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CHAPTER 6: SELF EXAMINATION & MATURATIONAL CURIOSITIES

Maturing adults struggle with maturational curiosities when their relationships decline. Understanding personality and its related motives will always help maturing adults comprehend why their relationships fail to improve. Maturing adults begin to accept that personality and its related motives stabilize marital or other interpersonal conflict. Good psychotherapy helps clients work through the following maturational inquiries:

• Am I driven to improve the psychological health of our marriage or am I motivated to create or avoid conflict in order to gratify my immature interpersonal motives?
• Is my partner driven to improve the psychological health of our marriage or is he or she motivated to create or avoid conflict in order to gratify their immature interpersonal motives?

Psychological naiveté or immaturity may limit one’s ability to judge the health of their premarital relationship. The fund of information that is available to many Americans regarding what is normal and abnormal in relationships is still highly underdeveloped. Therefore, malignant opportunists have an unfair advantage in all types of relationships.

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The drive to mature is limited by either individual or interpersonal personality. Maturing adults examine their own personality as well as the motives associated with the personality of a partner. Maturational instincts involve curiosity, domestic courage and individual accountability. Individuals who tolerate the angst of maturation commonly ask the following question:

• Is my motivation to mature limited by my own personality or by the personality of my spouse, parent, supervisor, leader, peer group, etc?

Normal and abnormal social ties challenge individual adaptive potential. With adaptive potential, individuals want to know more about the well-being and safety of their relationships. The motives associated with adaptive potential may either help a struggling relationship or end it. With regard to survival, curiosity has played a large role in human evolution; humans survived by either preying upon others or moving away from dangerous or suspicious relationships.

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Immature adults cannot tolerate maturational challenges that threaten their fragile sense of adult competency. Maladaptive defensive reasoning helps adults circumvent conscious awareness that clearly defines the limits of their personality and its impact upon others. Consider the following maturational questions where maturing adults struggle with increasing their conscious awareness of themselves and others:

• Is my maladaptive defensive reasoning limited by my own personality?
• Is my maladaptive defensive reasoning or judgment a response to my partner’s personality and the health of my marriage?
• Is my mental health declining because of my own personality or in response to my spouse’s personality?
• Is my physical health declining because of my own personality or in response to the personality of my partner?
• Am I objectively interpreting domestic realities or am I subjectively misinterpreting them with the perceptual filters of my own personality?
• When do I stop running or hiding from my marital problems?
• Why are these complicated decisions in my life?
• What do I really want in a marriage or relationship?
• What would a professional say about my interpersonal needs or the health of my relationship?
• When do I stop trying to rescue my marriage and file for divorce?

When maturing, individuals develop an ability to surrender from their maladaptive defensive reasoning. Just as some individuals are motivated to alter their lifestyles in order to improve their health, maturing adults are motivated to examine the health of their own psychological reasoning. Maturational curiosity is associated with reducing psychological paralysis and confusion.

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