00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 75, "Emotional Adulthood." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:21 

Alright, hey there. So glad to be here with you today. Thanks for joining me. Hey, so I was just laughing at myself because I've been home by myself all night and I was preparing this and I got ready to start my intro on this and I went to talk and my voice totally cracked because I hadn't talked for a few hours and I started giggling and then it took me several takes before I could do the intro without giggling because it just was making me laugh. I don't know, sometimes those things just happen, right? 

00:50 

Alright, so today we are talking about emotional adulthood. Now, you may not know what this is, but let me clue you in on what's happening here. So I was talking with my 8th graders the other day and we were discussing what it's like to be an adult, and I'm always amazed when I have these conversations with my kids, at how many of this generation are just not interested in growing up. When I was an 8th grader growing up in Idaho, I was months away from getting my driver's license and I was biting at the bit to get it, right? Because a driver's license meant independence and freedom and responsibility and those things were big for me back in the 80s. Today with these kids, not so much. And I think that smart phones and social media give kids kind of a false sense of these things that they don't feel they need the same way that we did to venture away from our homes to connect with others. And I think they're so used to people doing so much for them that they don't value. They haven't gotten the good feelings that come from learning to do things for themselves. 

02:00 

But anyway, these 14 year olds are just not that excited to grow up, and I see it all around me. So many of today's teenagers are just not interested in dating, or getting driver's licenses, or getting jobs, and when they finally do get them, it's under duress from their parents, because mom and dad are tired of driving them around and giving them money all the time. And these kids have no interest in taking on the responsibility of being an adult. And though it seems strange to us that these kids are wanting to stay in this juvenile state and not start taking responsibility for their own lives, I think there's a huge percentage of adults who don't want to step into what is called "emotional adulthood." 

02:45 

So emotional adulthood is taking 100% responsibility for all of our emotions, every single one of them. It is refusing to blame others for how we feel and how we act. Now, we've talked about this before, but so many of us were taught as children that other people were responsible for our feelings. We were asked if Mikey hurt our feelings or if Katie made us sad. We were chastised when we said something that made our brothers cry. We were even told by our parents that we had made them sad when we didn't clean up our bedrooms. 

03:20 

Now, I definitely don't think that any of this was taught on purpose. In fact, I believe that what all of this was meant to do was to help us become more aware and responsible for our own behaviors. But what it unintentionally did was to create a false belief that we had control over other people's feelings and that they had control over ours. And because of this, so many of us were raised to believe that our feelings were caused by outside circumstances. "Someone said something and my feelings were hurt." And so many adults continue to live in this world of believing that they have no control over what they feel. They don't make any correlation between what they are thinking and what they are feeling, and just thoroughly believe that what they feel is a direct result of other people and outside circumstances. And this is what we call emotional childhood. Because like my eighth graders, they don't want to be responsible for their own lives. They don't want the independence that comes with growing up because then they will have to step up and do things that they consider hard or  difficult. 

04:36 

But this is the thing my students don't understand about growing up. Yes, there are a lot of responsibilities when it comes to adulting, but there are so many amazing things about being an adult. I can come and go as I please. I can do whatever I feel like doing whenever I feel like doing it. I can drive myself anywhere I want to go and spend my money however I want, I don't have to be responsible to anybody else if I don't want to be. I can have complete independence to create whatever I want to create in my life. And it's amazing! Isn't it just so much fun to be grown up and be able to do all of this? Do we have to pay a price? Yeah, of course, but personally I think it's totally worth it. And most adults I know would rather be in this place paying the price it takes to have this independence than to still be a teenager dependent upon other people and not having the freedoms that come with being an adult. 

05:41 

But emotionally so many adults still want to be children. We are consistently looking for someone to blame for how we feel and what we do. And we want to be able to throw temper tantrums and not be responsible. But what we often don't realize is that just as a teenager without a driver's license is sacrificing independence and control over their lives, so is the adult who refuses to take responsibility for their emotions. But most of us really don't realize how often we abdicate responsibility for our emotions. We have engaged in this thinking and the subsequent behavior for so much of our lives that we aren't even aware that we're doing it. 

06:29 

Let me give you an example of what this looks like. When I was married and before I started to engage in this emotional mind work, I thought that it was my husband's fault when I felt unhappy. When I didn't feel love, I blamed him for not helping out enough around the house or not taking the time to sit down and talk with me. When I felt angry, I blamed him for not living up to my expectations or doing what I wanted him to do. When I felt hurt, it was because something he had said or he had done something that I thought was hurtful. I was in a continual pattern of blaming him for my emotions and my subsequent behaviors. I was consistently expecting him to fulfill my needs, and when he didn't I would behave in a very childish way. I would throw a temper tantrum, I would pout, I would feel sad, I would cry, right? 

