- The Problem: Physical age rarely guarantees emotional or spiritual maturity; many remain trapped in childish, reactive patterns of behavior.
- The Psychology: True adulthood is a shift from reacting to others' actions or speech to taking active ownership of your internal state and external impact (agency).
- The Solution: Cultivate emotional self-governance, active empathy, and resilient purpose through a practice of conscious choice.
How do I know if I'm an adult? Is there a test I missed?
Grown Up: Defining Adulthood Through Attitude and Agency
This article isn't here to make anyone feel "less than," or to crticize. It's here to help people discover what the characteristics of adulthood are. But growth never stops. We are all somewhere on that journey even at age 111. (No, I'm not 111.)
Children are full of attitude. They don't "think" about controlling themselves. They react. Possessing little room for empathy, they strike back at perceived offenders, act out over emotional issues, and belittle others, sometimes abusively, to protect their fragile sense of self (Gendlin, 1962).
While many adults never truly move beyond this stage, the transition to adulthood is marked by a fundamentally different attitude (Fowler, 1981). Adults have empathy for others. They understand that people have faults and tolerate them. They don't purposely try to hurt others. They are much less reactive to criticism, regarding it instead as room for growth (Frankl, 1959; Fowler, 1981).
None of us are truly ever completely "grown up." Life is an endless teaching tool, and many lessons are repeaed over and over. Some adults spend much of their lives with childish attitudes. Far too many young adults are hindered in reaching maturity because of childhood trauma. Some lack examples from parents, peers, and others who impact their lives. We shouldn't look down on those who are developmentally delayed. We should be examples to them and help them. The following isn't for criticizing others. It's about understanding our own growth.
So what I offer here isn't so much a measuring stick, but a demarkation process. This is a process and doesn't occur all at once, but evolves.
🧭 The Core Transition: From Reaction to Agency
In terms of psychological and spiritual development, the shift from childhood to adulthood is essentially a transition from being acted upon to taking ownership of one's internal state and external impact (Frankl, 1959; Bruner, 1990):
- Children are reactive: Their identity and behavior are dictated by immediate environments, impulses, and social mirroring (Gendlin, 1962; Goffman, 1959).
- Adults are agentic: They inhabit the space between stimulus and response—choosing empathy over defense, and core values over immediate emotion (Frankl, 1959).
📋 The Transition to Adulthood Checklist
Adulthood isn't a threshold of chronological age—it is a set of active practices. Use this checklist to reflect on your own journey toward maturity:
1. Emotional Maturity (Self-Governance)
- From Reactivity to Pause: You no longer react instantly to perceived slights. You can hold space for criticism, evaluate whether it holds truth, and use it for growth without your identity collapsing.
- Differentiating Feelings from Truth: You recognize that an emotion (like anxiety or anger) is a signal to interrogate yourself on why you are responding this way. It's not a command to act out (Gendlin, 1962).
- Emotional Ownership: You move past saying "You made me feel..." and acknowledge that while others trigger emotions, you own your choices and responses (Frankl, 1959).
2. Relational & Moral Maturity (Other-Centeredness)
- Active Empathy over Ego: You realize other people have complex internal lives, stresses, and faults of their own. You give others latitude to be human and flawed (Fowler, 1981).
- The End of Malicious Intent: You stop actively trying to belittle, punish, or hurt people who disagree with you, choosing de-escalation over winning an argument.
- Separating Role from Soul: You can respect a person's dignity even when you disagree with their current actions or political views (Goffman, 1959).
- Repairing Damage: When you make a mistake, you don't hide behind defensiveness; you actively work to make the situation whole and rectify the harm.
3. Agency & Purpose (Taking the Pen)
- Accepting the Unwritten Page: You stop waiting for society, parents, or institutions to write your script. You take ownership of your narrative (Bruner, 1990).
- Attitudinal Resilience: You accept that life presents unexpected setbacks, but you take full responsibility for your attitude in responding to them (Frankl, 1959).
- Living Beyond Self-Gratification: You realize that a meaningful life is built by using your unique gifts and talents to reduce the suffering of others.
4. Relational Respect & Love (Giving Room)
- Respect as the Primary Foundation: You understand that genuine relationships begin with respect—not demand, expectation, or control. Respect is the essential cornerstone that makes connection possible.
- Appreciating Differences: You actively appreciate the other person in their uniqueness, including all of their differences, rather than trying to reshape them into your own image.
- Giving Room to Be: You grant others room to hold their own perspectives, navigate their own faults, and grow at their own pace without crowding or suppressing them.
- Recognizing Love’s Prerequisite: You realize that love is impossible without respect—without foundational respect, what often passes for "love" is merely control, possession, or projection.
🧱 Connecting to the Keystone
On this website I emphasize a keystone life.
🧱 What is a Keystone Life?
An arch is just a collection of falling stones until the keystone drops into place. On its own, a keystone bears no weight—but when locked in alignment with others, it transforms separate, fragile pieces into a bridge capable of carrying heavy loads across wide gaps.
