What is emotional immaturity? How can we easily distinguish authentic feelings and emotions from mental distortions? How do we actually cultivate a sense of presence that allows us to become more emotionally mature with our authentic selves and in our relationships with other human beings?
These are actually very hard questions, and because we so rarely ask ourselves these questions, we might experience a lot of emotional distortions and even suffering that are simply no longer necessary.
We can learn how to become more emotionally mature to ensure we address our relational challenges as adults who can take care of each other with respect and compassion.
Being emotionally mature is the same as being mentally smart or physically strong; it's a skill you learn, develop, and master if this is what you want and would like to experience!
...
Emotional maturity has many aspects and many levels. It all depends on how deeply you want to feel and how skillful you want to become with your emotions.
First of all, you need to learn the very rich and multidimensional language of emotions. Each emotion is important and says something unique to you. Most importantly, it says something about you and your unique personal experience, not something about someone else that you think you feel or mentally understand. Your emotions talk mainly about you and to you!
If you project too much of your emotions in your relationships and make them about others and not about you, you literally give your inner power away to other people and situations. Without that power, you might never be able to take responsibility for the emotions you feel and truly transform them into something else. Not being in denial and dissociation, but facing the truth with the courage of what you actually feel.
If there are some emotions that we are not comfortable feeling and we prefer to run from them, they will certainly show up in our reality more and more strongly. If we continue projecting them onto others without understanding why we continue to feel the way we feel, we will manifest even more intense situations in our lives to truly understand the evolutionary message from that emotion.
You cannot run forever from your emotions. You can numb and hide for a very long time from your own heart and what it feels. You can pretend and continue the same story over and over, but you cannot transform something you feel without understanding the real reason why you feel it.
To understand that reason, you actually do need to take full responsibility for what you feel and why you feel it. You need to be able to talk about your inner reality in 'I' statements exclusively. And you need to be able to transform your inner system yourself in order to fully integrate the wisdom behind the emotions you felt.
If you think your emotions are 'because of' something or someone else, you are not yet in a space of emotional maturity or mastery. You have not yet cultivated a deep intimacy with your own self if you think what you feel is not about you personally.
People can indeed play with your emotions, but you are still the only one to have complete authority and sovereignty in your personal emotional space and reality. If you naively let people play with your emotions, well, don't be surprised if that is what they do!
But never forget, no matter who plays with your emotions and how deeply, what you feel still all belongs only to you!
This is why if you are foolish enough to project your emotions into your exterior reality or onto someone else after that, don't be surprised if you end up losing the last bits of your self-power and personal dignity at some point.
...
The only way you can feel other people's emotions in your own personal nervous system is if they let you feel them. Only if they give their conscious permission to their heart to become emotionally transparent with you can you feel what they feel.
And this is a true gift. When someone trusts us enough to let us feel their authentic heart, they are offering the most precious thing they have to us. They are literally sharing their heart with us. This should be taken very seriously and with a lot of care, respect, and compassion.
When someone opens their heart to us with their unique inner universe inside, we might feel many things simultaneously. We might get scared. We might judge. It might be way too much to feel and to know. We might be tempted to create some kind of story to justify the intensity of simple but authentic connection from heart to heart.
We might want to stop feeling. We might want to forget. We might want to blame or shame. We might completely disconnect or remain very confused about what actually happened.
And we might not yet fully get the real wisdom of what we actually felt and why.
...
There is a difference between the concepts of: 'I feel you' and 'I feel you feeling me'.
'I feel you' is only one direction. It provides the context for too much interpretation and a lot of potential mental nonsense. When a person feels another person, they kind of grasp some 'emotions' from them and they start to analyze and try to fix them for some reason.
'I feel you' is what kids do. They feel their parents or their environment and they try to guess, analyze, and understand what they feel and why. Kids think that what they feel from the field is about them. Because at the level of their brain development, the world is turning around them. They don't yet understand that they are not the center of the universe in everyone else's lives.
So, when children feel emotions from others, they unconsciously make them something personal about themselves. This enables them to actually learn the language of emotions at a very young age and very efficiently. This also traumatizes them deeply.
Because if a child thinks that every pain they feel in the open field is because of them or always related to them, they might be very emotionally and mentally confused if not traumatized.
But, when an adult uses the same strategy to emotionally connect with other human beings, it's actually becoming weird, uncomfortable, and potentially very awkward.
When an adult says 'I feel you' and at the same time believes in his or her head that what you feel is specifically about them, it's very hard to have conscious and meaningful conversations about your emotions in a coherent way with this kind of adult.
This is how you distinguish the mental nonsense from authentic feelings.
When an adult feels you for real, you are supposed to feel them feeling you.
If they truly feel your authentic being in their heart with no judgment, shame or fear, you will feel it too. You will feel the echo of their heart in yours. You will feel being felt and seen like never before by another heart.
A heart that knows that your inner universe is so vast and so huge that what you feel is beyond the reality itself and not about the limited perception and corrupted beliefs of the person that listens to you. You will feel accepted for who you are without needing to change anything about you or what you feel in this moment.
And because you are unconditionally felt, seen, and accepted as you are in this moment, you will have everything you need to transform your emotions. Efficiently, coherently and with pleasure. You will have the space, the care, and the tenderness to find your own way. To hear the secret message of your emotions and to learn how to befriend them and use them to become even more emotionally mature being.
'I feel you feeling me' is a relational ability we learn and cultivate when we gain more maturity about our own emotions and when we have enough courage to take real responsibility for what we feel and let other people feel whatever they want to feel.
If we don't have the clarity and mastery of our inner emotional space and landscape yet, we cannot truly feel others in the way they are worthy of being felt. They cannot feel us feeling them deeply in their soul. And without that, we cannot talk about authentic and sincere heart-to-heart connection or real intimacy.
Comments