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Hey guys, I'm Heidi Prib. Welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new here. Today on this channel, we are going to be talking about emotional maturity. So, this video is in part a follow-up to a video that I made several
Heidi Priebe explores subtle signs of emotional maturity, including organizing principles beyond oneself and grieving past pain to stop cycles of suffering.
Key Takeaways
- Organizing principles larger than oneself help people navigate daily stress without being derailed by it.
- Unresolved grief often drives emotional immaturity and perpetuates harmful cycles.
- Maturity means accepting ongoing imperfection and prioritizing repair over self-protection.
- Choosing relationships and environments that support growth is part of becoming more mature.
What the video covers
- Heidi Priebe introduces a follow-up video on subtle, commonly overlooked signs of emotional maturity, building on an earlier video about what people mistake for maturity.
- She defines maturity as the capacity to navigate the world and relationships well as one's actual self, without abandoning major parts of oneself.
- The first trait: mature people tend to have organizing principles bigger than themselves, which help filter meaningful signal from petty everyday noise.
- Priebe describes her own period of unemployment and pettiness, and how returning to school gave her a larger goal that improved her decision-making.
- She suggests the relationship runs both ways: secure upbringing helps people choose meaningful goals, and meaningful goals push people toward maturity.
- The second trait: mature people have grieved what they endured, rather than perpetuating cycles of suffering through distorted life philosophies.
- Priebe's theory is that denied grief lies at the core of most emotional immaturity, with defensive narratives formed as survival strategies.
- Defenses can manifest as dismissing others' emotional needs or becoming hyper-vigilant about past injustices and fighting undeserving battles.
- Maturity involves accepting that one will keep making mistakes for life, and focusing on interpersonal repair rather than managing internal feelings alone.
- Priebe emphasizes that maturity is a process rather than a destination, and that self-regulation under others' pain is part of growth.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Video Context
- 01:13Defining Emotional Maturity
- 02:34Trait One: Organizing Principles Beyond Yourself
- 06:04Personal Story: Finding Meaningful Goals
- 06:24Trait Two: Grieving Past Suffering
- 08:00Denied Grief and Distorted Narratives
- 11:00Accepting Mistakes and Interpersonal Repair
- 14:50Choosing Mature Relationships and Environments
- 20:20Self-Regulation and Closing Thoughts
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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months ago where we talked about all of the things that we tend to mistake for maturity. And ever since that video came out, which is linked in the description of this one, I've been wanting to make a sequel that looks at some of the more
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subtle or commonly overlooked signs of maturity in people. And so, that's what we're going to go over today.
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So, in that last video, I shared that my personal definition of maturity is the capacity to navigate the world and relationships well as the people that we actually are. So, being able to rise to the major but also the minor demands of
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our lives with competence and wisdom and without abandoning major parts of ourselves in that process. And it really is a process, right? It's not this one end destination that we arrive at. So today we're going to go over five signs
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of emotional maturity that tend to be a little bit more subtle than the ones that we usually hear about like having a general sense of responsibility or self-awareness. So these are just patterns that I have noticed cropping up
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over and over again in the lives of people who to me seem to be very grounded and capable of doing that navigation of their lives and relationships with a lot of authenticity and integrity online.
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So the first sign or unifying factor that we're going to talk about today is that these people's lives tend to all have organizing principles that are bigger than themselves. So, the reason I wanted to start with this point is that
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it was just chronologically the first thing that started jumping out at me more consistently when I decided to start paying more attention to what seemed to be the difference between myself and my own life and my own choices and priorities and the lives and
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the choices and the priorities of the people who I considered to be a lot wiser and a lot more mature than myself.
