How to Test Your Emotional Maturity

One of the more puzzling aspects of the way we are built is that our emotional development does not necessarily or automatically keep pace with our physical growth.

We can be fifty-five on the outside and four and a half in terms of our impulses and manner of communicating, just as we can be on the threshold of adulthood physically while an emotional sage within.

In order to assess our own and others' emotional development, we can make use of a single deceptively simple question that quickly gets to the core of our underlying emotional age.

When someone on whom we depend emotionally lets us down, disappoints us, or leaves us hanging and uncertain, what is our characteristic way of responding? There are three methods which indicate emotionally immature behaviour.

We might grade ourselves on a scale of 1 to 10 according to our propensities.

Firstly, we might sulk.

That is, we simultaneously get very upset while refusing to explain to the person who has upset us what the problem might actually be.

The insult to our pride and dignity feels too great.

We are too internally fragile to reveal that we've been knocked.

We hope against hope that another person might simply magically understand what they've done and fix it without us needing to speak.

Rather, as an infant who hasn't yet mastered language, might have a hope that a parent would spontaneously enter their minds and just guess what was ailing them.

Secondly, we might get furious.

Another response is to get extremely and disproportionately angry with the disappointing person.

Our fury may look powerful, but no one who felt powerful would have any need for such titanic rage.

Inside, we feel broken, at sea and bereft.

but our only way of reasserting control is to mimic an aggrieved emperor or taunted tiger.

Our insults and viciousness are, in their coded ways, admissions of terror and defencelessness.

Our pain is profoundly poignant, our manner of dealing with it a good deal sadder.

Thirdly, we might go cold.

It takes a lot of courage to admit to someone who's hurt us that we care, that they have a power over us, that a key bit of our life is in their hands.

It may be a lot easier to put up a strenuous wall of indifference.

At precisely the moment when we are most emotionally vulnerable to a loved one's behaviour, we insist that we haven't noticed a slight and wouldn't give a damn anyway.

We may not simply be pretending.

Remaining in touch with our wounds may have become conclusively intolerable.

Not feeling anything may have replaced the enormous threat of being fully alive.

One of the more puzzling aspects of the way we are built is that our emotional development does not necessarily or automatically keep pace with our physical growth.

We can be fifty-five on the outside and four and a half in terms of our impulses and manner of communicating, just as we can be on the threshold of adulthood physically while an emotional sage within.

In order to assess our own and others' emotional development, we can make use of a single deceptively simple question that quickly gets to the core of our underlying emotional age.

When someone on whom we depend emotionally lets us down, disappoints us, or leaves us hanging and uncertain, what is our characteristic way of responding? There are three methods which indicate emotionally immature behaviour.

We might grade ourselves on a scale of 1 to 10 according to our propensities.

Firstly, we might sulk.

That is, we simultaneously get very upset while refusing to explain to the person who has upset us what the problem might actually be.

The insult to our pride and dignity feels too great.

We are too internally fragile to reveal that we've been knocked.

We hope against hope that another person might simply magically understand what they've done and fix it without us needing to speak.

Rather, as an infant who hasn't yet mastered language, might have a hope that a parent would spontaneously enter their minds and just guess what was ailing them.

Secondly, we might get furious.

Another response is to get extremely and disproportionately angry with the disappointing person.

Our fury may look powerful, but no one who felt powerful would have any need for such titanic rage.

Inside, we feel broken, at sea and bereft.

but our only way of reasserting control is to mimic an aggrieved emperor or taunted tiger.

Our insults and viciousness are, in their coded ways, admissions of terror and defencelessness.

Our pain is profoundly poignant, our manner of dealing with it a good deal sadder.

Thirdly, we might go cold.

It takes a lot of courage to admit to someone who's hurt us that we care, that they have a power over us, that a key bit of our life is in their hands.

It may be a lot easier to put up a strenuous wall of indifference.

At precisely the moment when we are most emotionally vulnerable to a loved one's behaviour, we insist that we haven't noticed a slight and wouldn't give a damn anyway.

We may not simply be pretending.

Remaining in touch with our wounds may have become conclusively intolerable.

Not feeling anything may have replaced the enormous threat of being fully alive.