Emotional Childhood
There are very few grown adults existing today that actually live in emotional adulthood. Most of us are unknowingly stuck in emotional childhood because we were never taught the skills of becoming an emotional adult. This means most grown adults have not emotionally matured past their childhood and do not know how to manage their own emotions. Are you an emotional child or adult? Let’s find out.
Photo by Annie Spratt
Emotional childhood occurs when adults choose to react to their emotions, dramatically act out their emotions, or go great lengths to avoid their emotions rather than feeling them. There is an inability to take responsibility for what they are feeling as well as an inability to choose their thoughts intentionally so as to create a more desirable emotional state.
The cycle of emotional childhood has been perpetuated for generations. Most of our parents still operate in emotional childhood. They are not to blame, though. As you will learn, becoming an emotional adult means to take full responsibility for every aspect of your current life, which includes all of your own thoughts and emotions.
How to tell if you are in emotional childhood:
You constantly blame others (spouses, news channels, political parties, neighbors, mother-in-laws, countries, and other drivers on the road) for your negative emotion. It is all their fault. You’d love to not feel so pissed at them but because ‘they said x’ you no longer have a choice but to be pissed. This means you are unconsciously victimizing yourself and placing your emotional power in the hands of the very person you’d least like it to be in.
You constantly blame others (same list as above and then some) for how you behave and the results you currently have in your life. Once you become an adult, you are officially in charge and responsible for your actions and your future. When you sit in the story of blame and declare your own limitations over and over based on what has happened to you in the past or what your fourth grade teacher said to you, you are caught in emotional childhood and refusing to take responsibility.
You expect other people to make you feel positive emotion, like love or happiness or security. This is also emotional childhood because you are abdicating what you alone have control over to someone outside of you. This expectation creates a lot of unnecessary suffering in interpersonal relationships because the responsibility is entirely misplaced.
When big emotions show up in your life, like anger, sadness, or stress, you tend to lose control over your emotional state and act out like a child. This looks like loud yelling, door slamming, tantrum having, cry-screaming, or silence treating. Quite literally reverting to childhood with our behavior.
Instead of processing your emotions or tending to them lovingly, you would much prefer to escape them. This looks like always being distracted with something. Food, tv, social media, alcohol, drugs, work, exercise. Anything that takes your mind away from what you are truly feeling. There is a fear around silence and being present with yourself, because you are terrified of actually discovering what you are feeling.
How to become an emotional adult:
Achieving emotional maturity happens when you have ceased all blame and self victimhood and have taken full responsibility for your life. This looks like taking responsibility for all negative and positive emotion we might feel. This looks like no longer having expectations for strangers or loved ones. This looks like becoming emotionally empowered and deciding how we want to think and feel in each moment.
To be an emotional adult means that you have a strong relationship with yourself. You provide yourself with the necessary emotions of love, security, and passion and aren’t desperately searching for someone outside of you to provide you with those things.
As an emotional adult, we understand that we are the only ones that can hurt our feelings. We understand that all of our feelings are caused by our own thoughts. This is the opposite of victimhood. This is the very act of taking full responsibility of what we are creating. To be an emotional adult means that we are fully aware of our thinking patterns, and we put in the conscious and intentional work to choose thoughts that create our most desirable emotional states.
In emotional adulthood, there is a serene sense of well-being. We understand that life is 50/50. 50% positive emotion, 50% negative. We aren’t trying to escape our negative emotion anymore, we gladly process all of it and understand we are the ones creating it. We don’t need sugary food or an excess of alcohol to feel false pleasure anymore. Our entire existence is pleasurable when you live in emotional adulthood. There is nothing to be afraid of anymore.
Emotional adults know they aren’t at the mercy of the world around them, they create their world. They are the ones out there taking risks, going after their goals, and not giving up half way through. They have mastered the skill of managing their emotions, which means they know that anything is possible.
Becoming an emotional adult is no easy feat, and it won’t happen overnight. But with time, when we learn how to process our emotions and take full responsibility for them all, we will suddenly find ourselves thriving in emotional adulthood. Emotions are completely harmless, they are vibrations in the body. There is nothing to be afraid of.
Be brave, go feel.
