The word psychotherapy comes from the Greek words, psyche, which means spirit or soul, and the Greek word, therapeuo, which means healing. Indeed, good psychotherapy creates an atmosphere of healing. The Greek word for maturity (sometimes translated as “perfect”) is teleos, which is related to teleology, which is the study of the origins of the universe that has an intended purpose. We believe that good psychotherapy has an equally important origin, the element of maturity, or as we sometimes say, “growing up.” In this blog we want to present some cases of people we have seen over the years as people who were in need of both healing and maturity. What do we mean by “healing” and “maturity”?

Healing

Healing any kind of wound, whether physical, emotional, cognitive, relational, or spiritual means restoring the individual to their original state. It is easiest to see what healing is with a physical wound but much harder to see the other kinds of wounds, emotional wounds perhaps being the core of all wounds. When a physician heals a physical wound, she must first identify where the wound is, secondly remove any foreign particle that may be in the wound, thirdly correct the wound, and finally instruct the patient on care of the wound until it is completely healed. Healing wounds that are cognitive, relational, or spiritual all have an emotional element that must be healed. What does that mean?

When we talk to patients about their wounds and restoration, we say that they have to “find it, face it, feel it, and finish it.” We have written elsewhere about this process but you might find it valuable to read our books, The Positive Power of Sadness and I Want to Tell You How I Feel as well as other blogs on our website regarding hurt and healing. You might ask, “What does finishing an emotional wound mean?” In our sadness book we discuss how the central ingredient of life is to love, and that if we love something, we will lose it, leading to the natural emotion of sadness. Finishing emotional wounds means, quite simply, feeling sad about the loss you suffered. Understand, that this is a brief understanding of the finding/facing/feeling process.

Finding and ultimately finishing a wound is the first and most important step in healing, but we have found that we need to help our people continue the healing process, avoid acquiring further festering wounds, and move on in life as a healed person, more importantly as a person who makes a contribution to the world. This necessary second part of healing we call maturity.

Maturity

Maturity is essentially growing up. In fact, we first thought of calling this blog, “Healing and Growing Up” but decided that maturing was the better word. When we speak of growing up or maturity, we are actually speaking of the same elements that are a part of healing: physical, emotional, cognitive, relational, and spiritual. As with the healing process of psychotherapy we focus in our work on emotional maturity. If I am mature emotionally, I will be better able to heal from my emotional wounds and be better at being a servant in the world in some way because service is largely related to healing and maturity. What does emotional maturity mean?”

You can read extensively on what it means to be emotionally mature in our feelings book or our sadness book, where we discuss early childhood emotional development. Simply stated, children acquire, experience, and hopefully develop a working ability with the four basic emotions:

• Fear in year 1
• Joy in year 2
• Anger in years 3-6
• Sadness in 6 +

Emotional maturity means having a grasp of these basic emotions so that they can be used when necessary. Adults should use:

• Joy and sorrow daily because joy and sorrow have to do with what I have or have lost
• Fear rarely, and only when there is true physical danger. Fear follows loss and sorrow
• Anger almost never because anger always follows fear

You can see that very few people have this kind of emotional maturity, the heart of which is loving something and feeling joy as well as losing something and feeling sadness. Anger and fear are always secondary. This concept may be the heart of what we do with people after we help them heal from wounds: grow up. If a person is emotionally mature, s/he will be much more able to be mature cognitively, relationally, and spiritually. Such people will also find it necessary to take care of their bodies better. Let’s look at some of the people with whom we help to heal and mature.

Peter: Peter is a man of about age 50 who grew up in in a family without a father. But importantly, he grew up without much of a mother either. It is remarkable that Peter has done as well in life without the ingredients of a good father and a good mother. Indeed, he has some significant results of having missed the important ingredients that come from a good mother figure and a good father figure. Part of the reason that he not only survived a neglectful and abusive family life is because he is quite bright. In fact, he is a successful lawyer, perhaps as a result of his being able to seek justice and fairness with his clientele.