To live a Keystone Life is to choose agency over reaction, respect over control, and co-creation over isolation. It is the conscious decision to become a stabilizing force in an unpredictable world—anchoring your own soul in core values so you can help hold up the lives of those around you.
Maturity isn't a static threshold you cross—it is a continuous building process. By choosing agency over reactivity, you lay the foundational stones required to support those around you and serve as a living keystone in your community.
🌀 Life as a Spiral: Understanding Cycles, Reinforcement, and Breadth (Click me)
In Jungian psychology, the journey toward self-realization (individuation) is rarely a straight, linear path from Point A to Point B. Carl Jung described human growth as a process of circumambulation—moving in a spiral around a central core of the self. I've noticed the same thing in my life. We repeat lessons over and over.
When we loop back to a lesson we thought we had already mastered, it often feels like regression. However, in the spiral model, you are not back at the starting line; you are directly above where you were before:
- First Loop (Intellectual Awareness): You understand the lesson as a concept or rule.
- Second Loop (Experiential Testing): You apply it during a personal crisis, feeling the friction of real-world struggle.
- Subsequent Loops (Embodied Wisdom): The lesson shifts from something you merely know into something you embody.
Depth and Breadth in Learning
Reinforcement (Vertical Depth): Complex relational and spiritual truths require repeated encounters across different seasons of life to fully integrate into our nervous systems and choices.
Horizontal Expansion (Breadth): A lesson learned in one domain (such as work) remains incomplete until it is tested across other areas of life—like family, friendships, or handling adversity. Breadth prevents growth from turning into rigid dogmatism, converting narrow rules into flexible, compassionate wisdom.
This principle parallels educational psychologist Jerome Bruner’s "Spiral Curriculum," which shows that profound ideas cannot be mastered all at once. They must be revisited continuously with increasing depth and broader application over time. This is also a hallmark of my teaching method.
The Takeaway: Re-encountering an old challenge isn't a failure; it's an invitation to engage it with the greater agency, empathy, and perspective you've gained since your last turn around the loop.
🌱 Parallel Paths: Psychological Maturity and Spiritual Growth
A central focus of this website is spiritual growth. This is a parallel development to personal psychological maturity. While personal maturity develops our internal agency, emotional regulation, and relational respect, spiritual maturity expands our awareness into broader, more abstract realities:
- Universal Justice: Moving beyond rigid, legalistic rules or tribal favoritism to champion systemic fairness, mercy, and the inherent dignity of every human being.
- Divine Love (Agape): Extending unconditional goodwill to others—not because they have earned it, but because love is the primary connective engine of the universe.
- Co-Creation with God: Shifting from a passive expectation that God will magically fix everything to recognizing ourselves as active partners (Shutaf) entrusted with agency to reduce suffering and build the Domain of God on earth.
- Discerning Soul from Role: Disentangling our intrinsic spiritual value from external titles, institutional memberships, or social performance.
- Restorative Grace: Choosing reconciliation, forgiveness, and healing over retribution, defensiveness, or holding grudges.
Psychological adulthood builds the sturdy vessel; spiritual growth fills it with purpose, meaning, and active love.
My music video, Three Trees is about spiritual growth.
🕯️ A Note on Childhood Trauma & Unresolved Hurts
It is crucial to acknowledge that people who experienced deep hurt, neglect, or severe trauma during childhood walk a different road (Felitti et al., 1998). For many, childhood survival required developing intense reactive defenses—the very protective behaviors that helped them endure an unsafe environment (Van der Kolk, 2014).
While some naturally find paths to grow beyond these survival patterns, for others, developmental maturity remains blocked until those underlying wounds are processed and unburdened (Van der Kolk, 2014). Reaching emotional agency isn't simply a matter of "willpower" when the nervous system remains stuck in survival mode (Felitti et al., 1998; Van der Kolk, 2014).
If you find yourself stuck in cycles of overwhelming reactivity, please know there is no shame in seeking professional help. Working with a licensed trauma-informed therapist or counselor is often the necessary first step toward clearing the path so true growth and freedom can take root (Van der Kolk, 2014).
📚 References & Foundational Frameworks
- Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of Meaning. Harvard University Press. — Examines how individuals construct narrative identity and agency through cultural and relational lenses.
- Felitti, V. J., et al. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245–258. — Establishes the impact of developmental trauma on adult emotional regulation and physiological reactivity.
- Fowler, J. W. (1981). Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. Harper & Row. — Outlines the transition from synthetic/conforming identity to reflective, autonomous maturity.
- Frankl, V. E. (1959). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press. — Presents the concept of "Attitudinal Value"—taking responsibility for one's posture toward suffering and unavoidable circumstances.
- Gendlin, E. T. (1962). Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning. Free Press of Glencoe. — Explores the internal "felt sense" and how self-awareness shifts reactive emotion into conscious insight.
- Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor Books. — Differentiates between social performance ("role") and authentic personal core ("soul").
- Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking. — Provides clinical insight into why emotional self-governance remains blocked until survival-based trauma responses are unburdened.
Note: Four of these authors are in my bookcase and I deeply admire.