How to Test Your Emotional Maturity

How to Test Your Emotional Maturity

We can make use of a single deceptively simple question that quickly gets to the core of our underlying emotional age.

When someone on whom we depend emotionally lets us down, disappoints us, or leaves us hanging and uncertain, what is our characteristic way of responding?

There are three methods which indicate emotionally immature behaviour (we might grade ourselves on a scale of 1-10 according to our propensities).
1. We might sulk.
2. We might get furious.
3. We might get cold.

These three responses point us in turn to the three markers of emotional maturity:
1. The capacity to explain.
2. The capacity to stay calm.
The mature like themselves enough not to suspect that everyone would have a good reason to mock and slander them.
3. The capacity to be vulnerable.

In turn these three traits belong to what we can call the three cardinal virtues of emotional maturity:
1. Communication
2. Trust
3. Vulnerability

At least half of us weren't brought up in the land of emotional literacy. We may just never have heard adults around us speaking an emotionally mature dialect.

So we may need to go right back to school and spend time learning, with great patience and faith, the beautiful and complex grammar of the language of emotional adulthood.