10 Symptoms Of An Immature Personality According To Enrique Rojas
The immature personality is a half-done personality. A personality that, being constituted by the total sum of the behaviors that are carried out, is perceived as poorly defined and with negative fringes.
Taking this into account, at this point is where it is understood that:
Although this term “immature personality” resides in a lush reality that often undermines the freedoms of others, it is possible to determine with psychotherapeutic help the anchor points to achieve an improvement and a consistent structuring of the essence of oneself.
Enrique Rojas, professor of psychiatry at the University of Extremadura (Spain), systematized the main ingredients of the immature personality into 10 characteristics, a reality that mental health professionals usually encounter in our consultations.
Thus, from this approach,
1. Lag between chronological age and mental age.
In a first contact this is one of the most striking aspects. We can meet people who are afraid to “grow up”, they are people who are not aware of their responsibilities and their reality. The environment accuses this characteristic, fighting to assume those roles that are expected of each one according to their evolutionary moment.
2. Lack of self-knowledge.
Knowing yourself is the most important subject in a person’s life. Therefore, knowing what attitudes, skills and limitations one has are the logbook of proper navigation.
3. Emotional instability.
Constant changes in mood can be indicative of a half-done personality. Going from euphoria to melancholy or from good humor to bad humor in a matter of moments, being uneven, variable and irregular is a sign that something is not right in the constitution of our essence.
The changeable fragility and pendular feelings make us not know what we are going to find in the other. Thus, as if it were a roller coaster, the oscillations are so frequent that they are often harmful for those who accompany an immature personality.
4. Little or no responsibility.
Like any other psychological fact, immaturity has different levels. Being aware of the reality of oneself implies knowing the present of oneself and taking responsibility for the qualities, possibilities and demands without any doubts or believing oneself more than anyone else.
5. Bad or no perception of reality.
If we do not grasp our own reality and that of the environment well, we easily fall into a lack of harmony with ourselves and with those around us. We must learn to measure distances and neighborhoods well, assessing at each point and in each situation what we must and what we want to do.
6. Absence of a life project: life is not improvised.
Life is not improvised. For this reason, it is necessary to propose a vital scheme that helps us to mentally design our future. Striking a balance between love, work and culture is the only guarantee of well-being. As Rojas emphasizes, love should be the first argument in life, since it is what gives life and strength to others. Fulfilling this premise, the sum of all must offer us an internal coherence that determines our vital development.
7. Lack of affective maturity
For love, life has meaning but there is no love without resignations. At the same time, no one can be absolute to the other, so it is understood that emotional dependence and the most genuine feeling that we can display cannot coexist without destroying each other.
8. Lack of intellectual maturity.
Intelligence together with affectivity is another of the great tools of psychology. Although there are many types of intelligences, the lack of vision and planning present, the hypertrophy of the current moment and distant impulsivity recreates a game that fundamentally leads us to a detriment of our capacity for growth. If we do not analyze the facts, it is difficult for us to know where we want to lead our life.
9. Little education of the will.
When we are fragile, lack of temperance prevents us from setting specific goals. This leads to a fading of the possibilities for improvement. If we don’t know how to say NO, we are spoiling our essence. We must learn not to defeat ourselves or to be prisoners of immediate impulses.
Becoming light and fickle makes us frivolous and leads us to a frustration that undermines our ability to overcome and fight with life’s own difficulties. Taking refuge in a fantastic world means getting away from reality and maturity that is so necessary for our well-being.
10. Unstable moral and ethical criteria.
Morality is the art of living with dignity. Using freedom incorrectly means putting into practice something that is neither good nor positive for anyone. In the immature personality, everything is held up with pins, so the basting that is intended to put together the patterns of the dress of our life is easily frayed. For this reason, we must move away from the fashion of permissiveness, relative and fluctuations, joining the lists of critical thinking and mindfulness.
As Enrique Rojas would say, maturity is one of the drawbridges that leads to the strength of happiness, this being the result of hard, serious and patient work. Therefore, there is no maturity without awareness and without full commitment to oneself. For this reason, this is, without a doubt, information that is worth identifying in each one.
