Understanding Immature Adults and Ways to Handle Them.
Adult immaturity is difficult, here’s what to do.
For many reasons, some adults don’t grow up. Emotionally stuck at ages 5, 8, 14, 16 … they live in a world of dependency, social anxiety, lack of boundaries, and/or low self-esteem. In the most extreme cases, these overgrown Peter Pans reject the idea of sticking their neck out and taking a stab at much of anything …. life experiences such as higher education, career training, or having a serious cause or career, have been dismissed as not in the cards for them; they’ve concluded that if they tried anything of substance, they would fail. Those who do work often have had the job delivered to them via a helpful relative or friend, and there they will stay until hell freezes over. Their idea of the perfect life is never making themselves uncomfortable.
Almost always there is an enabling factor, someone who provides sustenance, shelter, and sometimes, coddling. Just like a crutch used to help a person with a bum leg walk, their assistance allows the emotionally immature person to survive without growing up. Ironically, the enabler is an emotionally immature person as well, just in different ways.
In Pia Mellody’s book Facing Codependence, an owner’s (1) manual for every person with childhood developmental trauma (CDT), which is virtually all of us, she explains that because of things that happened and didn’t happen in childhood, we become stunted at an emotionally young age. It is frighteningly easy for a child to be traumatized, even by little things that, to an outside observer, would not look traumatizing. This is why most of us have thousands of trauma wounds over the course of our childhoods.
The way an emotionally immature adult acts today can help us know at what age they are stuck, obviously, some end up more functional than others. For example, black and white thinkers are stunted at around age 9, before they reached the abstract thinking stage, which happens at around age 11. Children need to meet certain developmental goals throughout their young lives so that when they reach the age to launch, they will have the will, drive, and motivation to do so. Some people with CDT have enough drive to go to college and have a career but their emotional development in interpersonal relationships is stunted. I can’t tell you how many clients have told me that they are confident superstars in the workplace, but thumb-suckers, hopelessly avoidant, or emotionally reactive in interpersonal relationships. It’s as if we live in two different worlds, one where we’re capable, and one where we’re not. The hard work of trauma therapy helps us go back and pick up the goals we missed, release the painful experiences that have imprinted and created obstacles to healthy emotional health, and teach us what healthy relationships look like. Once we integrate those characteristics into our new understanding of how adults behave, we enter recovery.
Totally dependent, failure-to-launch, and emotionally immature adults are disabled in the five core areas that Mellody describes in her book; self-esteem (too much or too little), boundaries (none or walled off), reality (Inaccurate perception), dependency (either too dependent or anti-dependent, needless and wantless), and moderation (No self-control, or out of control with being in control). Often, their self-esteem is skewed toward toxic shame, the belief that “I am defective, not good enough, something is wrong with me, I don’t fit in.” I had this issue for years until I went through trauma therapy. The way it played out for me was that I lowballed myself in estimating what I was capable of. I had common immature behaviors such as having low-paying jobs, being financially dependent on my parents or men, and not pursuing careers or education I wanted to, all because I didn’t think I was smart or good enough. That is the sole reason I didn’t go to graduate school to pursue Marriage and Family Therapy until my 40s. By then, I’d had enough therapy to at least know I should try graduate school to gauge whether I could do it or not. Doing well in school and being accepted and appreciated by most of the professors and students, was a wake-up call, and I realized that I had belonged there all along. As the youngest of five children born over a 17-year span, I had been cast as the village idiot, but as I look back, they were the idiots. Or at least, using a more adult and sympathetic perspective, they had worse trauma issues than I did, and the toxicity that was spewed onto them needed a scapegoat aka a human garbage bin where that negativity could be dumped. Now, I experience pains of empathy when I work with clients who hold themselves back because of lies they believe about themselves.
