The Signs, Symptoms and Cures for Emotional Immaturity
hi i’m lisa turkis welcome to the proverbs 31 ministries podcast doing a series called therapy and theology and i want to welcome my partners in crime my co-hosts my fellow brilliant humans joel mutamale and joel is of course the resident theologian at proverbs 31 ministries and jim cress who is not only an amazing therapist he’s my counselor my personal counselor my family counselor so appreciate what you do but you also have a degree from dallas theological seminary so welcome to both of you so excited for this episode today we are
talking about emotional maturity emotional immaturity what are the signs of both of those so i wanted to start out today by reading something this started off as a text message to a friend she may or may not also be my hairdresser your hairdresser knows for sure so that’s right but she’s an amazing gal that had a question about something she was struggling with and i answered through a text but the text message prompted me to go over to the notes section in my phone and just keep writing so it started off as a text
wound up becoming an eventual probably future chapter in a future book but i want to read a little bit of it to you today i said a friend recently said to me your healing will bring out the emotional immaturity of those around you not willing to pursue help for themselves what a true statement and by acknowledging this it helps to make sense of the tension that exists in relationships where i’m wrestling over decisions this other person is making that feel so unexpected and sometimes even shocking either way i never thought
that they would do what they’re now doing or make the decisions they’re now making if this is you do not be surprised by the tension and when this other person tries to label you as difficult or uncooperative see it as a compliment if they’re making choices that are hurtful to you and refusing to acknowledge your concerns then the relationship can’t function normally there is tension because you are now doing the difficult work to no longer cooperate with dysfunction and you’re probably saying to yourself quite often is it me am i crazy
no you are not chances are it’s just because you are no longer cooperating with their dysfunction and when this starts to happen emotional immaturity is in play so i want to make sure that we fully acknowledge all of us are a combination of mature and immature moments so this isn’t to point a finger at someone else it’s really to help create some self-awareness and to help better understand when we’re in relationships that we cannot possibly discern in the moment what’s really going on here we may want to consider this reality