07:23 

Now, I totally get that relationships can be an incredible partnership, but I also understand that expecting my partner to fulfill my needs and make me feel good just isn't gonna work. How someone else in our life acts just moves into our circumstance line and it immediately becomes neutral. Okay, yes, you heard me right. It's entirely neutral, regardless of what the other person does or says, it's neutral. It only becomes positive or negative when I have a thought about it. So consider this: if you are lying there unconscious, I could say or do whatever I wanted to you and you wouldn't have any feelings about it at all. I could say you were the meanest person I'd ever met and you would just lie there. I could hurl all manner of insults at you and you would give me no response. Why is that? It's because if you are unconscious, you are not having any thoughts about what is being said. The words I'm speaking are just going into the air and they don't really mean anything. They are 100% neutral. They're just words. They only become positive or negative when we decide what those words mean. 

08:47 

For example, one person can tell you they love you and it will be a beautiful thing. You will have amazing thoughts that will cause you to have loving feelings as well. But there are other people in your life that if they told you that they loved you, it would give you the creepies, right? You would start to have some disturbing thoughts because of what you would make those thoughts mean, or what you would make those words mean. When one of my children tells me that they love me, I have an overwhelm of love emotions because of the thoughts I have about them telling me that. I think about how grateful I am for them and about how blessed I am to be their mother and how much overwhelming love I have for them. In fact, even just me thinking those thoughts right now just caused me to have a total overwhelm of emotion. I don't know if you heard my voice crack a little bit, but just thinking about how much I love them and how grateful I am for them caused me to have this huge emotion. 

09:52 

Okay, but a few weeks ago when that weird guy from Sri Lanka contacted me on Facebook and was confessing his undying love in his first message, I wasn't having the good feels because I was thinking thoughts about how he had to be a creeper and he must think I'm completely stupid if I'm going to take that seriously. Same words, "I love you," right? But my thoughts  about those words were completely different depending on who they came from, which then caused me to have completely different emotions. 

10:31 

So here's the thing about emotional adulthood. This is the place where we start to take full responsibility for how we feel every single time. And we also take full responsibility for the actions that come as a result of the emotions. When we step into emotional adulthood, we are willing to grow up emotionally and stop blaming others. We decide to step into the power of our own thoughts. When I'm blaming other people for my emotions, I am giving up my power. I am placing the responsibility for my emotions on another person. When I take responsibility for my emotions, realizing that I am creating them, then I become empowered in knowing that I can create anything that I want to create in my life. 

11:21 

So it's like the teenager who gives up their dependency on their parents in order to have full control over all of their time and their energy and their money. They give up something in order to gain something of far more importance. And here's the dichotomy here: emotional childhood is like trying to control other people. It's like a small child. We spend our time throwing temper tantrums and trying to manipulate other people into behaving the way we want them to behave so we can feel the way we want to feel. If I feel my spouse is responsible for making me feel happy, I'm going to spend my time trying to control the behaviors that they engage in because I think those specific behaviors are going to make me happy. 

12:13 

But this never works because nobody likes to be controlled. Even those little kids, right? Even these little two, three, four year olds, they fight against control. No one likes somebody else telling them what to do and being manipulated into doing things for fear of making the other person angry. And most of us, at least me anyway, will actually start to act in the exact opposite way of what we feel we're being manipulated into doing. And really, honestly, when we make other people feel and think and tell them that they're responsible for how we feel, that's a manipulative behavior. Emotional childhood really is about having control issues. We're not allowing the other people in our lives to be who they really are because who they really are isn't making us happy. So we feel the need to control what they do and what they say in order for us to be happy. 

13:19 

So I sometimes follow a Facebook page about equal partnership in marriage and I was totally floored by a post from a woman a few weeks ago. She was talking about how her husband was such a good man and how he really carried his share of the emotional and the physical labor around the house. She honestly felt he was a great partner except for the fact that her love language is words of affirmation and he just didn't really do that. Because he mostly did acts of service she was so unhappy all of the time because he wouldn't continually tell her how amazing she was and how she was the love of his life. 

14:01 

Okay, so I probably just embellished that just a little bit, but the feeling was all there, right? I didn't go back and reread the post before I did that, but I was amazed at what I was reading. She has a husband who's really partnering up with the parenting and the household responsibilities, and yet she wasn't happy. She was expecting him to meet her needs, thinking that she couldn't find a good place emotionally until he started to do exactly what she wanted him to do. It doesn't matter what else he was doing that was amazing, she needed to control this last piece of the exact words that were coming out of his mouth. And she had decided that she would not be happy with him because he was not behaving the way she wanted him to behave. And it was his fault that she was unhappy. 

14:56 

Okay, so you can probably tell that I was really bothered by this post because of my thoughts, right? My thoughts were, "she's being so selfish," and then that made me feel annoyed. And then my action is that I talk about it here on my podcast, right? I talk about it because, you know, that's my action. But this sweet lady didn't understand that her husband is not responsible for meeting her every need. He's not responsible for the way she feels, for her current unhappiness. That's not to say that she can't express something that she would appreciate from him, like more words of affirmation. But she also has to realize that he's an adult, and he can do or do not as he pleases. And to put all of her happiness on him is giving up control of her emotions, giving up control of how she feels. She is wanting him to take care of her emotions when her emotions are her responsibility. So right now, she's stuck in emotional childhood. But she is definitely not alone. I'm not singling her out. That was just an example. Because I get stuck in emotional childhood, and I'm sure that you do too, and we all do. 