Depending on which ways people are skewed in the five core areas, so goes our future. The only way to gain emotional maturity is to get healthy in each of the areas. This subject is taught by reading, understanding, and implementing Mellody’s concepts available in her books and workbooks, and having a trauma therapist walk you through the information. With the appropriate professional help, you will also experience trauma reduction while re-visiting life experiences at a deeper level, all in order to permanently release the nasty stuff. Most of us have a lot of childhood decisions to change, such as, if you concluded then that you aren’t good enough, we can show you evidence now that you are. I see it as cleaning up a mess so we can function as a healthy adult. Once you’re working on it, you’ll go out and practice what you learn in the real world, and tweak until it becomes natural. No one ever achieves perfection in practicing healthy adult behaviors, but at least when you’re choosing to act like a child moving forwards, you’ll know it.
The bottom line is that emotional immaturity is rampant in our culture and throughout the world. The more rigid a culture or belief system is, the worse it will be. Humans were meant to be free and authentic and should be nurtured to become who they are, not what others want them to be. With caretakers, religion, the education system, peers, and other influences working to get children to conform and follow rules, we end up losing ourselves and becoming trained animals working to please or control others. Growing up involves finding out who you are at your core, shedding conformity, and advocating for yourself to have the life you desire. And, every adult who can take care of themself, should take care of themself.
Meet Billy, an old college bud with a huge trust fund. He’s 67 years old (in body), 16 years old in mind, and is getting divorced after over 40 years of marriage. He’s a buffoon and has never had a serious conversation in his life. His marriage has lasted this long because he’s rich, they have three children, and his wife is an emotional 17-year-old. Who else could tolerate a 16-year-old roommate for 40 years? Marrying Billy raised the missus out of a lower middle-class existence to country clubs and debutants, and she likes it there.
Billy is a living cartoon character in the area where he lives. Mention his name and people will laugh, roll their eyes and shrug. He is taken seriously by no one. He’s rich, though, and buys businesses and gets knowledgeable friends to be his partner, relying on them to do the work. He is not able to manage or oversee any of the details, because emotional children can’t do that. He bought a popular restaurant years ago and hired an alcoholic friend to run it. People stole food, booze, and money, and it went bankrupt, ending in a lawsuit. It’s a pattern that has occurred numerous times, with numerous businesses.
Billy’s ride is a moped (his driver’s license has been suspended) and he meets his friends in a park pavilion every day at 4 for a woman-banned booze, pot, and trash-talking good time. It’s a confluence of emotionally immature men who have bonded over their substance abuse, childish behaviors, and lack of depth. Birds of a feather flock together, they say. Billy’s enabler is his money, that’s why he’ll never change, and his checks arrive no matter what he does. Self-esteem comes from doing things yourself and seeing the results. His constant flow of money and lack of accountability prevented him from ever having to work for anything. If something became difficult, he quit. He’s never been allowed to sink, so he hasn’t needed to learn how to swim.
Tough love is scorned by many, but the reason for it is to force an emotionally dependent, floundering person to have to do for themself. Enablers may know it is the first step to creating the potential for a person like that to become a responsible adult, but the enabler has a different set of CDT issues at the end of the day, often feels debilitating guilt even when thinking about setting clear boundaries. Of course, what that need is to have an honest conversation and set boundaries more than anything else. Therapists must point out that enabling is far more hurtful to their loved one than setting necessary boundaries to have any sort of chance of getting an enabler to do something different.
Here are a few examples, not a complete list, of signs of emotional immaturity I have seen over the years.
- Someone allows a friend to move in for a few days, and the friend won’t leave. The host is miserable, their life is disrupted, and it costs them money, but ridiculous justifications prevent them from setting a healthy boundary and forcing the person to leave.
- A person is verbally and emotionally abused by their grown sibling and continues to go back for more, because “it’s family.”
- A woman in a relationship with a man who cheats on and abuses her, and she claims she’s helpless to do anything about it.
- People in jobs or careers and have families but enjoy a partying social life that disrupts their health and relationships.
- Anyone who whines and complains without taking action to change it.
- Emotionally reactive in the extreme. Yelling, snapping, a temper tantrum, name-calling, shaming, pouting, refusing to speak.
