Emotional Immaturity

I believe that my emotional maturity was arrested at the age of 5. That was when my original parents divorced, began fighting a lot, and my dad told me that it's now my job to take care of my mom and my 2 year old brother.

According to the great psychologist Erikson, that is the initiative vs. guilt stage, where children develop the ability to try new things and learn how to handle failure. To quote from "Human Development: A Lifespan View" by Robert V. Kail and John C. Cavanaugh, "Most parents have their 3- and 4-year-olds take some responsibility for themselves (by dressing themselves, for example). Youngsters also begin to identify with adults and their parents; they begin to understand the opportunities that are available in their culture. Play begins to have purpose as children explore adult roles, such as mother, father, teacher, athlete, or psychology editor. Youngsters start to explore the environment on their own, ask many questions about the world, and imagine possibilities for themselves.

This initiative is moderated by guilt as children realize that their initiative may place them in conflict with others; they cannot pursue their ambitions with abandon. Purpose is achieved with a balance between individual initiative and a willingness to cooperate with others."

This would explain the core of my codependency, at least where it started from.

Allow me to take this a little further into my current days.

I normally wake up with the attitude "Mommy, I don't want to go to school!" This brings up frustration about having to get up and start being productive, which I try to quell this emotional frustration by smoking or eating. But since I am unable to identify accurately the source of this frustration, this leads to my normal morning pacing routine and high anxiety.

Eventually later in the morning I'll get over this, and I'll get motivated to be productive. For example, I'll take a shower and take care of a few chores. This usually brings me a sense of accomplishment, but again, since I don't accurately recognize what this emotion is, I label it as anxiety, down another Xanax, and smoke some more.

Then I'll pace some more since I can't figure out why I feel this way, and I'll become depressed and tired.

Eventually, I'll feel guilty that I'm not doing my part in taking care of my responsibilities.

Later in the day, as that emotion passes and perhaps I have taken a nap, I'll be motivated to get some exercise, for example, take a long walk or a bike ride. This will make me feel much better, actually excited. But again since I don't accurately recognize this emotion, it troubles me and I label this excitement as more anxiety and try to repress the feeling.

When it comes time for my cousin and her husband to come home, I'll start getting nervous about dinner, because I'm not sure if I'll make the right dinner, or if it's my turn to make dinner, or if I've done enough chores around the house, or if I should just hang out with them, and this usually spirals into a minor anxiety attack, so I usually make myself scarce around this time. But at the same time I'm usually bursting at the seems wanting to tell them about my day, so a conflict arises - are children to be seen, and not heard, or not seen at all? I think I learned that as a child.

As the day starts to close to an end, I wait for my cousin and her husband to fall asleep, at that time I feel "safe" enough to start working on my website and go deeper into my recovery using whatever tool I feel is appropriate for that day. I get productive at this point, experience some excitement, and again I label it as anxiety and try to smoke and repress the feeling; once again I am not correctly identifying my emotion. This excitement keeps me up for hours, but I usually also feel guilt that I haven't accomplished enough during the day and that I can't go to sleep until I accomplish more.

I'd also like to bring up the issue of my hygiene in this context; that is we could perceive it that I am still at the stage where I should be learning that it's OK to dress myself and take care of my hygiene instead of my parents doing it for me.

This would also explain what I call my "Dark Side". Which is the part of me that has bottled-up depression and frustration, and which has four key components: Scary Thoughts, Scary Fantasies, Scary Compulsions, and Rage.

The Scary Thoughts would be normal for a child of 5, as evidenced by my over-reaction to watching a scary movie.

The Scary Fantasies would be normal for a child of 5, as he has grand visions of becoming the president or an astronaut, but after more than 20 years of repressed emotions, is now evidenced in my rare fantasies as myself being a fallen angel.

The Scary Compulsions would be normal for a child of 5, as he is learning guilt and that his actions have consequences, but again in my much older body, I have scary compulsions to drive my car into oncoming traffic for example. (let me pause here to not that this compulsion is really "what if?" thinking, and a very very mild compulsion that I would never act upon and I feel guilty when these thoughts pop into my head).

The Rage would be normal for a child of 5, as he throws temper tantrums. At my current biological age and the years of emotional repression and frustration, these temper tantrums result in raging (for example, road rage).

I'm not saying I don't have an anxiety disorder and that this is all just an emotional maturity issue. Rather, that the two are joined at the hip.

Using a Bio-Psycho-Social framework, we can theorize that my anxiety is hereditary, that my internal cognitive thought patterns are distorted by my emotional arrestment, and that my current predicament is further frustrated by the social norm that I should be emotionally mature and able to lead a successful, inter-dependent life.

So all that being said, I'm not sure what the appropriate tool is for reaching emotional maturity, does anyone have any suggestions?