• School of Spiritual Direction (via Larry Crabb)
• Renovare
• Dallas Willard on spiritual disciplines & formation
• TrueFaced (aka Leadership Catalyst)
• Institute for Spiritual Formation (Talbot School of Theology and Biola University)
• Cloud & Townsend
• the Association for Christian Character Development (ACCD)
• Soul Renovation Ministries
• Monvee
• SOULeader Resources

It seems to me that a slightly increasing number of church & ministry leaders are going after these spiritual & heart matters to help people be more like Jesus. Well, some of them say it that way. Others might use different language and terms. Each probably have their own “spiritual growth” model.

In my own thinking (at the time of this writing) I think there is overlap between any of these categories: spiritual formation, spiritual direction, personal coaching, mentoring, discipleship, sanctification…

And somewhat like brands of clothing, people may be fiercely loyal to the genre of spiritual formation that’s been most transformative for them. It’s not the kind of thing that people go comparison shopping for, and let’s hope it doesn’t become commoditized that way.

And, to let my own bias show, it’s not really about the content or exercises of a spiritual formation program. It’s about one’s response to the Holy Spirit, and more telling, the person’s willingness to give permission for (a few trusted) others to speak into their lives.

Why I think this to be the case — it’s an idea from Fierce Conversations, “All conversations are with myself, and sometimes they involve other people.” So when a person goes through exercises, even if guided, it’s all too easy to reinforce one’s own perceptions. Until someone else can call out and speak to the matters of the heart, and the blind spots, transformation rarely happens to the degree that it could.

The analogy that I’ve been kicking around in my head is how some people seem to behave emotionally like a child vs. a teenager vs. an adult. And adults (people who are f adult age) don’t like to hear that they’re like a child emotionally. (After all, they’re going to act like a child upon hearing candid feedback, throw a tantrum or something.)

I found these Eight Stages of Development (developed by psychiatrist Erik Erikson in 1956) to be a useful list:

1. Learning Basic Trust Versus Basic Mistrust (Hope)
2. Learning Autonomy Versus Shame (Will)
3. Learning Initiative Versus Guilt (Purpose)
4. Industry Versus Inferiority (Competence)
5. Learning Identity Versus Identity Diffusion (Fidelity)
6. Learning Intimacy Versus Isolation (Love)
7. Learning Generativity Versus Self-Absorption (Care)
8. Integrity Versus Despair (Wisdom)

To developing emotionally could be described as, “… a learning – teaching process that… results in the [person] moving from its infant state of helpless but total egocentricity to its ideal adult state of sensible conformity coupled with independent creativity.“

How can those emotional maturity be developed? Let’s not the “child” designation trip us up. Maturity is not mastery or perfection; most of us have areas where we can develop more emotional maturity.

Here’s a great list of practical how-to’s from Enhancing Children’s Emotional Development (Leah Davies, M.Ed.) In essence, it’s facilitating someone to handle their emotions by processing them together. [read the entire article for full context]

1. Help the children gain an understanding of their feelings through the use of … interactive storytelling or role-plays.
2. Teach children to identify and verbalize their feelings, as well as to read the emotional signals from other children and adults.
3. Watch a child’s facial expressions, posture, play or art work for signs that a child is experiencing a strong negative emotion. Then offer constructive ways to defuse it…
4. Accept emotional responses as legitimate, even if you don’t like the behavior the feeling produces.
5. Communicate understanding and empathy by reflecting the observed emotion.
6. Observe the child’s nonverbal behavior for clues as to how he or she is feeling.
7. Avoid negative statements like, “Can’t you do anything right?” or “What’s your problem?”
8. Avoid moralizing, humiliating, lecturing, denying, pitying, and rescuing. Instead, listen patiently and nod your head appropriately.
9. Problem solve with the child by encouraging him or her to think of options and decide what constructive action to take.
10. Keep lines of communication open.

