“Emotional maturity” is a hot-button topic these days, especially since the entire elder generation running everything seems to lack it entirely — that’s the underlying cause of all these family estrangements, after all, to name just one example.
The unfortunate thing is, though, you often can’t discern someone’s level of emotional maturity until you get into the thick of it with them. Thankfully, one expert said there’s a sort of test you can give the people in your life that is very revealing.
Olesya luraschi is a Harvard-educated leadership coach with a background in psychology, which she leverages to advise professionals, especially those in the tech industry. Emotional maturity is, of course, a key skill to being an effective leader.
Lurashchi’s work has led her to have a deep understanding of what it takes to be emotionally mature. As she put it in a recent TikTok“emotional maturity is essentially having the ability to hold the greatness of the world, the fact that the world is not just black and white.”
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We are awash in a culture that rejects nuance — all you have to do is ask anyone for a political opinion or wade into the comments under any social media post and you’ll see it. Nearly everyone insists essentially every issue is cut-and-dried, and if you dare suggest otherwise you are castigated as “part of the problem.”
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This is, in the end, a child’s understanding of the world. As Luraschi put it, “It’s very difficult for a child to understand that people are a mix of good and bad. That’s why children’s stories are often about good versus bad. There’s villains, there’s heroes, and for a child, they often believe that good people do good things, bad people do bad things, and it’s really that black and white.”
That’s not how the world actually operates; however, despite how much our social media algorithms have convinced us it is so. Luraschi said this is a key hallmark of people with low emotional maturity.
“They have a really hard time admitting that they made mistakes because only people who are bad make mistakes,” she said. “They need to view themselves as all good, and that’s why they can get so defensive and they can make excuses. They can blame shift when you address something that they did.”
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That sound you heard a moment ago was practically every child of a Boomer on Earth simultaneously screaming “Exactly!” at their screen while reading Luraschi’s words. That defensiveness, the excuses, and the blame-shifting have become a hallmark of the wave of parent-child estrangements we’re seeing these days.
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But these dynamics are just as prevalent in other relationships too, from our romantic partners to our bosses. Luraschi said simply asking someone, “How do you handle being wrong?” can be instantly revealing, because their answer is an indicator of their level of emotional maturity.
“An emotionally immature person doesn’t really have a strategy,” she said. “They will typically shut down, they’ll blame shift, they’ll deny, they’ll double down, they’ll make excuses, they’ll play the victim — but they don’t have a healthy strategy for admitting that they were wrong.”
We can probably all think of multiple family members, partners, coworkers, bosses — all kinds of people in our lives who we wish we’d asked this question. Given the state of the world these days, even more of us should probably ask it of ourselves.
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John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
