Childish Adults Feel Pleasure and Pain, but Childishly

You're preparing to board a plane when your flight is abruptly canceled. A gate agent instructs all passengers to wait patiently to be booked on other, later flights.

You stomp and swear, flinging your backpack to the floor. Everyone else sits down as directed.

You wonder how they all handle this catastrophe so smoothly when they feel exactly the same way about it as you do.

They don't.

They share your frustration, irritation, shock, and dread. But they feel adult versions of those emotions; you don't.

Nor would I.

Some adults experience and express emotions childishly. Our feelings are neurobiologically held hostage by persons or situations in our lives that tricked, trained, or traumatized us into not even knowing we were stuck.

All human beings experience the same range of emotions. Whether that range comprises only six basic ones—anger, surprise, disgust, enjoyment, fear, and sadness, as psychologist Paul Ekman theorized—or whether, as recent research suggests, it includes dozens more, including adoration, craving, boredom, awe, nostalgia, sexual desire, confusion, horror, and relief, we're expected as we grow to process emotions in increasingly age-appropriate ways.

Furious toddlers hurl things across rooms and howl. Equally outraged adults often sit masterfully still, murmuring, "Can we talk?"

Researchers assert that emotional regulation—learning to handle hard feelings—burgeons in toddlerhood alongside verbal and motor skills and is inflected by parenting styles, personality, genetics, and circumstances.

Stereotypically "childish" emotional expressions involve panic, arrogance, and acting out. Approved "adult" versions involve self-awareness, restraint, and insight into cause, context, and effect.

Childish adults sob, stomp, sulk, self-harm, and sink into dysfunctionality when swept with anger, say, or shame.

Even "positive" emotions such as joy and passion sometimes spur in us extreme, embarrassing, and inappropriate reactions.

Told to "act your age," we can't.

To feel childish emotions in an adult brain and body is like being sprayed with ice and acid amidst blaring sirens while hogtied.

Primal urges barrage our full-sized muscles, organs, and neuronal networks, outpacing and overpowering all reasoning, resisting in their brute force our adult intelligence.

And this intelligence intensifies our pain because it "knows too much." Children imagine monsters. Adults know about war, sickness, killers, failure, infidelity, addiction, accidents: ten thousand real-world things that can and do and might go wrong right now.

This is what divides childish emoters from adult peers. It is why we feel outpaced, unlovable, and alienated next to them: We are easily overwhelmed by our feelings. They're not.

But why?

We aren't stupid. We didn't choose to spend our lives shrieking and slumping slackjawed to the floor.

Emotional maturity is mainly learned directly, one-on-one—"Big girls don't kick their party guests"—and by example, trial and error, observation, guidance, practice, and vigilance.

But what if we weren't taught? What if our would-be guides were absent, inconsistent, incoherent, or infantile? What if they trained us always to feel helpless, furious, afraid, or ashamed?

What if we mistook their meltdowns for ideal adult conduct, which we memorized and mimed?

What if crying, lying, and brutality were our home language? What if we learned this too well and programmed it into our young brains, coded as correct? What if we trusted nothing else?

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Some of us don't realize that we share the same emotions as other adults but feel these in shatteringly different ways. Some of us don't see our own affliction. We think: This is envy or this is awe, not this is a stunted version of it which I was unknowingly forbidden to outgrow.

Telling ourselves, or being told, to act our age is not a magic spell. Can we ever program triggers in our lives that have been set on auto-repeat? If our feelings define us, if they mirror what some call our souls, then what, were they to alter, might we lose? Maturity is too seldom seen as a luxury, which many of us do not even know we've been denied.