Episode 74 - Emotional Adulthood
Episode 74 - Emotional Adulthood
Hello friends!
Welcome to today's episode of the Seasons of Joy podcast.
Before we get started I wanted to let you know that registration is now open for my upcoming retreat. An Awakening Retreat will be held in Garden City, Utah near the beautiful Bear Lake. It will be October 5-7th. It is an opportunity to refocus on what is important to you. An opportunity to reconnect with yourself, others and God. And an opportunity to rejuvenate so that you can step into your life with confidence. You can find all the information on my website www.seasons-coaching.com/awakening-retreat or at the link posted in the show notes. I would love to have you join me for this awesome experience.
Now on to this week’s episode.
I want to talk about the concept of emotional maturity. You may have heard of this concept before or maybe you haven’t. It doesn’t sound that interesting but understanding the concept is life changing. Everything that I teach, in a way, points to this concept.
So let’s define emotional adulthood. This is when we take responsibility for our emotions and feelings which help us maintain control of our happiness while we progress through this earthy experience. If there is emotional adulthood then it is safe to assume that there is emotional childhood. Understanding the difference between the two allows you to enjoy your relationships with yourself, others, and God. You become the creator of your life.
The truth is we are the ones responsible for how we feel all the time. We are in charge of how we think and feel. However, when we are operating in emotional childhood, we blame other people for how we feel, how we act, what we are experiencing in our life. Sadly, there are many people walking around in emotional childhood.
I didn’t learn about emotional adulthood when I was growing up. There wasn’t a class in high school or college that I could take to become an emotional adult. I didn’t know that I had the ability to think about my thinking. I didn’t know that I could choose what I thought or how I felt at any given moment, no matter what the people around me were doing. If I had known this, I would have saved myself a lot of suffering. So that is why I do what I do now. I want to show people what their life could look like if they knew that they have the ability to create a life of purpose and meaning and this is partly done by taking responsibility for your thoughts, feelings and actions.
When we are children, we only think about ourselves. We believe that everything that is going on in our life actually causes our feelings. This belief is reinforced by how we were raised. We are told that we can hurt someone else’s feelings or that we make others feel bad. This way of thinking is so ingrained and natural that we don't even realize that we are reinforcing this to each other when we blame others for how we feel. As children, we don’t have the capacity to make the distinction. Not only that, there are so many adults that operate emotionally as children that it just carries on through adulthood. This is so disempowering and keeps us in emotional childhood and blame.
This leads us to blame everyone and everything in our life whether it is the government, the economy, our bosses, other people, our ex-spouses, our mothers, our fathers, our childhood, our adult children, or our friends. We blame everyone for why we feel the way we feel, for our behaviors, and our life experiences.
For me, a lot of my feelings of frustration and self-pity in the past came from a place of blame. I was blaming my adult children for my unhappiness because of their choices. Really, I wasn’t taking responsibility for my feelings. I wasn’t feeling my feelings, I was wallowing in them. Feeling sorry for myself believing that if they would do differently then life would be better. I was functioning in emotional childhood, wanting them to take responsibility for me.
There are times that we are an emotional adult and we still feel frustrated or sad. That is being human. We are going to feel those things sometimes and that is ok. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about when we find ourselves operating from those emotions all of the time–coming from a place of disempowerment. We are believing that we feel like we don’t have control over our emotional well-being and we hand over that responsibility to someone else.
For example, let’s say I give my emotional well-being over to my husband. It is like I am saying, “You are responsible for my happiness.,” or “You are responsible for my frustration or sadness,” or “Your responsible for everything that causes me to be emotional.” When I am in this place, I am always going to be trying to control him so I can feel better. I am going to always be trying to tell him what to do and how to do it. I will be mad when he doesn’t do what I want, and my emotions will be all over the place because I am trying to control him.
This is so disempowering and feels terrible because we can’t control anybody else. Most people don’t like to be controlled no matter how hard we try. If I expect my husband to meet all of my needs, in a way I become a dependent child. Giving him a list of needs that he needs to meet so that I can be happy. He could do the same thing for me. Then we have put each other in charge of the other person’s happiness. This doesn’t mean we don’t make requests of each other. Of course, we do. We do things for each other because we love each other. But when our emotional well-being is the other person’s responsibility, we are in emotional childhood. This affects our relationships in a painful way because we are delegating our happiness to someone else.
I heard it once explained this way.
What if we decide to meet our own needs and let the other person meet their needs then we come together and have a really good time? We don’t expect the other person to manage our emotional life because it is hard enough to do it for ourselves let alone another person.
Emotional adulthood means that we are each responsible for our own happiness. We are responsible for our own unhappiness. We are responsible for when our feelings get hurt and for our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
This doesn’t mean we aren’t responsible for how we treat people. When we are in emotional adulthood we don’t act in a way that is mean or unkind to other people. We don’t react in anger or have temper tantrums. We don’t base our reactions on trying to get them to behave in a certain way so we can feel better. Trying to control other people in order to feel better never works and only causes tension and suffering in our relationships.
Emotional adulthood is letting people behave how they want and behaving how you want. It is taking responsibility for all of your actions and feelings. You may still show up as not your best or in a way you regret but that doesn’t mean you are not going to take responsibility and apologize for how you treat another person. It means we don’t blame other people for how we show up in our life.
However, it is so important to not go from blaming others to blaming yourself for any thoughts or feelings or actions that you don’t like. Believing that you are a terrible person. That is not the purpose of this work. It is learning to understand that you are feeling a certain way because of the way you are thinking. If you are acting a certain way, it is because of the way you are thinking. Curiosity is the way forward and you can do it with love and compassion. Being kind to yourself will create greater change than beating yourself up ever will. This awareness gives you the opportunity to do something different in your life.
Emotional childhood usually leads us to showing up in our life in a way we end up regretting. We don’t take responsibility for it because we feel so horrible about it. Emotional adulthood allows us to take responsibility for how we feel, so that we are less likely to show up in a way we will regret later. But when we do make mistakes, we own them completely and apologize for our mistakes.
This is such an empowering place to be–a place where you have complete power over your own life to create something amazing. When we take responsibility for ourselves this actually frees us to look outside of ourselves and see where we can serve. To be and do good in the world.
When I started taking responsibility for my emotions and actions, my life changed. Do I still have moments of emotional childhood? For sure! But I experience it so much less. I am in a better place to love and serve others. By taking ownership of my happiness, I am so much happier and I would add a lot more fun to be around.
The Savior was the perfect example of emotional adulthood. He went about doing good and had the ability and capacity to do all He did for us because of that. Everything He did was because of love. He knew we were going to make mistakes and struggle. While on earth, He actually spent the most time with those that were considered sinners and unclean. It didn’t affect how He treated them. He had compassion and love for them. Did He want them to follow and to become like Him? Of course. But he never tried to force or control them. He taught, encouraged, and invited. He does the same for us. He invites us to follow and be like Him. I believe that when we operate from emotional adulthood we are better able to accept and act on His invitation to be like Him.
So here are some questions to consider:
Are there places in your life where you can see yourself acting like an emotional child?
Where are you placing blame in your life?
Where are you not taking responsibility?
How can you take more responsibility?
What would your life be like if you could stop blaming others and take responsibility for how you think, feel, and act, and ultimately the results in your life?
This isn’t easy work but it is so worth it.
If you want help doing this, I would love to be your coach.
Schedule a free discovery call and let’s chat.
That is all I have for you today.
Thank you for being here and have a joyful week.
If you are ready to take these concepts and apply them to your circumstances, I would love to be your coach.
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