Fiona Job, Registered Clinical Counsellor

@what.is.mental.illness

Emotional maturity has nothing to do with age. Because we live in a culture that does not have awareness of emotions, many of us are adults with the emotional i...mmaturity of children. We still have emotional tantrums (myself included) because we don’t know how to regulate our emotions. When we can’t regulate our emotions we’re reactive our emotions control our behavior. This causes us to go into shame cycles. Where we beat ourselves up for the way we react. The foundation of emotional immaturity comes from inflexible, black + white thinking. When we aren’t emotionally mature, OUR emotions before everyone else similar to a child’s emotional experience. This leaves little space for other people + their emotions, thoughts, beliefs, + perspectives. It’s difficult to have secure attachments with people who have emotional immaturity because they’re typically impulsive + very attached to their framework of thinking. To develop emotional maturity takes work. It takes practice. The practice of being conscious as you navigate new ways of responding. This brings confidence because as we respond in new ways, we are sending a clear message to both mind + body: I am resilient. I can choose how I respond. I can allow a perspective outside of my own without fighting or denying it. I can stop seeking to control the emotions of those around me. I’m still working on this. How do you feel about your own emotional maturity #selfhealers

As a psychologist, I was trained to believe that trauma was a singular big event. Something that involved severe abuse or neglect. When I started my practice,... I noticed a pattern with people who had ‘normal’ or ‘supportive’ families yet they struggled with severe anxiety or depression. Low self worth. Chronic fear of others think of us. Many were in toxic relationship patterns + had so much confusion around why they felt stuck. I noticed the same patterns in myself. Yet nothing ‘big’ happened to me. The next few years, I spent studying the patterns I saw + realized trauma is so much more than what we’ve been told. Trauma is an event where we are chronically denied our authentic nature as children, + are left to cope with our emotions without guidance in how to process them. This is where we learn to betray ourselves for love. This is where we learn that who we are is not acceptable + the ego comes in to create a sense of self based on the unconscious desires of a parent. We start to chase external approval because we’ve lost the connection to self. We seek relationships that mirror our earliest childhood experiences. If we had a parent who denied our reality (ex: an alcoholic father who we witnessed drinking + our mother, in denial herself, told us was just not feeling well) we have no trust in our own perception. We choose partners + situations where our reality continues to be denied. Unconsciously, we learned this as part of what relationships are. Our path to healing begins with an understanding that all of our behaviors, thoughts, patterns, + beliefs are simply our conditioning. They are not who we are. They’re a reflection of the past. Nothing is wrong with us. We are not damaged, or ‘mentally ill.’ As we become more conscious, we can make choices beyond our conditioningin alignment with who we actually are. We are resilient humans who have learned how to cope. Humans who can now learn how to become empowered to thrive#selfhealers