This article titled “Social and emotional growth,” summarizes 4 practices for emotional development:

• Continues to expand her circle of trusted adults. At the same time, maintains a closeness to a few special people.
• Gains self-esteem from feeling capable and demonstrating new skills.
• Uses more complex language to express her understanding of feelings and their causes.
• Uses physical, imaginative, and cognitive resources to comfort self and to control the expression of emotion.

Developing emotional maturity is no cake walk. It takes a lot of patience combined with good judgment and warm, nurturing relationships to raise emotionally healthy, comfortable and cheerful children. [replace "children" with "person" or "adult"] It’s about developing concepts like trust, choices, limits, and knowing you’re free to feel what you want, and to control what you do.

Rhett Smith is putting together a great series of blog posts about depression. Not just depression in general, but taking a closer look at depression, burnout, and ministry.

• Depression, Burnout & Ministry: Deciding to Get Honest About Our Journeys
• Depression, Burnout & Ministry: Anne Jackson Interview, Part 1
• Depression, Burnout & Ministry: Anne Jackson Interview, Part 2
• Depression, Burnout & Ministry: Assessment

[note: this is my personal opinion] What does depression have to do with emotional maturity? It’s about being emotionally honest. We all have struggles and difficulties in life — I don’t recall ever hearing someone exclaim, “Oh, life is so easy, it’s a cake walk!” Each one of us need a safe place to talk about the issues and burdens of life. Depression is one of those issues. Unfortunately, many (most?) cultures and contexts stigmatize these kinds of emotional and/or psychological issues, so that it is difficult to go for help and healing. As if the emotional issue wasn’t tough enough to manage already.

[continuing with my humble opinion] What is unfair (not that life is supposed to be fair) is that people with depression are forced to deal with their issues and work on better healthy self-care, while a person with anger doesn’t necessarily have it. Depression forces a person to “say uncle” and debilitates to ask for help. Without help, the person cannot productively function (to varying degrees.) As Rhett rightly notes, “[this is not] a substitute for professional help or advice. Please consider seeking out professional help if you consider yourself to be at risk for depression.”

On a personal note, in a 2007 blog post titled, “deconstructing depression,” I described my own journey and understanding, and also linked to the DTS Chapel message from Pastor Tommy Nelson (Denton Bible Church) about his experience.

I confess I’m not exactly sure where to go with this series. I don’t have a road map or content schedule planned out. So I’m going with what’s at my fingertips. This chart comes from Soulwork Systemic Solutions, a coaching system developed by Martyn Carruthers:

And, Guy Kawasaki twittered this online Emotional Intelligence (EQ) test over at about.com. Taking the test just now (there were like 15 questions; I lost count), it told me, “Your results indicate an above average score on emotional intelligence.”

The people there wrote that Emotional Intelligence “refers to the ability to perceive, control, and evaluate emotions. Some researchers suggest that emotional intelligence can be learned and strengthened, while other claim it is an inborn characteristic.”

Notice the 3 parts: (1) perceive — being in touch with one’s own emotions; (2) control — which I think means one doesn’t have to impulsively act on one’s feelings, and is not saying that one could or should control one’s feelings; (3) evaluate — which is the ability to discern why one feels that way, or what I like to say, getting at the feelings under the feelings.

Maturity or immaturity isn’t such a binary categorization. One author describes 6 levels of emotional maturity (excerpted from “SELF-CONCEPT: The Enemy Within” by Kevin Everett FitzMaurice):

1. Basic Emotional Responsibility
2. Emotional Honesty
3. Emotional Openness
4. Emotional Assertiveness
5. Emotional Understanding
6. Emotional Detachment

Read the full article for descriptions of these six levels of emotional maturity.

When I searched amazon.com, I found 199 titles with the phrase, “emotional intelligence” in it. That’s a lot of books on one topic! There’s even a Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations.

Emotional intelligence is not identical to emotional maturity. It seems to me that “emotional maturity” is a broader general category for someone’s emotional life. Whereas “emotional intelligence” is the whole science of quantifyingly studying and understanding human emotions, both individually and relationally.[*] It’s probably right to say that if one’s EQ (emotional intelligence quotient) is high, that person is more emotionally mature.