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So for those of you who might not be familiar with this term, an organizing principle is the underlying structure that the rest of a system organizes itself around. Okay, so psychologically speaking, it might be something like a core value or an overarching goal that
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operates in the background of our awareness that a lot of our smaller dayto-day decisions are getting oriented around or made in service of. And what I started noticing was that most of the people I looked up to seemed to have a
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pretty impressive ability to move through things like daily forms of stress and exhaustion and adversity without getting completely derailed by or too caught up in their emotional experience of those things. But it also wasn't that they were dismissing those
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things or pretending not to be affected by them, right? it was that they seemed to be in touch with some greater goal or some other endpoint that was giving those smaller annoyances and challenges meaning. And it occurred to me that I
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actually had no idea which of these things was driving the other. So were the organizing principles like caring for a family or having a career goal that felt meaningful in some big way the things that were maturing people or was
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it that mature people were better at picking and adhering to good organizing principles? So I decided to test this out for myself. So at the point in my life where I was exploring this question, it was in the thick of co I
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was out of work and I was noticing myself getting really pulled into things like just stupid Twitter arguments about absolutely nothing of substance or petty dayto-day disagreements with my partner or even just the simplest choices about like what to eat or how to structure my
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day. I was putting so much emphasis and way too much thought into. And I realized that the problem might be not that I was terrible at making daily decisions, but that I needed a bigger fish to fry. So all of that energy that
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my body was producing to try to help me live a big meaningful life was getting squandered on these small low-meaning activities.
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Right? So this was actually the point where I decided to go back to school and start learning about psychology again, which gave me a whole new set of challenges to orient myself around. And that ended up giving my life and my
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consciousness a totally different shape than it had had before. So I now had new bigger forms of stress in my life. But I was also becoming quicker to disengage with interactions that were petty or going nowhere. I preserved my mental and physical energy
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more because I needed to. And over the course of those two years, I made significantly wiser decisions than I had in many of the years preceding them.
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And so I do suspect at this point that the directionality works both ways here.
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I think that those of us who are maybe raised a little bit more secure tend to have better internal mechanisms for choosing meaningful goals in the first place. But also meaningful goals can help push us towards maturity because
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they can inherently provide these organizing principles that help us filter out signal from noise when it comes to those smaller everyday decisions.
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So there's a Theodore Roosevelt quote that goes in any moment of decision. The best thing you can do is the right thing. The next best thing is the wrong thing. And the worst thing you can do is nothing. And I really think that that
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speaks to the fact that any significant choice in life that we commit to is going to function to cohhere some aspect of our mental, emotional, and physical energy in a particular direction. And that coherence can actually serve the
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maturation process much more so than the actual attainment of goals does. So internally cohering ourselves is the process of building character.
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Organizing ourselves in some direction regardless of where it ends up leading us is sometimes the very thing that can keep us from wasting our energy fighting the wrong battles. which is something I've noticed that a lot of the more
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mature people I know personally seem to spend very little time doing. The second trait of emotionally mature people that we're going to talk about today, they have grieved what they once had to endure in a way that allows them to stop
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perpetuating cycles of senseless suffering. So my pet theory on this is that denied grief is actually at the core of pretty much all emotional immaturity.
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When bad things happen to us in life and we do not have a way of understanding either why they're happening or how to cope with the feelings that they bring up in us, the only choice we really have
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is to find some narrative that gives us any sense of control or autonomy back, right? That's just a basic survival instinct.
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But when we retain and hold on to those narratives past the point of relevancy, they can end up turning into really distorted life philosophies. So things like, "Well, no one ever asked me how I was feeling growing up, and I turned out
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fine, so my partner or my children just need to toughen up and stop expecting me to check in with them." Or, "Everyone feels depressed and anxious at work. If you're working for me, you need to stop worrying so much about your mental
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health and worry more about just putting your head down and getting the job done." Or we might swing in the opposite direction with this and become so preoccupied with the injustices that we've experienced that we end up fighting back against anything that even
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remotely reminds us of that thing which can lead us to fighting a lot of battles against people who don't deserve it. And I will say in either case, these defenses usually form because we didn't have the guidance that we once needed to
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learn to emotionally metabolize situations that have been either traumatic or just plain painful and unfair for us. Right? So, what we're not here to do is moralize about maturity.
