Testimony: How I am Recovering from Infant Maturity Deficits

As we delve into the human maturity stages, it is helpful to read or hear examples of how other people identified and addressed their maturity deficits. This month we feature an interview conducted by Catherine Curtis (CC) with HCI Executive Director, Betsy Stalcup (EMS).

CC:  When did you realize that your infant level maturity was low?

EMS: I think it was back in 2008. I was introduced to the Life Model by Miriam Hollenbeck, a graduate student who was interning with me. She and her husband lived in our basement during that season while she was finishing her master’s in social work at Loyola University. She gave me a copy of Living from the Heart Jesus Gave You, which has a short description of maturity.

HCI started running Life Model classes--Restarting and later Forming. I became aware that maturity was important. The Life Model people, at Shepherd’s House, had at one point undertaken a massive project to evaluate what was wrong with 10,000 Christian leaders who had failed in some way, typically moral failure. They compared notes with all these different clients, and what they discovered is that each of them had significant maturity deficits. The idea is that as your level of responsibility goes up, your maturity deficits become a bigger problem. If you don’t have a solid foundation of infant and child maturity, you are going to cope poorly with the additional complexity and stress and you will end up finding some way to cope that isn’t healthy.

For the leaders with lots of responsibility, this can feel like an acceptable way to handle the stress of your job, because you never learned healthy ways to quiet yourself. And you end up in moral failure because you get sucked in and become dependent on these ways of recovering that are not healthy, not moral, not godly. In the cases of Ted Haggard and Ravi Zacharias, they were at the peak of their ministries, and started acting out with masseuses, to relieve stress and quiet their bodies. Zacharias would actually tell women, I need for you to do this for me because I am so stressed by the ministry. This is a very dramatic example of failed maturity.

For most of us, we are going along pretty well, operating at a maturity level that might be the correct one for our chronological age and our physical body. Then something happens, and we seem to just fall into a maturity hole. We watch ourselves acting immaturely, and wonder what in the world is going on with me, and how did I get here? For me, I always thought that I was a lot more mature than my dear husband, Sam, because in our marriage I tended to be the more responsible one. Sam is joyful, happy-go-lucky, carefree, and fun loving. He saw no reason to wash dishes, for example, as long as there were a few clean plates in the cupboard. He does not like to take care of business.

The first time we did a maturity assessment, I found that I had pretty solid child level maturity, so I knew how to do hard things. I was good about fasting and taming my cravings, but I was shocked to learn that I was not good about resting and receiving, which is an infant level deficit. During the infant stage, we are also supposed to be able to regulate all of our emotions, both good and bad ones. If you are able to regulate then you are able to feel them, then quickly return to a place of tranquility and peace. Even with a positive emotion, if you stay at that level for too long, it ends up overwhelming you and it is too much.

We learn how to regulate our emotions when our mother or primary care giver repeatedly helping us calm and quiet. An infant is born with zero capacity to regulate their own emotions. So, babies cry and they need someone to pick them up and soothe them. This needs to happen over and over and over again. And when it does, the baby develops neural wiring that goes from the place of distress (back of the brain) to the place of joy (front of the brain). After lots of repetition, an infant will feel distress, their neural circuits will fire, and they end up in the place of calm and quiet. It happens automatically when they have been repeatedly comforted every time they are in distress. This takes a patient adult who understands what is happening when a baby is in distress or starting to get upset. An adult who knows how to regulate their own emotions and is willing to help the infant by comforting them. Many times, my children would start to yelp, kind of an “Arkk.” And if I attended to them then, it kept them from getting upset.

I did not have that in my life. People were not consistently attentive to me, and I would end up in full-blown melt down. I remember crying for hours lying under my grandparents dining room table while the four adults chatted overhead and ignored me. I think my parents believed it would be spoiling me to comfort me when I was hysterical. So, my brain lacked that neural wiring, and did not know how to regulate my emotions.

I read an Allan N. Schore book on affect regulation, and he says that the primary task of childhood is to learn to regulate your emotions. Think about it, kids who do well on the playground and in school are able to regulate their emotions. It is not because they are so wonderful, it is because their parents or somebody helped them calm down over and over again until now, they know how to do it themselves, because it was modeled and demonstrated for them repeatedly.

Basically, I was completely blown away by my low score on the infant maturity assessment. If that had been a number (it was not) I would have flunked. The way it would show up in my life, is that I would be okay, then something would happen, and I would lose it. What felt true to me was that the people around me were causing me to feel this way. I did not have an accurate perspective; I did not see that it was my own stuff. I was really good at blaming other people in my life for what I was feeling.

Then I talked to Sam and discovered that he was actually pretty good at that. Which is why he is pretty even keeled. That was a big shock. His infant assessment wasn’t perfect, but it was much stronger than mine. Thank God for giving me this husband who was strong where I was weak!

Jim Wilder has a specific way of looking at when someone is like me--strong at child level maturity, but weak in infant level maturity. He says it is like a plane that is flying upside down. At a distance, it looks pretty good. But as the plane gets closer, you notice, hey--wait a minute, the plane is flying upside down. It takes a huge amount of energy to function at that high level when you don’t have infant maturity. It is like the foundation of a house that has many missing bricks. If your “maturity house” is one story high, say, you are in your 20’s with little responsibility, then those missing brick don’t matter much (until there is an earthquake).

But then you become a parent and get more responsibility at work. Pretty soon your job becomes more demanding and there are constant things pushing at you, you have to fill in those bricks, or you will not cope well with parenting. You might turn to a substance to get you through. You might turn to entertainment. You might shirk your duties as a parent and miss out on one of life’s more joyful experiences—raising children. You might try to use anger to control your kids, or you might, like me, make blaming other people an art form.

One of the saddest things about missing maturity, is you can recover, but few people do. I think many do not know what is missing. And others feel it is too hard. However, what I have found is that when you recover, when you engage with God and your community to go after your missing maturity, then doing what you were made to do becomes much easier. Maybe not at first, but every place where you recover, makes talking the next deficit easier. I am not saying that you don’t suffer, we all suffer in seasons, but you are able to suffer well with the Lord and supportive community. You don’t get lost in a vortex of behaviors and experiences that actually detract from the joyful life God has for you.

I’ve made a lot of progress since I first learned about maturity. Regulating my emotions is getting easier, and recently I sensed God nudging me to go after shame. My experience is that when I see it is shame, that alone, that recognition, helps right away. I can bear feeling it. I don’t like it, but now I know the answer is not to avoid it, but to name it, feel it. Take it to God and let him love me. Make amends if appropriate. With the help of my community and a loving Lord, I can do this!