My email inbox got to overwhelming proportions this summer. As I worked on clearing it out last week, I realized that I’d missed a number of not-earth-shattering-but-not-trivial emails from a good friend of mine. I sent her an email apologizing for missing the emails and noted that “my lack of organization must be very frustrating for you.”
This is what she said: “Yeah, frustrating at times, but that’s on me, right?”
Her reply was a classic example of emotional adulthood.
Emotional adulthood is the stage in development where we take responsibility for our own emotions and feelings. Emotional childhood is when we expect our parents, partners, or others to be responsible for our emotions and feelings, when we believe that they are the cause of our emotions and feelings.
While it can be difficult to take responsibility for our own emotions, it’s also very freeing. If I am responsible for my own emotions, then the words and actions of another person cannot make me feel a certain way. I get to choose how I feel.
My son has recently started asking my husband and me if some action he takes makes us sad.
He’s only 3, so I just say “No, love, nothing you say or do can make me sad. That’s up to me.”
On the playground at my son’s preschool I recently heard a teacher say a child’s behavior “makes me very sad.” While I disagree with this message, it’s a very common one, and well-intentioned. But it gives our children, and anyone else who “makes us sad” too much power. That’s a lot of responsibility for any child to shoulder.
One of my mentors, Brooke Castillo, once said that when we allow our children to have their emotions and don’t connect our emotions to their behavior or words, we give them permission to be themselves.
That makes sense to me. What if I tell my child that his behavior–hitting, for example, makes me sad. It might get him to stop hitting in that moment. But what if the behavior that makes me sad is him crying because a play date is over? Now he doesn’t have my permission to express his own emotions. The next time a play date ends he may not cry–not because he’s not sad, but because he’s learned that for me to be okay (and he needs me to be okay) he has to hide his emotions.
So when I see an example of someone who is an emotional adult, I’m very encouraged.
While I’m sorry I caused my friend frustration, I know that she can handle it and that if she’d like me to change my behavior, she’ll ask me. I know she’s authentic with me–when I’m with her I get the real her, not the person she thinks I need her to be. And I get to be the real me, as imperfect and in progress as I truly am.
Are you an emotional adult in your relationships?