Let’s use this working definition: “Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify, use, understand and manage emotions.“

What does that look like? Daniel Goldman describes Five Components of Emotional Intelligence, according to [ht: Sandeep Gautam] ::

• Self-awareness. The ability to recognize and understand personal moods and emotions and drives, as well as their effect on others.
• Self-regulation. The ability to control or redirect disruptive impulses and moods, and the propensity to suspend judgment and to think before acting.
• Motivation. A passion to work for reasons that go beyond money and status, which are external rewards. A propensity to pursue goals with energy and persistence.
• Empathy. The ability to understand the emotional makeup of other people. A skill in treating people according to their emotional reactions.
• Social skills. Proficiency in managing relationships and building networks, and an ability to find common ground and build rapport.

Found this Emotional Intelligence Test (35 ?s) and Emotional IQ Test – Abridged (10 ?s) online. Even before seeing these results, I’ve known that I’m a person still in process of growing in emotional intelligence.

Top Ten Suggestions for developing Your Emotional Intelligence (aka, 10 Habits of High EQ people) from eqi.org:

1. Become emotionally literate. Label your feelings, rather than labeling people or situations.
2. Distinguish between thoughts and feelings.
3. Take more responsibility for your feelings.
4. Use your feelings to help make decisions.
5. Use feelings to set and achieve goals.
6. Feel energized, not angry.
7. Validate other people’s feelings.
8. Use feelings to help show respect for others.
9. Don’t advise, command, control, criticize, judge or lecture to others.
10. Avoid people who invalidate you.

Individuals with a higher EQ (usually) get more success, more happiness, and more compassion in life. Everyone wants that, right? Let’s hear Daniel Goleman talk about why we aren’t more compassionate more of the time.

Aside: EQI.org is a website by Steve Hein, who authored a very practical e-book, “EQ for Everybody,” and posted it online for free. He says, “Emotional intelligence is the innate potential to feel, use, communicate, recognize, remember, describe, identify, learn from, manage, understand and explain emotions.” Hein claims to have compiled the world’s largest list of feeling words, with over 3,000 words. Feeling words beginning with A thru S are online.

[*] Daniel Goldman popularized this fascinating phrase via his book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, and he uses the phrase “to synthesize a broad range of scientific findings, drawing together what had been separate strands of research – reviewing not only their theory but a wide variety of other exciting scientific developments, such as the first fruits of the nascent field of affective neuroscience, which explores how emotions are regulated in the brain.” (huh?) The Wikipedia entry describes how the definition is constantly changing, so it’s a lot to get your hands around.

Peter Scazzero is one of the few authors that compellingly connect spiritual maturity and emotional life. Since he’s got a couple of published books, that lends reliability and rings authoritative more than articles I’ve found randomly on the internet. [ cf. official website, EmotionallyHealthy.org, has resources for individuals, groups, and even church-wide; video introduction to emotionally healthy spirituality ]

Jay’s Library noted these 4 points from Peter Scazzero’s book, The Emotionally Healthy Church [read Jay's comments too]::

1. It Is Impossible To Be Spiritually Mature Without Being Emotionally Mature.
2. To Be Emotionally Mature You Must Be Willing To Look Beneath The Surface.
3. To Be Emotionally Mature You Must Go Backward To Go Forward.
4. To Be Emotionally Mature You Must Learn To Manage Pain.

Ginger comments about Scazzero’s Emotionally Healthy Spirituality book ::

… It’s the most down-to-earth, spiritually practical and inspiring book I’ve read in a very long time…

Peter Scazzero, the author, makes the point that you may be spiritually committed, yet so emotionally unhealthy that it renders you spiritually unhealthy. He states that unless we deal with our emotional immaturity we can’t be effective or whole as Christians, and in fact it can cost us everything.

… I wanted to buy a copy for each of about fifteen people in my life. That, my friends, is the mark of a life-changing book.

