Fr. McCarthy says emotional maturity is about learning to “manage” one’s emotions. For me, since my life was so unmanageable, that started by surrendering my emotions to God. I decided to quit trying to change or mask what I feel in the moment—without acting out. To accept them and work with them, I had to let myself feel my emotions, and I had stay put while that happened. I could no longer escape, distract or play-act myself out of feeling my feelings. Sometimes I just had to sit there and cry—and not do anything destructive while that happened. This turned out to be the key to attaining even the beginnings of a moral life. It isn’t that I learned to suppress my feelings, rather, I learned to work with them and moderate them. Fr. McCarthy gives a simple illustration of a person who has reached emotional maturity:
“A child goes all out after every emotional experience. He stubs his toe, and he bursts into tears. He is frightened, and he falls into a complete panic. He is angry, so he breaks whatever happens to be in his hands. An adult is quite different. He does not waste a tremendous emotional response on some relatively trifling affair. He can feel fear without going into a complete panic. He can know the surge of anger and yet not burst into an uncontrollable rage. He can meet a new situation and be puzzled by it and yet not feel that the world has come to an end. He can be thwarted or disappointed and not bursting into heartbreaking tears.”
I have to stress again that I am by no means perfect on this score. I am a crier. And I still can’t drive on the freeway without having a panic attack. There are plenty of new situations which I still avoid because they distress and perplex me. The key is, I do not need to make life-changing decisions based on the good or bad feelings that pass through me like clouds in the sky. I have cultivated a certain self-awareness. Because of this, I became more and more aware of the ways in which God is asking me to change and grow right now. I have become more and more willing to suffer the bad feelings that often accompany change and growth. For the things in life that are most important to me: love, marriage, family, faith, morality, salvation—I have been willing to suffer; to put everything on the line.
It’s heartening for me, and I hope for you, that just because I’m an ’emotional person,’ and I’m not always good at handling my emotions, doesn’t mean I am not suited for marriage. Just because you may be a bit of a basket-case, or perhaps, out of touch with your emotions—not able to easily identify or express them, doesn’t mean you can’t learn. You can learn to feel, accept and handle your emotions well, especially where it matters most. And just because you have ‘baggage’—even serious baggage—it doesn’t mean marriage is not for you. Far from it.
We have a little saying in our secret club. We claim “progress, not perfection.” While we are not perfect, we recognize that regardless of what we have done or thought or felt before, we really must make progress. We must change—and we become willing to change, dramatically and deeply, with God’s help. Here’s what we do:
When we are ready and willing to get over whatever is holding us back in life, we first admit we have a problem, and that God (if he exists) really knows better than we do. Then, we make a decision to let God (whatever God may really and truly be there) teach us how to be and how to live. Trusting God (a person we may not even know) with our happiness, we begin to take practical action based on spiritual principles (instead of our old ideas that never really worked anyway). We begin collect valuable experience we can bank on, and share it with others. Thus we grow in our trust and knowledge of God, because we have begun to gain experience. We continue to grow in our knowledge of spiritual principles, and whenever we fail, we gain wisdom, because we have the privilege of seeing spiritual principles in action in our own lives. That’s how we set forth to achieve sobriety, which, depending on your definition, looks an awful lot like emotional maturity.
Am I saying you need to join a 12 Step program? Not necessarily. (Although, maybe you really do!) What I am saying is that I don’t think I would have ‘stumbled’ into marriage with a wonderful, faithful man, and had this beautiful family, without practicing these principles myself. And boy, did I practice them.
These principles of transformation are universal, as far as I can tell. My only advantage over some people is that I started on this path a long time ago by screwing up badly enough to admit I needed a total inner-makeover. And even though it took the form of solving the addiction problem first, the end game was always the same: either change now, or end up alone. You know, one of the last things my last guy told me before I got sober (before he dumped me in the parking lot of a church so I could go to my first meeting) was this:
“I like you. But I want to get married and have a family, and you’re just not marriage material.”
And you know what? He was right. It took me over a decade of applying spiritual principles to figure out how to get married. I guess I just had a long way to go. But if I can do it, you probably can too, if you are willing to admit you’ve hit bottom. Whenever or however you get to that point, you’ve made a great beginning. Now, it’s time to start digging in the other direction.
(For more on this topic, see Emotional Maturity, Part 1)
Grow Up and Marry! 