Can Childish Adults Ever Grow Up?

Being childish in an adult's body isn't cute, carefree, or fun.

It's scary, risky, overwhelming and embarrassing.

It's not a personality disorder, technically, but emotional immaturity — the inability to process situations age-appropriately — can fuel dysfunctional patterns that last lifetimes and corrode our very cores.

Imagine being forty-plus and flattening yourself against all walls instinctively to let the "big kids" pass. Imagine countless sleepless nights spent dreading every possible disease. Imagine expecting all nail technicians, bank tellers, and ten-year-olds to trick you.

Imagine your loved ones, if you have them, bearing burdens all alone which they think you can't handle.

And you want to help. You want to act your age and be even a bit heroic but you can't, you don't, and end up looking like a huge child skipping down the street whistling past your burning house with everyone screaming inside.

You hate yourself for this but life looks to you like one sky-high steampunk spire of impossible tasks whose coded instructions it is too late to learn.

Imagine always waiting to be scolded, and always justifiably; the only variations are when, why, how loudly and by whom.

Imagine happy days infused with fear which spreads like paint poured into milk.

Imagine keeping countless secrets from adults because the truth, for you, is I regret everything I say and I fear choosing ice-cream flavors and This is my lucky chair.

Imagine wanting to nod sagely after being criticized, but stomping off instead. Imagine always wanting to apologize for looking old enough to trust.

Imagine hiding it sometimes by being either wildly eloquent or resolutely mute, but only for so long: You'll flee or cry and everyone will know.

Imagine watching friends realize that they've outgrown you. Their eyes flash confusion, fading to disdain.

Studies suggest that most people attain emotional maturity at 22. Imagine being far past that but still feeling 6 or 16, and not in a good way, despite attempting force-fed maturation via grad school, say, or marriage or the military, and despite how lucidly — It's like being the slowest runner in a race! It's like being locked in my childhood bedroom all my life! — you can describe your crisis to professionals and others whom you think are thinking: Grow up! — as if you just could.

Imagine fathoming vast galaxies of passion, courage, and accomplishment suffusing ordinary adult lives to which you are a silent spectator, your body aging like a threat.

Some of us know what we are. I'm childish, we tell ourselves. I'm stuck. We understand firsthand that childishness is functionally, if not legally, a disability.

But some don't know. Self-loathingly, they mislabel their immaturity as toxic narcissism, cowardice, or cruelty — self-made proof of innate evil, all their fault.

Some of us know why we are what we are. But some do not.

Many roads lead to emotional immaturity. Such roads typically start in childhood, soon becoming quicksand or steep cliffs. Here's one road: Some of us were raised by childish parents.

Being physically capable of parenthood doesn't necessarily mean being emotionally able. It's quite possible to produce a child while lacking such basic skills as patience, empathy, responsibility, endurance, fairness, self-awareness, and sufficient self-containment not to call that child a brat, a b--ch, or a filthy pig.

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Full disclosure: I am a childish parent's childish child.

Immature parents aren't always young. And yes, they might be tragic victims too — of their own childish parents, trauma, and/or painful patterns generations deep.

Kids such as myself saw our parents not as big unstable babies but as prime, exemplary adults. We thought this because they were large and loud and ran our lives. The nature of their loudness and control outspanned our hazy powers of discernment between right and wrong, helpful and harmful, normal and bizarre.

While learning to walk and talk, we synthesized into our brains their terrors, overwhelmedness, boundary-blindness, black-and-white thinking, self-absorption, hypercriticality, defensiveness, rigidity, and rage.

Floored by our slightest sicknesses, they taught us that the world is unbearably perilous, our bodies ticking time-bombs, every breath a risk.

Excoriating our every misdeed and mistake, they taught us that rapid, painful punishment is the first, best response to each offense. Ignoring or disdaining our cries of delight or distress, they taught us to be hardhearted — even toward ourselves.

These and a thousand other lessons childish parents teach — not out of cruelty, but because it's all they know — can mire their offspring in forever-neverlands from which escape requires tools we can't identify and don't know that we lack.