16:15 

And so much of it is because we were raised with these ideas that other people are responsible for our emotions, and they become our go-to thoughts for our primitive brains. Because our cerebellum, or our primitive brain, just wants to protect us from the pain of the immediate short-term pain of responsibility, but without regard for the long-term consequences of not owning our own emotions and giving up control. Because if you remember, cerebellum does not have that long-term understanding of consequences. It just knows what has happened in the past. 

16:56 

So what do we need to do to move into emotional adulthood more often? First of all, just becoming aware of this concept and beginning to evaluate where you are? First great step. Ask yourself, do you find yourself blaming other people or outside circumstances or situations for your emotions? Whether they're positive or negative emotions, it doesn't matter. We have to become aware of whether we're giving up control of them or not. Are we blaming others for them or are we owning them? Awareness is always the first step in anything we're interested in looking at, right? If you find at this point you are always living in emotional adulthood, good for you. But my guess is that at least some of the time we're all in emotional childhood. We all want to blame other people for what is happening in our emotional lives because we're taking that discomfort and putting it on somebody else, right? We want to blame other people for what is happening in our emotional lives because that is what our primitive brain naturally wants to do. 

18:10 

So once we start to become aware of certain situations or even certain people with whom we tend to blame more often then we need to seek to heighten our awareness of where and when this is happening. Are we always blaming a spouse? Are we always blaming our children? Are we always blaming our mother, right? What's going on here? At first we may not notice it right away, but we may find ourselves saying things like "he makes me so mad," or even "he makes me so happy." Technically neither one of those is true. We have made ourselves mad or happy by our thoughts about their behavior or what they said. 

18:56 

And that can be a tough pill to swallow sometimes when we first start to realize it. And guess what? That's okay if it's tough. Let it be tough. But start to see what you're thinking through the lens of emotional adulthood and check out what shows up. Just get curious and start looking at what you're thinking and start looking at your emotions and start looking at how we start to blame other people and then how we start to try to manipulate other people to help us feel the way that we wanna feel. 

19:30 

Fascinating stuff to start looking at. When we start noticing our self-thinking or saying something that gives up our power, intentionally we need to evaluate our thoughts and discover what is going on in our head. Then we need to reframe thoughts to take responsibility for our emotions. The more consistent we are with rethinking what we want to think, the more we will grow into an emotional adulthood. And just like these teenagers who eventually set aside their insecurities and their mental immaturity of not wanting to take responsibility, and they start to step into the amazing independence of doing adult things, so will we start to step into emotional adulthood and realize the true power and control over ourselves that comes when we take responsibility for our emotions and we stop blaming other people. 

20:26 

Is it work? Absolutely. But at this stage in our lives, what great things have you ever obtained in your life that didn't require work? Doing the difficult work to become an emotional adult is so liberating and empowering. It allows us the freedom to feel whatever we want to feel and not be at the mercy of whomever or whatever is around us. And what better way to strengthen our relationships and make stronger connections than to let go of our sometimes never ending need to control other people so that we can try and feel the way that we want to feel. 

21:14 

Growing up is amazing. These insights are changing my life and I love, love, love them. I would love to coach you one on one. I have some openings coming up. I just finished working with a client so I've got some open space in my schedule. So if you would love some personal help from me in learning more about these concepts, learning how they work, even talking through a situation with me and helping me to see your thoughts of where you may be giving up control, where you may be trying to control other people, where you may be stepping into emotional childhood, is a powerful, powerful experience to work with a coach and have that happen. I know working with my coaches I'm always completely shocked and amazed at what they pull out of what I say. And I'm like, "what? I said that?" But it's so enlightening. It's so amazing. It's such a brilliant process. 

22:16 

If you haven't had an opportunity to be coached, give me a call. Well, don't give me a call. Get on my website, tanyahale.com. You can go to my "contact me" page and there's a place where you can send me an email. Send me an email and I will get back with you and we'll set up a time that works for both of us. Coaching is an amazing, amazing work. A client gave me a feedback on this the other day and she's like "it's something that I never knew I needed. It's the best thing I never knew I needed." It's an amazing process. If you haven't ever done it, let me give you a free session. It's not a waste of my time. I love to do it and I love to help you see things and help you move into a better place. 

22:36 

And just like my client who just left me this review, get on iTunes. Leave me a review, if you will, please. I love that and it helps to spread the word about this. And also share. If you feel there are people who could benefit from learning these emotionally and mentally healthy behaviors, send them my way, get them on this podcast. Everything that I teach on these podcasts, I don't hold back stuff for whatever else. It's all right here. It's just that the coaching is a totally different process when you're doing a one-on-one. But yeah, all the information is here. So send them here, stick with me on here, I love this. I love doing it, I'm so glad that you're here with me. Thank you for caring enough about your emotional health to move into this place with me. Alright, that's gonna do it for us today. Hope you have a terrific one and I will talk to you next time. 

24:01 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.