“Why don’t you just grow up?”  How many times have we heard or said that?  There are many reasons and excuses that we “don’t just grow up”.  The purpose of sharing isn’t to try to figure that out even though that is a very important subject if you find your life chaotic and a mess or 180 degrees from that, super mature and controlling of one’s environment and people you are in relationship with.  The point here is that they are adaptations on opposite sides of the coin.  If you relate to either extreme you may want to spend some time reclaiming the authentic self that is immature.  To help one decide if one needs to pay attention here go back to Step 1 of the 12 Steps and ask if chaos or being super mature causing one to feel out of control or insane.  Once we identify our adaptive self we can observe in our lives whether or not we can live moderately.  Or do we shift from one extreme to another and have no clue what moderation looks like in reality.  The adaptive self here moves into the area of intimacy.  We find it difficult to share with others who we really are as well as the inability to hear them share who they are with us.

As we have gone through these first four characteristics you may note that it is easier to identify the problems we have in the Related Problems column and most of the time we spend trying unsuccessfully to change these behaviors when all they are is the surface of a deep chasm where we have buried the original child abuse.  This is not a “blame game”, it is a “name game”, going to the root of our troubling behaviors.  Most of the deep buried stuff came to us before we even had language for it.  Many of us have amnesia during our childhood but the body remembers, the subconscious carries it around affecting and infecting our adult lives.  The stories amaze and boggle the mind as week after week we hear revelations of sexual/physical abuse perpetrated by priests, ministers, Scout leaders to say nothing of the politicians and media moguls being accused and convicted of these crimes.  As we dig deeper many times we see that victims become victimizers so it behooves us to do the hard work necessary to reclaim our authenticity.

Recovery of Immaturity

• Identify yourself on the continuum of chaos to over maturity
• Admit the insanity and use the first three Steps of recovery on it
  • I can’t, He can and I let Him
• In the midst we can start with “I want to want to change …”
• In a safe place with safe people begin to learn how to be moderate and centered in the experiences of your internal reality and the external expression of your own reality