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For the most part, we mature to the extent that we've had mature role models available to us during formative periods. And if we didn't get those early in life, we might have to seek out and choose them for ourselves in the
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form of therapists or mentors later on and take on that process of maturing in a proactive way.
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But a key marker that that maturing process has happened is that we're able to grasp that those old stories that we once told ourselves to make sense of the injustices that happened to us don't have to be universal. There's no karmic
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justice to be found in others suffering the same way that we did. So to get here, we have to move through the grief of realizing that our own suffering was not necessarily inevitable. Nor was it a situation that everybody must learn to
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simply deal with. It was just a really bad hand that we got dealt because suffering is not doowled out equally in this world or fairly.
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But learning to have compassion for that in ourselves instead of some hardened or super reactive response to it can go a really long way in making sure that we don't accidentally perpetuate those same cycles of suffering in the lives of our
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own children or the people whose lives we impact. The third trait of emotionally mature people that we're going to talk about today is they are aware of their capacity to cause harm unintentionally and they can own up to wrongdoing
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without collapsing into either shame or defensiveness. Now, before we unpack that point further, I just want to take a quick minute to thank the sponsor of today's video, Factor. So, one of the things that I've learned over time is that a
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big part of staying grounded dayto-day is making sure that the basics are consistently taken care of. So, if I am over or undereing, if I am feeling rushed or mentally overloaded, I have way less capacity to attend to the
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plus free breakfast for 1 year. All right, so back to point number three. All of us at some point or another are going to end up making a mistake or hurting someone we care about, however unintentionally.
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That's just an unavoidable part of being alive. And a key sign of maturity, just like being able to metabolize grief, is the capacity to metabolize shame. It takes genuine strength of character to be able to do this well. Because when we
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don't know how to be present with the feeling of having gotten something wrong, we usually go in one of two directions. We either distance ourselves from it by minimizing what just happened, right? By justifying it, deciding the other person was
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overreacting, whatever it is, or we collapse into selfadating thoughts and we tell ourselves that beating ourselves up is the same thing as taking responsibility.
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But neither of those responses actually lead to interpersonal repair, right? Because both of them are just strategies for managing the feelings that are coming up for us internally.
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And the antidote to both of those strategies is humility. So the capacity to rightsize our own self-concept and go, I am of course not immune from hurting people without meaning to. Why would I be the only person who's immune
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to that? Right? But I can also treat myself with dignity through the repair process. I don't have to write myself off as a human being just because I got one thing wrong. Even if I got it really wrong. The thing about apologies, even
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for those things that we really messed up on, is that they only really hit when we have our dignity and our backbone online while we are making them.
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So, for a really long time, I personally had this fantasy of maturity as finally getting to a place where I would never get anything wrong again. Like, if I could just memorize all of the rules about how to be an upstanding friend and
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partner and citizen and follow them all methodically, I would get to this magical place where I would never have to feel shame again.
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And I had to slowly and excruciatingly learn that it is the opposite. Maturity means getting to a place where we can accept that we're going to keep making mistakes in some form or another for the rest of our lives. And we need
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to be in deep relationship to that fact. So we are not above getting things wrong. Nobody is.
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But also our wrongs do not need to take over and overwhelm the whole of who we are. That is more often than not the pattern that keeps us stuck in avoiding accountability rather than stepping into it. The fourth trait of emotional
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maturity that we're going to talk about today is holding ourselves responsible for being well supported.
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So this was I actually think the hardest pill of all hard pills that I had to swallow in any part of my attachment healing or maturation journey period.
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coming into the awareness that I actually had a moral responsibility to find good support for myself if I wanted to keep myself stable and a good friend and family member. I had a responsibility to choose friends who lifted me up without enabling my bad
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habits. I had a responsibility to date other emotionally mature people so that I didn't end up squandering my life force energy which I could otherwise use to do great work in the world getting sucked into the wrong battles. I had a
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responsibility to surround myself with positive and nurturing people if I wanted to do the best work that I was capable of in the world and show up for the people who mattered to me in the best and most resourced way. A huge part
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of maturity is about recognizing our limits and acknowledging what we are just not capable of on our own.
