Arrested development

Emotional maturity stalls at the age of trauma.

The older I get the more I realize that just about everything I value depends on my ability to maintain healthy relationships. I’m working on it—really trying to figure out why and where I connect with people or fall short. Empathy is key. Some of this is driven by the simple fact that, to exercise and strengthen my own emotional intelligence, I need to understand where other people are coming from. And to be honest, on some level, I’m just curious about what drives certain behavior.

I suspect we have all had encounters where we really don’t get why someone is behaving the way they are. I’ve posted before about the need to meet people where they are.  Are they having a bad day? Resilience depleted? Euphoric about personal good news? All of these things can swing behavior on a daily basis.

But what if the place people are coming includes an emotional bomb shelter—a place with permanent, trauma-induced damage? I was discussing this with my therapist, and they explained the condition called “age regression.” Essentially, it means that traumatic events can freeze the emotional maturity of an individual at the age they were when the trauma occurred. That memory is experienced and stored in the brain as well as in the body, and can be triggered unpredictably. The result can be explosive, and adult throwing a temper tantrum, or more passive, rendering the person incapable of dealing with a seemingly simple situation. But if you think of the road most people travel in learning emotional intelligence, it points to a place in time where progress came to a full stop until some sort of detour could be mapped. Or not.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because I’ve realized that people I know and care about have this challenge. It explains a lot about people who are bullies, or addicts, or hoarders, or simply ineffectual at coping. I hope they have access to professional help. But my takeaway is that, when I don’t know where people are coming from, they may not know either. I can’t control their behavior. But I can learn to manage mine. It begins with empathy.