If I am aware that I'm emotionally/developmentally immature and that it's adding strain to my friendships, what can I do to... become mature in those ways?
This depends a lot on what forms of emotional and developmental maturity you are working on, but some stuff I’ve found helpful:
Keep track of how often I have emotional emergencies. By emotional emergencies I mean, like, how often do situations arise where it feels like it’ll be absolutely catastrophic for me to not get the support I need right now? For me this often looks like “sobbing alone in my room” but for other people it looks like “locking myself in the bathroom at a party” or “binging drugs and alcohol” or “calling my ex fifty times in a row” or probably a hundred other things. Don’t track this in order to conclude that you suck or you’re worthless or obviously no one would like you or anything like that, but do keep track of it. How often is this happening? What tends to trigger it? What tends to work to return you to a healthier state?
A lot of emotional maturity is your ability to have bad things happen and have control over how you respond to them. But the first step is just understanding and correctly anticipating how you currently respond to bad things happening. If getting scolded at work always gives you a breakdown, just that knowledge is really powerful - you can have strategies and plans based on it.
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Here are some other measures of emotional maturity. I mention these because I have struggled with them. (I do not offer advice, because I don’t have any.) I say “measures” because these aren’t skills, but things you need to have skills to do, or situations that will measure how emotionally mature you are.
- Being outwardly confident in public. Specifically in this case I mean not over-apologizing, and not injecting self-deprecating or self-derogating remarks into casual conversation (“yeah, I was going to show up early, but I’m an idiot and left my wallet on the table”). When people do this stuff it is often a way to cope with the fear that others will judge and criticize them - if I criticize myself first, I can beat you to the punch! - and so the “emotional skill” in question is just learning other, healthier ways to cope with the fear of judgment. The difference between somebody who self-deprecates and somebody who does not is often stark.
- Workplace professionalism. The rules of emotional control in most workplaces are stricter than in the rest of the world. You are expected to prevent your emotions from affecting your coworkers 100% of the time, not 80% or 90%; it is not okay to have an angry outburst at a coworker or cry in a meeting. This can be hard, especially when you care a lot about your work.
- A balanced instinct about when to confront an interpersonal issue and when to leave it alone. An emotionally mature person is capable of saying “hey, Roommate, could you mop up your spills in the kitchen in future because that really bothers me” instead of talking behind Roommate’s back, but will pick their battles and keep their silence when their boss does that slightly annoying thing for the fifth time that week.
- Discretion. Keeping your own counsel (especially when it comes to gossip of questionable veracity) is a subset of the larger skill of treating others the way you’d want to be treated, and it is a gem of a skill to have. More generally, with time you learn what sorts of things you will regret having said later, and you refrain from saying those things.
