A continuum, not a label

As soon as we speak of maturity and immaturity, it seems essential to specify that this is not a binary logic. One cannot say of a person that they are mature or not mature: it would make no real sense. There is a continuum running from immaturity towards maturity, and a process taking place between the two.

This process of maturation varies from one individual to another: it takes more or less time and remains sensitive to life events, to encounters, to the people we live with and to those who raised us. In other words, people are permanently adapting to a context, and it always remains possible to move along that continuum.

On the side of definitions, immaturity is a term usually used to characterise the affectivity of a child, an adolescent or an adult, marked by a lack of autonomy, a need for protection and an exaggerated fixation on parental figures. By contrast, maturity is thus implicitly defined as access to autonomy, to freedom of action and to detachment from those figures. Figuratively, dictionaries speak of the age of ripeness, the one immediately following youth, which grants human beings the fullness of their physical and intellectual means: what emerges is the idea of a state of completion within a process of development.

Three levels of complexity

To find one’s bearings on this continuum, three levels can be distinguished. They hold for couple therapy, but also for individual and family therapy.

Conscious maturity

A vital organisation — an individual, a couple, a family — set within an optimal functioning allows a development and a growth directed towards an ordering called conscious maturity. This state is characterised by a functional performance: it enables the most effective possible adaptation to constraints and conditions of existence, and the best use of one’s own competences.

These are people who have the capacity to oppose, who accept confrontation without fear, who display adapted behaviours and behaviours of self-affirmation. At this stage, one is able to make choices for one’s own life and to assume their consequences; one has the choice of satisfying a desire or not, and can accept frustration. A mature individual is aware of the impact of their behaviours on others and takes that information into account when acting.

Careful, though: this does not mean making every choice according to other people’s interests. Maturity is not to be confused with altruism. What is at stake is taking into account the impact of our behaviours on our environment, on those around us, and even on people we do not know but whom our acts may affect — politically, for instance, or in any position of power. The mature person then assumes their choices: even when those choices do not serve other people’s interests, they are aware of it and know why they made them.

Conscious immaturity

As the name indicates, this is a state of immaturity of which the individual is aware, at least in certain areas. And it is sometimes the best kept of secrets: one may feel ashamed of certain behaviours, attitudes or reactions. Here too, people have a certain awareness of the impact of their behaviours on others; those behaviours may be persistent without being entirely dysfunctional, precisely because they do not go too far.

Take someone who tends to flee their responsibilities and takes refuge, for example, in video games, to the point where the couple’s life is affected and other responsibilities are no longer assumed. Since they are aware that this refuge is an escape route, they will be able to limit its effects somewhat. When that is not possible, such people sometimes choose to flee, to leave, or to provoke the break-up.

The same is found on a more recreational side: people who party all the time, go out very regularly, consume a lot of alcohol or drugs, and feel unable to take on family life with children. Faced with a problem — in the couple, at work, with family, with friends, or about money — they set up avoidance strategies: not opening the post, not looking at the bills, not answering the phone as soon as it concerns a debt. They withdraw, they hide, they lie; but the lie here has no manipulative purpose, it has an avoidant one. With the reinforcement of shame and denial, one can sink into it ever more deeply: I have seen cases where one member of the couple lied for months, pretending to have a job, until the other realised that the savings accounts had been drained and that nobody knew him at his supposed workplace. Others take refuge in complaint, in somatisation, in illness, to avoid confronting problems head-on.

These situations end up becoming extremely uncomfortable for the people concerned. The good news: with them, it is possible to talk, to name the areas of immaturity one perceives, and to accompany them in that process of maturation by leaning on their patrimony and on their existing competences.

Unconscious immaturity

Here the prognosis is more guarded: these are people who are immature and do not know it. Highly immature behaviours, in complete denial. With them, it is not even possible to name immaturity: they would receive it as an attack, which would trigger a movement of aggressiveness, withdrawal or flight — a movement not registered as such.

