Transcript

Emotional maturity is a state few of us ever reach, or at least not for very long. But it may help us to try to lay out what some of the ingredients are. So that we can have an idea of what we might aim for. If we were to grow into emotionally mature people, this is some of what we would have learned how to be. 

We would strive to understand the specific ways in which our childhoods had made us crazy, we would accept that most of what we are, is shaped by relatively small events that unfold before we are 10 years old, we would probably go and find a good therapist there, we would start to notice the patterns. Perhaps we wouldn't need to keep trying to impress older figures of authority or fall in love with distant people who are involved with someone else, we would acquire a low resolution map of our neuroses, there would be a little more delay between feeling something and having to act on it.