Let’s talk about emotional maturity privilege.
Do you know how rare it is to be raised in an emotionally mature and integrated family?
While there are no statistics on this I’d guess we’d be talking about less than 1% of the planet’s population.
I’m not talking about families that don’t have trauma. Every family does in varying degrees.
I’m talking about families who can address those potentially traumatic experiences with love and compassion and humility and resilience and maturity and expansiveness. Who — by being emotionally mature — can prevent traumatic events from governing their lives, how they think, and how they behave afterward.
When you grow up seeped in dysfunction, this world of healthy relating feels elusive. In fact, so elusive that you don’t even know it exists. Healthy behavior is invisible to the unhealthy person. Most often the unhealthy person is even repelled by healthy behavior.
And therein lies the vicious cycle. The ignorance of dysfunction is that you can’t see healthy. And so you abhor it, judge it, make it wrong, further distancing yourself from healing and becoming healthy yourself.
People who grew up in healthy families have no idea that they are healthy. They don’t orient towards the world as healthy or unhealthy. They are just secure and as a result they don’t really question these things.
And they also don’t go anywhere near unhealthy or dysfunctional people because they have discernment about who is right for them and who is not and they don’t waste time thinking about it beyond that.
It’s a special kind of privilege to have that life.
Most of us have to work for it. Most of us go through trials and errors ten times over before we start to see our own dysfunction for what it is: coping mechanisms we once needed to survive but which are no longer serving us. We spend time and energy and money to unravel the mess. We are misguided and choose guides along the way who are just as dysfunctional themselves — and thus don’t really help us — because we lack discernment about what healthy even looks like. We wouldn’t know it if it was standing right in front of us.
A big part of the journey here is in building discernment. Building discernment only occurs through experience. Trial and error. There is no shortcut to discernment because discernment is a byproduct of being able to hear your heart and dysfunction is so loud for most of us that our heart’s calling is inaudible.
There are few people on the planet who can hear their hearts clearly with no obstruction because of how they were raised.
The rest of us have to learn.
And I can honestly say it’s a safe bet to just assume you’re not a part of that particular 1%. You probably don’t live with that privilege. You don’t have to grovel in it and punish yourself for it. It’s just the real reality for most of us. And if you don’t waste time throwing a pity party for yourself for not winning the genetic lottery, you can spend that energy getting to work, creating new neural pathways, healing your nervous system, expanding your perception, and building the emotional literacy you need in order to live well and create deep, unbreakable bonds. Because if not for that, why in god’s name are we even here?
In all of my work, I aim to orient toward the excitement of learning a new way of being; discovering who we are here to be underneath all the unhelpful learned behavior and thinking. Doing inner work is not punishment for having a dysfunctional upbringing. It’s a reward.