- People who seek revenge and/or say, “I don’t get mad, I get even.”
- Any adult says, “He/She/They won’t let me.”
- Blamers and who won’t take responsibility for their actions.
- People who don’t take care of themselves.
- Talkers, not doers.
- Grown son, sits at home playing video games with a package of jellied donuts by his side, while his parents work long hours.
- Afraid to be alone.
- Will not work even though the family needs the money.
In healthy, non-codependent relationships, the rule of thumb in the dependency category is that any functioning adult who can take care of themself, should be taking care of themself. Healthy boundaries among enablers are crucial to have any chance of the emotionally immature person becoming self-sufficient. Enablers are emotionally immature people, too, and therein lies the problem.
What has always fascinated me is that if every person practiced appropriate boundaries, no one would get away with any of this. Billy’s family members set him and his offspring up for generations of emotional immaturity by having huge checks sent to them with no trustee, oversight, or consequences of his actions. I do know of some people born wealthy who have gone on to work hard and be successful, but I’ve known far more who use it as an out from having any sort of responsibility. What does one have to work for in life if it is all handed to them?
Healthy mental health means having solid self-esteem. No one is better than anyone else, nor less than. Self-esteem is not gained through performance, things, achievements, beauty, or anything else external. We are all valuable because we are human beings, and it comes from within. Boundaries are the security system for humans. We must protect ourselves physically and emotionally and restrain ourselves from harming others. Reality is perceiving things accurately. This requires not making up things that aren’t true, we must have evidence to support what we think and believe. Learning healthy and accurate perception is crucial to communication skills and healthy relationships. Dependency is normal in childhood. We all depend on adults to raise and protect us until we can do so ourselves. If we grow up and can’t fly the nest, there we have dependency issues. If we grow up and feel we need no one and can’t do the give-and-take a long-term relationship takes, we sell ourselves and our partners short. And finally, control. If you lack any sort of self-control or are out of control with being in control, or waiver between the two, you will make yourself and others miserable. After seeing so many thousands of clients over the years, I’ve never met anyone who enjoys being controlled.
One last thing, if you have an emotionally immature partner, I feel your pain. If you signed a lifetime contract with them, all you can do is manage your side of the relationship. We can’t change or control people. You may make requests for change, but if they are not responsive, you need to learn to take of yourself within your disappointment. For those of you who are single, stop enabling emotionally immature people by dating them more than twice. They will show you at least one red flag early on, maybe the first day you meet when they give you the rundown of their life, so get out before you get attached. We can all see the difference between people who act like mature partners and people incapable of intimate relationships right? I describe it as the difference between someone who is solid and someone who is not. Marriage is a long, miserable, haul with an emotionally immature husband or wife. Practice the ultimate self-care, and steer free.
(1) *Note: All these concepts come from the work of Pia Mellody, author of Facing Codependence, Intimacy Factor, Breaking Free workbook, and Facing Love Addiction. She created a model for how to recover from childhood developmental trauma, that renders us all emotionally immature. The model helps us grow ourselves up and be able to have healthy relationships. I highly recommend that every person come to know the life-changing work of Pia Mellody, and if you need therapy, seek a Pia Mellody or PIT (Post Induction Therapy) trained therapist. You can find one through the Healing Trauma Network. I will continue to write about her powerful concepts, making them user-friendly, so you may have the relationships you desire. Please tell me what you think!
Becky Whetstone, Ph.D. is a licensed Marriage & Family Therapist in Arkansas and Texas* and is known as America’s Marriage Crisis Manager®. She is a former features writer and columnist for the San Antonio Express-News and has worked with thousands of couples to save their marriages. She can work with you, too, as a life coach. She is also co-host of the Call Your Mother Relationship Show on YouTube and has a private practice in Little Rock, Arkansas, as a life coach via Zoom. To contact her check out www.DoctorBecky.com and www.MarriageCrisisManager.com. Don’t forget to follow her on Medium so you don’t miss a thing!
*For licensure verification find Becky Whetstone Cheairs.