One then encounters great agitation as soon as uncomfortable subjects are broached, an undermining of the frame, behaviours of denial, confusion, rigidified behaviours and difficulties with cognitive flexibility. In the worst scenarios, one speaks of decompensation in the psychiatric sense of the word: people who lose contact with reality, develop hallucinations or a delusional construction of the world. This category includes many psychiatric disorders, which end up constituting, unconsciously, a way of escaping a reality.

What the system keeps alive

A useful question: what keeps someone in a position of immaturity? Asking it already means taking the context into account. In the systemic approach, we take a keen interest in the complex interactions woven between the individuals of a system, whether familial or conjugal. This means that immaturity will not be treated as a characteristic belonging to a person, and which it would be up to them alone to resolve.

Put like that, the idea may be surprising. But if I am in a couple with someone immature, it may irritate me; at the same time, it develops my own competence. The other does not deal with the paperwork: I take care of it, and I develop my competence. The other flees problems: I take them on, I develop my problem-solving capacity, and I derive a very real gratification when I solve them. So one member of the couple delegates their incapacity to the other, and the other takes on that responsibility: while complaining about the situation, they are developing their own skills in it.

This immaturity may only reveal itself at a certain point in the couple’s life cycle, not necessarily from the start. Two people may have been together for a long time without really living together, without having married or moved in together. Before that, one of them may have benefited from an enormous support network within their family circle — a circle in which the others contributed greatly to maintaining their immaturity, where everything was taken care of for them, where they never had to look after anything.

This is the comfort trap. Who would not dream of having everything taken care of? One need only look at the success of all-inclusive hotels: a week in which you deal with neither the cooking nor the cleaning, in which you live a life of leisure. There you experience, in an extremely enjoyable way, immaturity — but on a temporary basis. Some people fall into that trap permanently and consequently fail to develop certain skills. It is not a fatality: one may have been raised like a prince or a princess and still have had the will to go outside, to make one’s own experiences, to face difficulties, to take risks — and to develop maturity there. But for those who do fall into it, moving in together is the moment when they indirectly ask the other to compensate for what they have lost.

One important nuance: this does not mean that occasional regressive spaces should be banned — quite the contrary. It can be very healthy for a couple to have moments in which the other becomes, for a few minutes or a few hours, the symbolic parent who takes care of everything. After a very long day, a moment of great tiredness, an emotional shock, being able to settle into a slightly regressive behaviour and be welcomed by one’s partner is extremely beneficial: it is even what then allows one to regain one’s adult stance within the couple. It is as though there always remained, deep down, a remnant of childhood; and there is no question of throwing that inner child out of the door. What matters is that the position does not settle in over time.

Finally, do keep in mind that this process has nothing to do with the number of years. One can be in unconscious immaturity at 50 or 60, then take that path of maturation and become more mature at 70. There is nothing to judge here: this path is above all linked to life events, to the way one adapts to them, to the resources one can call on and to the support one receives.

Therapeutic paths

As a therapist, it will be very important to name this immaturity in a fine and subtle way. It is not said point-blank: one first increases the system’s permeability to that piece of information.

If the person is in a form of unconscious immaturity, the work is different. And one decisive distinction must be kept in mind: it is the immaturity that is unconscious, not the subject. We will therefore start from the fact that this person is not doing well, from their complaints, and begin to build something so that things improve — without necessarily naming immaturity, which could not be heard right away. Perhaps they will be able to move towards a form of conscious immaturity: at that point, it can be named. This really is to be envisaged as a process, along a continuum.

Another very important point: maturity as well as immaturity may be tied to certain registers, to certain areas of identity. The idea will then be to extend the zones of maturity towards those that remain to be developed. It is even possible to have people assess their own degree of immaturity depending on the space: asking them what age they feel they are in such and such a configuration or circumstance.

This is the notion of the piloting child: as though, in certain situations, a child of a certain age were piloting an adult body. An introspective piece of work is then proposed, based on a few questions:

• How old is the child piloting your body in those moments?
• Do you want that to change?
• What can be done to help that child grow up?
• In what way can the other member of the couple contribute to that growth?

This way of approaching the situation is often far gentler than using the word immaturity directly. And it closes this series on the four great couple dysfunctions: incivility, immutability, infidelity and immaturity.