Emotional Immaturity Is Working AGainst Us All

​In the aftermath of a broken 22-year relationship, a life partner accused me of being emotionally abusive. I am certain in her mind it didn’t sound like an accusation, but in my mind, she might as well have been accusing me of murder.

It's hard to be called an abuser.

But I am here to tell you there’s something even harder than being called an abuser. It’s coming to accept the truth in that accusation. It’s hard to accept that harsh accusations are harsh truths.

On my way to Atlanta earlier this week, I listened to part of Mel Robbins’ book, Let Them. I am stuck on Chapter 7. Chapter 7 of her book may end up being one of the most significant chapters of any book I have ever read. At least as it pertains to my own personal growth.

Chapter 7: When Grown Ups Throw Tantrums.

Robbins started the chapter by suggesting that most of us are walking around with the emotional maturity of 8-year-olds in big people bodies. She suggested that we are to some degree, many of us to a large degree, emotionally immature.

She didn’t say that as belittlement. She actually said it with great compassion.

Robbins said, “growing up, you were probably taught to repeatedly repress what you feel. You know, when you tell a child to get over it or stop crying or calm down, you're training them to suppress how they feel. You're teaching them that you're not supposed to feel or react. You’ve got to distract, avoid, or numb those normal healthy emotions.”

Robbins would go on to share that a therapist told her that this is why so many people live with anxiety and depression and addiction and chronic pain because they have avoided all the emotions over the years that then build up inside of them without any outlet.

Then she went on to address the silent treatment. And I went on to hit that replay button over and over.

About the silent treatment, Robbins said, “silent treatment is what an immature adult does when they're upset, and they don't know how to process their emotions in a healthy and respectful manner. So, what do they do instead?”

They stop talking.

They pretend nothing's wrong.

And often, they ignore you.

Robbins added, “and if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of the silent treatment from a friend or family member or coworker, it’s painful.”

My personal guess is, if you’re on the receiving end of it, it may feel abusive. And if you’re someone coming to realize this while reading chapter 7 of Let Them, you can start feeling like an abuser.

But then comes once again the compassion from Robbins. The compassion that can grow from emotional intelligence and emotional maturity.

She said, “an immature adult uses the silent treatment because they don't know how to process their own emotions. And so, they go silent and just drop this guillotine and cut off all contact because they hope you're gonna come over to them. They want you to ask what's wrong so that they don't have to deal with their emotions by themselves."

In those words, I came to understand me in a way I don’t think I ever had. Because most of my life that’s exactly what I did, use the silent treatment in hopes that someone would ask me what is wrong. I didn’t KNOW that’s what I was doing, but it IS what I was doing.

Somewhere inside of me I always longed to release all of the pain that had built up over the years, but didn’t have it in me, not by a longshot, to say to someone, I’d like to talk about all of this pain I have built up inside me.

I had NEVER seen anyone do anything remotely similar to that, I sure as hell had no idea how to do that myself.

Hearing chapter 7, and these insights from Robbins on the silent treatment, I realized I had spent most of my life using the silent treatment in that manner. Using it to beg people to ask me what is wrong because that felt easier than talking to someone about everything that was wrong.

I used the silent treatment as a kid, and as a teen, and in every relationship I ever had.

Robbins says, “until a person does the work to build the skills of emotional intelligence, they're always going to pull the silent treatment. They will always play the victim, and they will always be passive-aggressive. This isn't a personality trait, it's a pattern.”

Again, not easy to hear. But on the other hand, when you hear the way you’ve handled your emotions isn’t about a broken personality, but instead just the carrying on, over and over, of the patterns of your childhood, there is almost something freeing about that.

Freeing to understand a lot of who you are is who you were patterned to be and not who you decided to be.

Patterns built into you by abuse that was likely just the continuation of someone else’s patterns and not their personality traits.

How much harm is caused not by malicious intent, but by people unknowingly repeating the emotional patterns they inherited? Patterns they never learned to name—let alone break?"

How much abuse is simply carrying out patterns of emotions people have no capacity at all to interpret, let alone interpret as abuse?

I don’t offer any of this up as an excuse. Excuses have no value at this point.

But I do believe there is value in helping people understand themselves and understand the people across from them.

Robbins says to people who may be reading chapter 7 and realizing to some degree this chapter is about them and their own emotional immaturity: “You're not alone. I had that realization about myself too. And it takes a lot of courage to admit that you got work to do. It's so easy to see this immature behavior in other people. But it takes a level of bravery and emotional intelligence to see it in yourself.”

I also want to suggest that when we are on the receiving end of the silent treatment, emotional maturity may help us lean with compassion into the possibility this abuse isn’t at the hands of an abusive personality but rather a continuation of a pattern that goes back decades.

When we are on the receiving end of the silent treatment and receive it as an attack, it’s easy for silent treatments to breed more silent treatments.

Until a relationship becomes nothing BUT silence.

And the one thing that thrives in silence is resentment. Resentment until no one really cares at all about what is going on inside the person across from them. You come to resent the silence more than you have any compassion for the patterns beneath it.

Silence becomes an attack, it becomes abuse, not a call for help.

Not everyone can break the patterns of their life to the point that they can break their dependence on the silent treatment. I never could, at least not until I became painfully aware of my patterns. I am grateful that my emotional age is higher than 8 today, even if I have a long way to go to reach maturity.

I will also acknowledge there are certainly times to realize you are indeed the victim of a silent treatment you can no longer allow yourself to be a victim of. You need to allow for one's emotional immaturity while allowing yourself to no longer be a victim of it.

But there are also times, maybe, that being aware of emotional patterns offers an avenue to helping someone explore their patterns. Patterns they have unknowingly, often, used the silent treatment to hide from.

Patterns that have resulted in them abusing themselves while at the exact same time abusing the people around them.

Breaking generational patterns takes courage. It takes even more courage to enter into another person’s silence—not as a victim or an adversary, but as someone willing to see beyond the silence and into the pain that created it.

That kind of bravery could change everything.