Kortsch (English)
Books by Dr. Gabriella Kortsch (Spanish & German - coming Spring 2015)
My blog posts are also featured on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest & you can find me on Instagram
Meine Bücher auf Deutsch ab Frühjahr 2015
Mis libros en español a partir de la primavera de 2015
Mis libros en español a partir de la primavera de 2015
Angefangen mit Rewiring the Soul - auf Deutsch: Deine Seele und Du (Blog hier), werden meine Bücher weltweit auf Amazon ab Frühjahr 2015 erhaltbar sein.
Empezando con Rewiring the Soul - en español: Reconectar con el Alma (blog aquí), se podrán encontrar mis libros globalmente en Amazon en español a partir de la primavera de 2015.
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