A Checklist: How Emotionally Mature Are You in a Heated Conversation?

Melissa Killeen

[This is the final in a series of posts about my interactions with a recovery coaching client. In these blogs, I wanted to share what happens during a recovery coaching engagement, the discussions that take place, what usually comes up for the client and how, as a recovery coach, I respond. The series will pick up again in the near future]

I asked my client a very specific question after a blowup between he and his live-in girlfriend. If you have been following my blog, recently, you know that I have dedicated a number of posts to the topic of this particular client’s recovery and relapse, and his attempts to repair his relationship with the woman with whom he lives. So it’s become fairly obvious to me that this is going to be a recurring subject in our coaching and recovery relationship.

My client would like to believe that he is a mature, rational, 40-year-old adult. But if he is honest with himself, just as if we all are honest with ourselves, he’s surely held on to some inner emotional immaturity. The truth of the matter is that we can act like adults in our relationships or we can act like we’re 6 years old. When one partner displays emotional immaturity during a discussion, the other often follows suit, seemingly without much hesitation. Then the entire conversation fails. Perhaps the trigger is a feeling of being less-than, or of rejection or abandonment. In a flash, we become the 6-year-old that was lost in the department store, the 9-year-old that was reprimanded by a teacher or the 12-year-old listening in as their aunts and uncles fight at a Thanksgiving dinner.

As a coach, I like to differentiate between the emotional maturities of the 6-, 9- or 12-year-old, and those of the forty-year-old. When we begin to mature, our childlike behavior no longer reaps the same reward and we are forced to act more maturely. A 6-year-old is extremely limited in their choice of options when it comes to handling most types of situations. They learn as they grow, finding out what works and what doesn’t work. As adults, we have far more choices and options than a 6-year-old. Before reacting to questionable comments from another, it’s important to ask ourselves the very same question I asked my client: Do you want to be 6, 9 or 12 – or do you want to be 40? A true adult gets to choose!

Let me illustrate the difference . . .

I spent some time with my client to discuss his reaction to this most recent blowup with his girlfriend. He identified with several of the immature characteristics in the above columns, characteristics evident in this and past exchanges. How many did he use? Did this number of immature responses overwhelm the number of mature responses? We discussed what the mature responses would have been.

Immediately, he said this was a good chart and that he was going to show it to his girlfriend to let her know that she had also displayed immaturity in their past discussions. I suggested he not do this, pointing out that as a mature adult, he need not shame his partner, even under the guise of using, to her benefit, a learning tool. It would be more effective, I explained, for him to practice mature, adult responses to future, potentially explosive situations. That that would help ensure the temperature of the next conversation not rise to a dangerous level, and expect his girlfriend to recognize his positive responses and emulate his mature behavior in these dialogues.

Using correct tools of engagement in heated discussions is seldom taught in families, or school. We learn how to argue and fight from our parents, family members or friends. At forty, it is time for my client to approach a heated conversation as a forty-year-old, not a 12-year-old.