Tag Archives: emotional maturity

Emotional Maturity (part 2)

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)

Emotional Maturity (Part 1)

Emotional maturity, according Fr. Raphael McCarthy S.J., the author of the 1945 booklet after which this website is named, is the ability to regulate one’s emotions in proportion to the situation. To “manage his own emotional responses.” I can imagine an intelligent, accomplished woman reading this right now and thinking: “I’m emotionally mature. I’m 35. I have a master’s degree.” Or a man saying to himself, “That isn’t my problem. It’s my mom and sisters who are always freaking out. I’m the calm, reasonable one.”

Well, according to Fr. McCarthy, emotional immaturity, and all its attendant miseries, was a problem for many of the good people he encountered as a priest helping couples and families in his day.

“People just do not grow up. One of the parties in the marriage remains emotionally immature. He or she goes on playing a child’s game in a state of life that demands the emotions and feelings of an adult.”

The biggest difference between the demographic Fr. McCarthy was dealing with back in the 40s, and the people he would most likely meet today, is this: back then, people got into relationships with other human beings, and usually ended up married. Hopefully, most were able to grow up and out of their deficiencies together, or at least to practice acceptance, thus living out their marital promises. Yet, today, many people don’t even bother. They despair, actually. They never embrace the necessary challenge that marriage entails. Anticipating that marriage requires a certain degree of emotional maturity to succeed, they avoid marriage altogether. In fact, many of them don’t even attempt to date!

From the reading, one gets the sense that the couples Fr. McCarthy was counseling were young, naive, and eager to marry. This is presumably because in 1945, when people felt a strong attraction to each other, or just really wanted to have sex, that’s what they did. By contrast, the people I’m encountering in my circles are usually older—30s and 40s or beyond. Although they might have assumed marriage as inevitable (that’s a bit different than having a desire), they realize now that its just not happening. Some are perplexed and desperate to figure it out before it’s too late. But many are so diffident, confused and frankly afraid, that they fail to get out of their comfort zone. They say they probably should get married, and yet that they seem to avoid the real issues that come up when they think about what marriage may mean for their specific case.

This trend is not limited to non-religious people who say they have no moral objection to drifting from one meaningless sexual-encounter to another; living with someone until they inevitably go their separate ways; substituting porn, fantasy and masturbation for a genuine relationship with an actual human being. I always try to encourage these people, many of whom I love dearly, to find a better way. What’s more astounding, though, is that I see many of the same self-sabotaging beliefs and patterns among faithful Catholics—and I mean ardent Catholics who accept the teachings of the Church, attend mass once or more a week, and go to Confession!

What’s the deal? Why are good-looking, intelligent, well-formed, faithful Catholics (and other conscientious people) failing to form relationships that leads to marriage? Let’s look at the idea of ’emotional maturity’ again. I honestly feel like a hypocrite talking about this, because I am not exactly a poster-child for emotional maturity myself. Who am I to lecture anyone about it? On the other hand, even though I am not perfect, I did get married.

Let me reiterate how non-perfect I am: I was an alcoholic stoner in my twenties who slept around—and around— looking for Mr. Goodbar. I had an abortion, and then developed a severe anxiety disorder. My biggest fear at the time was not so much dying of alcoholism—although that could have happened—rather, it was a vision of myself as an old woman with no friends, no family and no love in her life; peering out of windows and muttering psychotically to herself. I could see my life headed toward a desperate end. In fact, inside, despite my apparent successes, I was already desperate. I was, as they say, “spiritually bankrupt.” So I asked for help.

I had no faith to speak of, but I was okay with the “God-thing,” as long as it wasn’t Church. I entered that anonymous club for extremely imperfect people (you know, the one with the 12 Steps?). I made a decision, by God’s grace, to change—and change and change and change! I agreed, as a part of that huge undertaking, that I was going to keep changing and growing and transforming, according to whatever God wanted me to do and be, as a way of life. I agreed to throw away my old ideas and become like a little child, in order to grow up. I’m still living according to that initial agreement with God. Everything that I have, including my marriage, is built on it.

That’s the ironic thing. To develop any degree of emotional maturity—at least enough to quit drinking and doing self-destructive things, I had to become truly child-like. I had to “let go and let God” manage my life—including my emotions. This seems like a rather spiritual and mysterious proposition, and believe me, it was and is. To grow up at all, I had to put my pride on the altar of sacrifice, and ‘become a child’ in the way Jesus told us that we must be, or else lose the Kingdom.