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Our culture likes easy measurements of maturity, such as chronological age, number of achievements, financial stability, and the ability to adapt to conventional norms for having a job and a place to live. However, a person can meet these criteria for growing up and still have little or no psychological maturity. The word maturity comes from the Latin word matures, meaning “ripen.” We can understand ripen as meaning “moving beyond early stages of development.” But before we can ripen, we may need to grow down.
Growing Down
When we grow down, we confront early attitudes and beliefs that strengthen neither our relationship with ourselves nor our relationship with life. Here are a number of these attitudes and beliefs.
- Attached to immediate gratification. Early in our development, we tend to want our needs to be met now. Of course, this makes it difficult for us to make investments that pay off in the future. The ability to plan is seriously compromised.
- Holding a view of permanence. We tend to think that if we love and cherish someone or something, then it will not end. It’s a serious distortion, since everyone and everything will come to an end.
- Attached to believing that our stories about the life happening around us are accurate accounts. It can take a while before we accept that our stories are simply that, stories. We may need time to integrate how often our stories fall short of accurately reflecting reality. The process can be quite humbling.
- Attached to denying fear. Growing down means becoming curious about feeling scared. It can help to consider what you might be afraid of and talk with friends about their fears.
- Attached to being compulsively self-reliant. Consider whether there are times when you might need help and support from others. It can be challenging to recognize you need help without thinking it means something is wrong with you.
- Attached to being special. Personal worth can still be posited in the idea of being special. This may be the time to at least consider that your uniqueness and your ordinariness can hold your self-worth.
- A tendency to react. In our growing down experience, we begin to notice how often we act impulsively, without considering which words or actions will serve the immediate situation.
Growing down is a process of letting go or dying, where denial and certain attachments are challenged and gradually let go. It often takes multiple acts of letting go before an attachment is released. Let’s look at how the growing down process can translate into ripening or growing up.
Growing Up
- Postponing gratification. When gratification is postponed, there is less impulsivity, leading to a wider consideration of what might serve you as well as others.
- Accepting life’s non-permanence. We can let go of the magic attached to believing that when we love someone or something devotionally, the relationship will never end.
- Accepting that our stories are often a cursory view of what’s happening. If we’re lucky, we experience how fitting it is that life’s immensity will naturally elude our best attempts at capturing it.
- Acceptance of being ordinary. Know that seeking to be special will not strengthen your essential worth. The goal is to honor the paradox of your uniqueness and your shared humanity.
- Acceptance of your need for help. As there is more honesty about life’s immensity, so there is a greater willingness to ask for help, accompanied by humility.
- Responding rather than reacting. Being responsive means slowing down and recognizing that what’s happening isn’t a crisis demanding immediate attention. Our input may not be necessary at all. Pausing lets us consider what to say or do that might help most.
- Accepting fear. Feeling fear is not a reflection of our psychological instability. It is simply an emotional reaction to potential danger, the unknown, and change in general. Adults can feel fear, decide whether their safety is at risk, and, if it is, do what it takes to protect themselves.
Maturity can so often be such a vague concept that we don’t know what it is or whether we can actually influence it. Everyone seems to want to “grow up” into a flourishing adulthood, yet it can help to take “growing down” seriously because it shows us what we need to let go of and get ready for. It’s not much different from clearing land of rocks and debris in order to prepare for planting and growing. The goal is to take some of the mystique out of becoming an adult. We owe it to ourselves and to others to attend first to some of our more primitive attitudes before we find ourselves merely pretending we are adults.
