121. Are Immature Bonding-Disabled Men Doomed?
Googling for adult emotional immaturity results in countless sources, mostly about the problems of the victims and some few vague theories about what could cause it. But what I could not find was some good information, how people achieve to avoid getting mature, maybe at a slow pace, in spite of living and interacting with other people.
So my following thoughts about immaturity and maturity are once again only my own speculations.
McWilliams wrote in a book on narcissism: "the most grievous cost of a narcissistic orientation is a stunted capacity to love". I generalize further. This is true for all varieties of men, who are immature and bonding-disabled.
When comparing an immature person with a non-criminal psychopath (Anti Social Disorder), then they have an amazing lot in common: Both enjoy life feeling entitled to take, be given, usurp, use and take advantage of whatever they can get without any need to earn it or to give anything back. Both do not feel responsible for what they do and they shun away from taking responsibility and accepting obligations as binding.
But there is one fundamental difference. The psychopath knows fully well, that he in the opinion of others an person without morals, a bad person. The immature person has the honest believe to be a good person entitled to behave as he does.
Therefore if someone is really selfish or enjoys the benefits of being selfish so much, that he does not want to give it up, but also has a strong urge to consider himself as a morally good person, the only way to achieve this is to never grow mature. At some early age, a child is allowed to feel entitled to get all his needs taken care of without earning it, while being considered a good person for nothing more than not doing bad things.
Growing mature is a process of learning in exchange with the environment and by introspection. As long as someone perceives and receives information from the social world around, in a healthy person this automatically compels the person to grow mature. Staying immature while being fully exposed to all influences of social life would be more amazing than growing mature. The person in interaction with the social world gets information from perceiving and observing others' reactions to themselves, and from proffered feedback. That person gets the whole variety of human experiences, praise and criticism, success and failure, without seeking any of it. It happens to everybody as the dynamics of everyday life.
To stay immature requires the information input to be curtailed somewhere before or while it is processed as learning or as an experience.
- Brain damage can of course impede the processing or any other step on this way.
- Peculiar wiring of the brain like autism can filter, what information is perceived and processed.
- Psychological reactions can make someone avoid the input or processing of information. This can be denial, distortions, delusions, defenses of many types. While some unpleasant and painful information is meant to be filtered and kept away from the consciousness, as a side effect, this also deprives the brain from the information needed to grow mature.
Therefore I can see two kinds of dynamics to explain immaturity. Either the brain is first cut off from information input from outside, and staying immature is the consequence. Or staying immature is so beneficial, that it is a goal, and the brains is protected against all influences, that are a hazard to maintain immaturity.
Independently of the dynamics, the result is a wall around the immature bonding-disabled man's brain, that blocks vital information from entering. The four delusions (120. Immature Men and their Delusions) make him mindblind to the existence of that wall, they impede him from perceiving his own bonding-disability. The wall protects his delusions, and it successfully impedes the woman outside from having any influence on him. He is oblivious, that maturity and the knowledge, how to have a healthy relationship, are outside of the wall, out of his reach and beyond his vision.
To have a healthy mature relationship requires to remove the wall. But he is not even aware, that he holds the wall up, and the woman from outside cannot remove it for him.
Therefore he seems to be doomed to stay a prisoner behind the wall forever. The only remedy, that I could think of would be, that he gets shocked out of his delusions. But what shock would be strong enough to make a delusional immature bonding-disabled man learn, how to treat a woman? I wonder, how many rejections and failed relationships he would need to start even doubting his own demeanor?
There is a vicious circle, and the man with those delusions is doomed in it:
Only if such a man would be very deeply attached to a woman, loosing her could be enough to shake him out of his delusions. But unfortunately for him, he would need to be shaken out of his delusions first, before he might become able to get deeply attached to a woman.
It looks rather bleak for such men, and I am determined to avoid them. I called them unsuitable before, and I am convinced, they stay unsuitable for a long time.
