From day one, as humans, we are going through stages and chapters of development and the developmental stages that we can successfully complete open us up to some new levels of developmental stages. When, on the other hand, we have not successfully completed a certain stage of development, we perpetually come back to it in order to graduate from it, so to speak. The idea of inner work can be reframed to rewinding the clock, going back looking at perhaps some areas in our development, in our maturing process at how, perhaps, certain areas are still unresolved.

The reason why I am looking at this very specifically in the context of relationships is that it’s somewhat of an easy to understand and to relate, an easy possible explanation for how things unfold in life.

What is happening when we are struggling in relationships, when there’s relationship distress, when we’re arguing with our partner (any type of partner), is that things are not going our way, somehow our expectations are not being met and then we respond – we respond with whatever set of skills we have, we’re responding with the tools that we have in our tool bag… and what we might notice is that, in many of those moments, we are bumping up against our own immaturity, we’re bumping up against the limitation of our skilfulness to manage a situation, to respond to a situation. We might notice that we have a limited approach, a limited awareness because, quite honestly, we have never done it differently from when we were kids, and so we don’t have enough experiences that would help us evolve and grow along the way. What that means is, we default to what we know, which is going to be coming at a situation using our particular state of mind or our level of logical thinking is going to be channelled through an immature understanding, the same immature place we were operating from when we were children.

How the mind works is that, when we’re in a relationship and we are at our most challenging moments and when we’re disconnected from our current adult self, what happens is, we seem to regress or we default to this younger self and that’s how many of us can sometimes feel like we’re coming from a place of behaving like a five-year-old, a ten-year-old, whatever age you want to pick, acting like a teenager… It’s not uncommon for us to be in the middle of an argument and we happen to catch a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror – say you’re arguing with your partner and you decide to leave the room and, in the hallway, you pass a mirror and you see yourself and you might have just this little tiny moment where you know you’re acting like a teenager, you know you’re arguing with your partner and you feel it really in your body and your muscles and your bones, everything about you just feels like, “I am a rebellious teenager, I’m not getting my way and I’m feeling a little bitchy about it and I’m going to have an argument with this person” and usually, when we are most fearful, when we question if trust is being challenged, if a sense of safety and reassurance is being challenged – when that gets heightened, we generally don’t default to our best self or our better self, we generally slide into our younger self. Perhaps this circumstance speaks to the degree of our unresolved attachment trauma that, when we were in those previous situations of that same level of fear and mistrust and not having our emotional needs met when we were five, when we were seven, when we were ten – it seems that the brain defaults to what it knew then, it just defaults to using the same old programming, the way that we felt helpless, the way that we had a temper tantrum, the way that we shut down and felt completely rejected, ignored, abandoned, we felt really angry and misunderstood … So when, as an adult, we’re going through our lives and something occurs – some trigger, some conflict, some situation that’s going to trigger the same feeling stage from when we were 5 or 7 or 10 or whatever age, and instead of being able to consciously say, “hey, I’m a different person, I have different resources, I have a current mature self I could activate, my Mature Adult Self“, and really attempt to stay present and do this in a way that has intention, instead of being able to retain awareness of our current adult selves, we tap into the same level of disempowerment and that same level of imploding into not having choice, not having agency, not having clarity!

In the spirit of creating new experiences so that we mature and grow, the message here is to really think about this word, maturing.

In order to achieve maturity, we have to be honest with ourselves and say, well, I’m being immature! And, of course, we don’t say that all the time and that’s not an identity, it’s not like all of you is immature – when you’re at work, you have your adult resources and you’re mature; when you’re in a crisis with the family, you have your adult resources and you’re mature; when you’re with friends hanging out, living your life, in general, for the most part, you’re in your adult self.

We’re not taking a test assessing to say yes, you’re mature, no you’re immature – what we’re saying is that, within that continuum, when you’re stressed out, when life is throwing you a curveball, when your partner is distancing and/or you’re perceiving distance, when there’s some argument in your relationship or the relationship is stale and dead and over and you can’t leave and you’re stuck and you’re lying to yourself that you should stay – that alone creates a lot of high anxiety and distress. What we’re saying, we’re noticing how we have the tendency to respond to that very edgy prickly uncomfortable place of our suffering – we have a tendency to want to get sucked into an immature younger approach to managing those feelings and the point is to raise our consciousness and to practice choosing maturity, we are choosing to think about, well, if I am to continue to expand and grow and evolve, how can I possibly respond to the situation a little differently, how could I possibly respond to my internal feeling states a little differently, how can I give myself comfort when it hurts, how do I self-soothe those places that in the moment feel inconsolable, as opposed to acting out? In some ways, an immature response might be immature logic, we might have immature thinking but oftentimes it’s immature acting out and, at the core, that’s also what’s referred to as protest behaviour – I want to be treated differently, I’m going to protest, treat me differently! Maturity is to step back and take a bigger view of saying, I choose to engage in the conscious development of myself, in the conscious development of my relationship skills, the conscious development of my mind, the conscious development of my adult self! How do I move from those really painful places when I enter child-mind and moving into more my adult-mind? How am I tapping into and dropping into my wisdom-centre, my wisdom-self, my wisdom mind and practice the ability to access and to lead from a place of my wise mature mind?

If I can at least access that, if I begin to have the skill to look into how do I drop into that more expansive thinking that has less childish rigidity that has a bit more openness to it, my disciplined choice, my disciplined practice to nurture and cultivate a mature mind, that, in and of itself is the evolution of my development, that’s how I know I am maturing.

Begin by holding awareness of when you slip into your immature child mind, your younger self who really just needs some comfort, then when that happens, that’s the moment you sit with your five-year-old self, that little boy, that little girl who’s so scared and so afraid and feels left out and feels isolated and feels he or she doesn’t belong and feels rejected and feels like there’s no security in this world, does not feel safe – it’s in that moment, through your mature self, through your inner healer, your inner therapist, your observer self, the wise mind, when you know this younger part of yourself has been triggered and activated and is very upset, that’s when we swoop in and we cradle that part of ourselves, we really pile on the gentleness, pile on the compassion, pile on the kindness telling him or her, “I’m going to get through this”, “I’m doing okay”, “What do you need, younger self?”, “How do I help you?”

In the same way that we’re offering comfort to that younger part when it gets really triggered, we’re going to do the opposite for our current adult self and give praise and give encouragement – so, you are maturing, good job!!

Be very specific about it, write down what are you learning, what have you learned and what you need to learn next and, as long as you’re committed to that process of personal growth and of raising your consciousness, all in the service of having the skill to work with the pain of suffering, to work with the cessation of suffering, that is very noble, that is very sophisticated, that is very complex and, at the same time, that’s what it means to mature!