The challenges Peter brought to me were several, not the least of which was his undue inclination to get angry, like so many men do. You might check out our newest book, Balls: Men Finding Courage with Words, Wine, Work, and Women (link)where we discuss the nearly universal tendency of men to fail to mature emotionally leading to both anger and anxiety. In addition to Peter’s tendency to get too easily angered, he wanted to be a better father, husband, friend, and an honorable worker. What held Peter back from these things were his early life emotional wounds, which then migrated into a lack of emotional maturity in general. I was pleased to hear him speak of a time while he was driving, feeling generally irritable and anxious, where he remembered what we say to so many people: he remembered his anxiety and irritability was a “love problem,” namely that he was worried about losing something that he loved. He told me that he felt, “God or Something showering him with love,” namely the things that he had been worried and irritable about. And his anxiety and anger disappeared, replaced with emotion associated with what he had and loved knowing that he could lose these things at any time. In other words, Peter felt the emotions of joy and sorrow.

Frank: Frank is a man, now 35, whom I saw 10 years ago when he was having trouble finding how he could overcome a challenge he had in his last semester of college and find some kind of meaningful work. He came back to see me after about eight years and I have been seeing him now for nearly two years with minimal success, I must admit. Frank had somehow found a way to finish his bachelor’s degree and had had some other developments in his life, but he was far from where he should be at 35. He is quite bright, like Peter, but brilliance can be an impediment to success in life because school often comes easily to such people. He had had a live-in girlfriend for several years but hasn’t been able to find and mature in any sort of job, let alone a meaningful profession. Most interestingly, Frank would like to be the President of the United States while also being some kind of superhero. He has talked of how his early childhood running well into his adolescence and adulthood has been playing video games always finding a kind of identification with superheroes. He talked about figuratively wanting to “wear the cape” (of superheroes) and do some kind of wonderful good for everybody. How, you might ask, would an intelligent, educated person believe he could be President and Superman in real life? I know, this sounds crazy but Frank is far from crazy. Frank has not grown up, this despite the fact that he has a college degree and is quite intelligent. I have come to believe that, like Peter and Frank, many very intelligent people don’t seem to grow up, at least emotionally.

Now, in this second session of therapy, Frank has been “looking” for a job, but it seems that there are no openings for a superhero with a cape nor is the Presidency open. He has not worked at all for two years and for most of the previous 10 years he has not worked very much, sometimes being fired, sometimes quitting, and at least once being laid off that gave him the opportunity to challenge his dismissal and get some kind of stipend. More importantly, he has been supported by his girlfriend and his parents as well. As I have worked more carefully with Frank, I see that while, indeed, he has not grown up, but equally importantly, he has been wounded. Interestingly, his wound, his emotional wound, was that of indulgence. You can check out our blog on PTSD from indulgence if you like (link). So, to help Frank grow up, I will need to first help him find, face, feel, and finish this early wound. The wound of indulgence for people is subtle but no less devasting because such people do enter adult life thinking, looking for, and finding people who indulge them.

Stan: Stan is a composite of many people whose wound is glaring and the cause glaring, quite different from Frank’s invisible wound. These people know they have been abused, think of it frequently, suffer significant self-esteem issues, and are chronically unhappy with themselves, other people, and the circumstances of life. The similarity between Frank and Stan-like people is the feeling of helplessness. Whereas Frank seemingly thinks that there is a person, job, place, or profession that will see his Superman-like dream a reality, Stan and others like him see no hope for anything in life, feeling stuck in their very visible wound, often a combination of abuse and neglect. Whereas Frank is obviously immature in many ways, including emotionally so, and Stan is very visibly wounded, they suffer from the same combination.

What can be done?

• As the individual:
  • Realize that you were not given the ingredients necessary for living a successful happy life
  • See the causes as your original unhappiness some kind of wound
  • Find, face, feel, and finish this wound. You will need a good therapist
  • Then, realize that you have not grown up. Growing up, maturity, is largely related to emotional maturity. Try hard to maximize the emotions of joy and sorrow, which generate from love, which will help you find love for people, product, work, play, and yourself
  • Catch yourself complaining, becoming irritable at small things, and note that anger and fear come from loss. Face loss, you will be sad, and your sadness will end. Fear and anger tend not to end.
• For friends and families:
  • Be careful with your loved ones because wounded/immature people are dangerous. Not dangerous in the physical sense of the term, but dangerous emotionally. They can drag you into emotions and complaining that does no good for them and not good for you
  • Listen, but don’t listen too much. Give, but don’t give in. love but don’t necessarily like. This is a challenge. Wounded and immature people can be very attractive and good at getting attention and rescuing
  • Avoid giving advice. They will not take it because you are advising a person who is a child emotionally and feels helpless.
  • Avoid getting judgmental or angry. If you feel these things, back off