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And this is a really humbling thing to realize for those of us who grew up believing that the most inconveniencing thing we could possibly do is to rely on somebody else. It is an honor for most healthy people to feel relied on.
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It is an honor to show up for the people we care about and contribute to their lives and to their growth and to their well-being in meaningful ways.
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It is so easy to form these egos around not needing anyone when it's the message that we internalized early on as the right thing to do.
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And it's so hard to realize that those egos are often directly at odds with what it actually means for us to grow into the most generous and giving versions of ourselves.
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Those versions are born from immersing ourselves deeply in supportive contexts, not from ruthless self-reliance and going without.
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Okay? We are never as wise or as balanced or as resourced as we are when we are in deep relationship with other wise resourced beings.
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So this is about putting ourselves in the right rooms, learning from the right people and being vulnerable in the right environments where that vulnerability can serve both us and the people who are responding to it where we can create those upward
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spirals interpersonally towards more wholeness. So to my knowledge though I am not a botonist so correct me if you are and I'm getting this wrong. There are no flowers out there that are resilient enough on their own to grow
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inside of soil that lacks meaningful nutrients. And in the exact same vein, there are no people out there, no matter how strong and resilient, who are resilient enough to thrive inside of environments where their needs are being neglected.
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We can survive those contexts. We can maybe even survive them for a long time, but it is really hard to thrive in them.
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Actual flourishing requires the right soil. So, we need to be intentional about finding that for ourselves. The fifth and last trait we're going to talk about today is that mature people give others room to fail and grow at their
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own pace. So, we've already talked about the flip side of this one, which is the phenomenon of dismissing others pain and suffering. But the other end of the same extreme is becoming overly involved with others suffering because it either
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reminds us of the suffering that's unresolved inside of us and seeing it playing out externally disregulates us or because we have only learned to keep others close through helping them or playing savior to them in some way.
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But a key component of mature adults is that they are well differentiated. They understand where they end and someone else begins, which means holding a deep respect for other people's autonomy and capacity to find their own way to the solutions that are best for
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them. So, we talked briefly in the last video on maturity about how independence is a huge part of it, but a core mistake we can make is confusing what I call the objects of independence with the mechanisms.
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So maybe for us achieving independence looked like leaving our hometown to go live in a big city and founding a startup or buying a home or whatever it was. We can be prone in these cases to push those same experiences onto other
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people thinking that those achievements or those objects that we attained are what independence is. But that's not true. Actual independence is the capacity to choose for oneself. That's it. So, the person who stays in their hometown, works a very ordinary 9to-5,
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and marries their high school sweetheart can be every bit as independent as that high-powered startup founder, so long as their choices are emanating from a place of deep autonomy and self-alignment.
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That's all mature independence really is. It has very little to do with what manifests on the outside and a whole lot to do with how we relate to ourselves internally.
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And mature adults tend to naturally grasp this. They understand that whatever they think is best for another person is just a thought that is incredibly limited by their own experiences and biases.
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So the process of supporting others for them is more about the process of being present and available to the people they love as those people chart their own courses forward which are necessarily going to involve a lot of trial and
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error and dead ends and having that capacity to self-regulate around the pain that we feel or the discomfort we feel or the panic we feel when the people we love are going through those trials or hitting those dead ends is a
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key part of what makes up a mature adult. So, it's not that we never want to lend a helping hand when that's what's needed, but we don't need to rob people of the experience of learning from their mistakes because of the
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discomfort that we feel watching them make them. Right? We need to allow the people we love to struggle their way into whichever self-directed path is going to grow them next.
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All right, this list, like most lists on this channel, could be quite a bit longer, but I am going to leave it at that for today. As always, any questions, thoughts, or insights that you had coming up as you went through
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this video, please leave in the comments section below. I love you guys. I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other, and I'll see you back here again really soon.
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Sweet.
Topics:emotional maturitypersonal growthorganizing principlesgriefself-awarenesspsychologyHeidi Prieberelationshipsself-regulationcharacter building
