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Commitment 5 – Maturity

I commit to growing myself up. When someone else pisses me off or hurts me and I regress into acting like a young boy, I will reaffirm my commitment to learning how to be less reactive and developing more mastery.

What does it mean to grow yourself up?

As grown men, we are not beyond our emotional reactions to life’s situations. To react is to be human.

How we react is the key.

However, since most men never work on themselves, they react in the same, predictable, emotional ways issue after issue, year after year.

When we get “triggered” in life by circumstances and relationship challenges, we react. Most of the time the reaction happens so fast that it feels as if we do not have a choice.

For example, let’s say you initiate sex with your girlfriend. But your girlfriend is not in the mood to have sex with you. You then feel a wave of shame and anger, then you collapse and shut down. You make up a story that she does not find you attractive. You start to believe that you are “too much.” You feel rejected. Your story intensifies and you now believe you are not lovable or worthy. You feel like hiding now and you start to make her wrong in your mind. You say things like “Fine, then I won’t ask anymore, see how you like it.” Then you become passive aggressive and try to “get back at her” in some lame way.

Later on when you have some distance from the situation, you might be quite surprised at how such a little event upset you so much.

But in the moment, specifically with those we love the most, we tend to react intensely to our own upset.

Why do people regress?

It is commonly understood in psychology that in the above situation and others like it, a few things are happening in a very short amount of time:

1. we get triggered by a person or event
2. we leave the front part of our brain and the hind brain takes over, thus rational thinking (front brain) goes out the window.
3. We have now regressed to a childhood a time where a similar event happened when we were a little boy
4. We are now in a survival response and we do one of four things to “survive” the situation:

Fight–Act out or fight back with verbal or physical aggression

Flight–Run away, go away mentally or dissociate

Freeze–Shut down or hide so it doesn’t happen to us again

Submit–Give up and collapse becoming depressed

In addition to your “in the moment” reaction is how it ties into past situations where a similar thing happened. You now “couple” it with other times where you were rejected. This is why it can feel so overwhelming at times.

But since most boys never learned how to work with their emotions and inner psychology and they were often taught to suck it up, they never learned what to do when they feel sad, angry, hurt or even happy.

Take me as an example…

Prior to any personal development work, I was a very reactive dude. All the emotions felt the same and I would end up having no idea what was going on. So I labeled it a “bad mood” or “my funk.”  I had no tools because as a kid, I was taught to stuff my feelings and taught nothing about emotions.

So, as I grew into an adult, I still believed being emotional was bad—that crying was weak, unmanly, and getting angry was “asshole” behavior. I was committed to not hurting anyone and getting others to like me, so I resigned myself to hide my emotions.

But the irony was that I was feeling everything but I had no clue how to be with it or even express it. Further, when I would get upset and reactive, I would act like a little boy.

When I got angry, I did anger like a little boy. I wanted to throw a tantrum and hit people. When I did sadness, I would shut down and hide. This is what happens to little boys who are not allowed to feel.

They repress their emotions because it wasn’t safe to express them. And since it is hard to keep a lid on them, they explode when the pressure gets too great. Adults who have repressed their emotions do the same.

Time to grow up

So given this, what can you do now?

Revolutionary grown men don’t stuff their feelings, nor do they act out. They don’t posture and they don’t collapse. A revolutionary man, feels everything fully and then gets back in the game.

Just because you were robbed the opportunity to feel as a boy, doesn’t mean that you need to continue robbing yourself from your emotional life as a grown man. You have choices now you didn’t have back then.

If the external claim is that you say “I am a man,” but the behavior is that you behave like a boy in any situation, you are incongruent and less trustable as a man.

Just be honest. Take responsibility that you sometimes act like a boy and then re-commit to acting like a man.

So, when you as a grown man have some challenge in your life, ask yourself how you are handling it.

How to grow yourself up

• Be open to the possibility that a little version of you lives inside of you
• Take full responsibility for what is going on with you
• Take note of this dynamic in your own life. Start noticing in what situations you act like a boy
• Feel your Feelings fully. When you feel like you are 5 years old and shameful, feel it
• Go to therapy or counseling to get more tools to grow yourself up
• Be an amazing father to your little boy. Shaming him into oblivion does not work
• Stop asking or expecting your girlfriend or wife to mother the little boy in you
• Join a men’s group and start one to get quality man support
• Stay engaged in your own personal development

Remember, it is likely that you will continue to react in life and even regress into boy-like behavior. However, they key is HOW you respond.

With practice, you can gain more and more mastery with the little boy in you so that you can parent him when need be. Why? So that the man in you is captain of the ship, not the little boy.

If you want additional reading on this, a great book is “Growing Yourself Back Up” by John Lee.

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