Kevin Martineau listed the “Top Ten Symptoms of Emotionally Unhealthy Spirituality” from Scazzero’s book::

1. Using God to Run from God: At times we use Christian activities as an unconscious attempt to escape from pain.
2. Ignoring the Emotions of Anger, Sadness, and Fear
3. Dying to the Wrong Things: Some people believe that the miserable you are the more that God loves you.
4. Denying the Past’s Impact on the Present
5. Dividing Our Lives into “Secular” and “sacred” Compartments
6. Doing for God instead of being for God
7. Spiritualizing away conflict
8. Covering over brokenness, weakness, and failure
9. Living without limits
10. Judging others people’s spiritual journey

Read the original list with descriptions for each of the Top Ten Symptoms of Emotionally Unhealthy Spirituality [pdf] via the official website.

And, there’s one more thing.

I just found this series of 16 talks titled Emotionally Healthy Spirituality from Newheart Foursquare Church (Simi Valley, CA) by Paul Kuzma. Though I haven’t listened to them all, yet, I have faith that these would be wonderfully holistic and healthy for the heart and soul.

I think I’m (mostly) right there are (practically) no book titles with the words “emotional maturity.” There are a few self-published books about this topic. Strange.
And, there are quite a number of books on “emotional intelligence” and on “emotional health“. 2 that makes the vital connection between spiritual life and emotions are Peter Scazzero’s Emotionally Healthy Church and Emotionally Healthy Spirituality.

Turning to the web, here’s a couple things I found on how to develop emotional maturity. When looking at information on the web, it’s not automatically reliable, even if it is in the wisdom-of-crowds moderated Wikipedia. Or, shall I say, especially if. Caution aside, here’s what the wisdom of the world wide web turned up about developing emotional maturity.

eHow‘s has this article with 4 steps to emotional maturity:

how to become emotionally mature

1. Avoid getting easily offended.
2. Stop giving your joy away.
3. Use reason to govern your actions, instead of emotion.
4. Do not bite the bait.

I’m being facetious, and I hope they are too, because emotional maturity is much more involved than 4 easy steps. How about 7 steps? [from adoption.com]

7 Steps to Emotional Maturity
1. Eliminate Magical Thinking
2. Learn to Tolerate Your Anxiety
3. Learn to Recognize and Appropriately Express Your Anger
4. Learn to Cope With Pain and Hurt
5. Facing Your Guilty Feelings
6. Learn to Live With Your Failures
7. Put Your Feelings in Perspective

From another perspective, How to Develop Emotional Maturity (from iLoveIndia)

Anyone can develop emotional maturity in oneself by keeping a track of certain points, given as follows.

• Work hard to achieve your goals. Life is not a fairy tale where magic wands do wonders.
• Start accepting your tensions and worries. Don’t avoid it just to get momentary relief. Work over your stress and anxiety, and handle them.
• Start recognizing and expressing your anger. Otherwise, you’ll become afraid of yourself after a certain point of time.
• Learn to bear pain and hurt because life is full of uncertainties. You never know what lies in store for you.
• Face the consequences of the things you’ve done. Understand your responsibility and learn from your mistakes.
• Learn to accept you failures and engage yourself in better actions. Keep a positive approach and be helpful to others.
• Make your own viewpoint from your feelings. Comprehend that the world is really big and one can actually not identify with the things, people etc.

Um, so what does emotional maturity look like, and where does doing the above things get you? The traits and characteristics below seem to be good descriptions:

Emotional maturity is not something that is automatically given to someone when they turn 18. Emotional maturity is something that we must develop in our lives by knowing how to respond to situations in a mature and responsible manner. Three factors that define emotional maturity are:

• Ability to Face Reality — Acceptance
• Ability to Relate Well With Others
• Willingness to be Honest with Ourselves

This list below has 10 traits of emotional maturity, from a dating site called bookofmatches.com:

How do you recognize emotional maturity? An emotionally mature person will have many of the following traits:

• Knowing what one wants and making it happen
• Thinking before acting and having control over one’s behavior
• Self-reliance and the ability to take responsibility for one’s life and actions
• Patience
• The ability to connect with others in a cooperative and positive way
• Genuinely caring about others and demonstrating that ability
• Honesty and living by one’s principles
• Having moderation and balance in all things
• Having the ability to follow through, even when it is difficult
• Humility and the ability to say, “I was wrong. I am sorry.”

