When trauma impairs your ability to develop full emotional maturity, this is known as arrested psychological development. Trauma can “freeze” your emotional response at the age you experienced it. When you feel or act emotionally younger than your actual age, this is known as age regression.
Emotional Responses
Children who have experienced complex trauma often have difficulty identifying, expressing, and managing emotions, and may have limited language for feeling states. They often internalize and/or externalize stress reactions and as a result may experience significant depression, anxiety, or anger.
Emotional immaturity can be the result of insecure attachments during early life experiences, trauma, untreated addiction or mental health problems, and/or lack of deeper introspection or work on oneself. It can manifest as self-centeredness, narcissism, and poor management of conflict.
People sometimes revert to childlike behavior to cope with trauma, stress, severe illness, or mental health disorders. Age regression can be unconscious (involuntary) or conscious (voluntary) behavior.
One of the hallmarks of PTSD, and especially CPTSD, is having trouble controlling your emotions, which is known as emotional dysregulation.
They may be impulsive, acting before they think. Aggressive behaviors also include complaining, "backstabbing," being late or doing a poor job on purpose, self-blame, or even self-injury. Many people with PTSD only use aggressive responses to threat. They are not able to use other responses that could be more positive.
Feeling emotionally detached can be a symptom of another mental health condition, including: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): According to the National Institute of Mental Health , feeling emotionally numb can occur with PTSD.
Trauma-related immaturity refers to the ways in which trauma can impact a person's emotional and social development. As we mentioned before, trauma can often result in behavioral problems or emotional difficulties that make a person appear immature or developmentally delayed.
That's what PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) is—our body's overreaction to a small response, and either stuck in fight and flight or shut down. People who experience trauma and the shutdown response usually feel shame around their inability to act, when their body did not move.
Self-destructive behavior, such as drinking too much or driving too fast. Trouble sleeping. Trouble concentrating. Irritability, angry outbursts or aggressive behavior.
A person with BPD may appear to be emotionally immature because they often expect others to put their needs first. They're frequently emotionally dependent on others and may appear to be trying to manipulate others to give them their way by inappropriate emotional reactions or acting out.
They Do Not Empathize – An emotionally immature person does not empathize with others' emotions and feelings and may seem self-centered. It is about fulfilling their needs, and they seldom apologize for hurting people with their actions or words.
People can grow and change. If someone you care about is emotionally immature, you may be able to help them learn to behave more like an adult. If they don't want to change, speak to a counselor about how to care for yourself while dealing with an emotionally immature person.
Alterations in arousal and reactivity: Arousal and reactive symptoms may include being irritable and having angry outbursts; behaving recklessly or in a self-destructive way; being overly watchful of one's surroundings in a suspecting way; being easily startled; or having problems concentrating or sleeping.
Remember: PTSD is a normal response to abnormal circumstances. It's common for people with PTSD to isolate themselves. You may feel overwhelmed or unsafe in groups, quick to anger, misunderstood, or just uninterested in being around people.
In the fourth stage, you begin to enter into recovery from PTSD. It is called the “transition” stage because you begin to move into a new level of acceptance and understanding of what happened and how it has been affecting your life. This is the stage where healing finally starts to occur.
Dissociation is a state of mind that occurs when someone separates themselves from their emotions, and is a common trauma defense mechanism in people with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Dissociation can feel like an out-of-body experience or like disconnection from the world around you.
Emotionally immature people may lack emotional sensitivity, behave in a self-preoccupied manner, and may cause you to question your reality. You may find communication difficult to even impossible. Therefore, it is important to acknowledge and recognize the signs so you can deal with them accordingly.
Emotional immaturity is a person's inability to express or cope with emotions that are serious in nature. People who are emotionally immature may also overreact to situations or have trouble controlling their emotions.
PTSD symptoms are also positively associated with broad deficits in emotion regulation (e.g., Tull, Barrett, McMillan, & Roemer, 2007). One aspect of emotional dysfunction that has received less attention in PTSD is emotional lability (i.e., intense, frequent, and reactive shifts in emotional experience).
People with PTSD or some other form of trauma may be clingy. They may not be able to function without their partner nearby, and they may try to guilt trip you when you have to leave. It's important for people like this to develop a secure attachment, where they can still be themselves even without the person.
Many trauma survivors feel unlovable because of the trauma they experienced. They might believe that they deserved what happened and that whatever made them deserve the trauma also makes them unworthy of love.