Wednesday, November 22, 2017

A Thumotic Perspective on Delayed Development to Adulthood, Part 2

When Your Spirit-Driven Development is Threatened and Delayed

When your spirit-driven development to adulthood is threatened, it’s life-affirming work is denied. Your spirit’s immediate emotional response to the denial is anger, fear, sadness, guilt, and disappointment.

Your spirit’s emotional response is its attempt to overcome the threat to you becoming an adult. The more intense the threat, the more intense your spirit’s emotional response.

When the threat to your development overwhelms your ability to overcome it, it delays your development to becoming an adult. Your spirit’s response to your delayed development is a chronic emotional response of anger, fear, sadness, guilt, and disappointment.

Despite your delay to becoming self-sustaining, you reach society’s “age of adulthood.” Society (embodied by your parents, teachers, media, governing officials, employers, etc.) expects you to be self-sustaining when your body is fully developed, around 18 to 24 years old. You also expect to be an adult and treated as such around this time.

It’s Not Your Fault

It’s not your fault that your development to sustaining your life is delayed. The threats to your development were more than you could handle at the time.

There is nothing wrong with you morally or as a human being. However, your delayed development is a problem for your society’s expectations of you. It also a problem for your own expectations of yourself and your life. You’re not in synch with society’s expectations or your own. Being out of synch can be a miserable place to be.


When your development is delayed, you can sustain your life by using immature ways or by intentionally developing mature ways yourself.

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