Other ideas perculating for future posts on emotional maturity: how about emotional intelligence? How about emotionally healthy spirituality? why we’re so emotionally messed up? relationships forge emotional maturity. Anything else you’d add?

What is emotional maturity? Emotional maturity isn’t something that necessarily grows with chronological age, i.e. you don’t get more emotionally mature when you get older. Some adults are very emotionally immature; some have never matured emotionally.

And, you can’t tell someone that. Telling an emotionally immature person they’re immature will get an explosively immature reaction. Childish. Not a pretty sight. And it’s too bad. It’s those emotionally immature people that need a lot of help, but how in the world do you help them? They have to want the help, like the alcoholic who has comes to the point of admitting they need help.

There’s a lot to unpack about this topic, as I began looking more closely at it, and as I review my own journey of emotionally maturing. Not to say that I’ve arrived.

I do think about this topic, and have to say that I haven’t come across great books or teachings on this. Don’t recall any classes or seminars on this. And, it seems that cultures have different categories for emotions and feelings, if the difficulty of navigating both Asian and American cultures is any indication.

Before I find out how does someone develop emotional maturity, let’s consider what emotional maturity looks like. From my quick scan of the Web, these are my tentative thoughts in process:

• Emotional maturity is being responsible for one’s behaviors– both actions and words.
• Emotional maturity is NOT controlling one’s emotions. It’s controlling one’s behaviors and choosing to act in a way that doesn’t impulsively give in to reactive feelings.
• Emotional maturity recognizes it’s okay to feel. It’s human to feel the full range of emotions. It’s not okay to act out immaturely, definitely not illegally.
• Emotional maturity seems to go hand-in-hand with developing mental health.
• Emotional maturity doesn’t mean every person will feel the same way about a situation / stimulus / idea. There’s some kind of relationship between core values and emotions / feelings. Would you believe values can change?
• There’s probably a fine difference between emotions and feelings, but it’s too close to call for me, so I’m using them synonymously. Add a comment to explain otherwise, ok?

James Burns says, Emotionally Mature People Are Responsible. Excerpt below:

Emotionally mature people accept responsibility for their actions. They don’t look for excuses for their behavior. There may be reasons or circumstances why emotionally mature people act in an irresponsible way, but they don’t waste time making all kinds of excuses. Emotionally mature people don’t feel victimized by circumstances or other people. Even when circumstances or events are difficult, they deal with them without resorting to blaming others. … It becomes the responsibility of the individual to overcome difficult circumstances that were not really the fault of that person.

One overly simplistic but sorta fun way to find out how emotionally mature you are is to take an online quiz. Here’s my results:

You Are 60% Grown Up, 40% Kid

You’ve grown up a good bit, but you still have a way to go before you’re emotionally mature. You have the skills to control your emotions, you just have to use them. Whenever you feel yourself acting out, just stop. It’s really that simple. Acting like an adult is all about doing the best you can.

Um, see, I’m not there yet. I can sure use all the help I can get, very open to getting help.

Aside: “How Can I Be More Emotionally Mature?” was asked at Yahoo Answers and people responded with a random lot of suggestions. Doesn’t quite do it for me.

I’ve gathered random bits of data for this series of posts. There are different approaches to facilitating life change. (I know I am in desperate need for life change myself. Yet, I also am discerning how to live out of how I am made, rather than being someone I’m not.)

According to this article, there are only 3 things that motivate people to change:

• pain – emotional or physical pain gives motivation to change
• pull forces – transition in life stages or response to inspiration
• push forces – motivation from someone else or circumstances

I’ve heard great things about the 12 steps to recovery, originally defined by Alcoholics Anonymous. Having met people who’ve been through this kind of a process and really work it, I’m amazed by their honesty, vulnerability, and profound life change:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His Will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

The Twelve Steps for Christians is enhanced with Scriptural references, and explicitly names God as the “higher power”.