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“I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
— Daisy Buchanan, from The Great Gatsby
What, Me Worry?
I found this piece hard to write either because it’s about what you cannot see, or because it’s about what I cannot see. There is an elusive reason why people act like poorly developed adolescents but cannot see they’re doing it. I suggest that we must see this in ourselves. If we don’t, we won’t grow up.
These dark issues of savagery, selfishness, and self-destruction were William Golding’s themes in the book, The Lord of the Flies, Golding disliked children and cast them as villains, but the villains he portrayed are, in reality, exemplified by immature adults. It’s adults who behave like children—not children behaving like adults—who have created a world full of misery and stupidity.
“What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages? What’s grownups going to think?” — Piggy, from Lord of the Flies
“Quiet Piggy!” — Donald Trump, President of the United States, silencing the reporter Catherine Lucey.
“Some children have the most disagreeable way of getting grown-up.” — Lewis Carroll
The age of 12 is considered transitional for many reasons. It’s the average age of menarche for females and a time of hormonal growth for males.
Psychologically, it’s the age when a person transitions from concrete to logical thinking, thinking beyond literal facts to understand sarcasm and metaphor. This is when we develop the ability to “think about thinking,” which leads to increased introspection and a budding awareness of our own thought processes. Twelve is the age of Ralph, Jack, and Piggy, the leading “biguns” in Lord of the Flies.
“Making a mockery of the rule of law and wielding state power to reward friends and punish foes while eroding institutions, (Trump is) a 12-year-old boy: There’s fun trips, lots of screen time, playing with toys, reliable kids’ menus and cool gifts under the tree… yet, as with all children, there are also outbursts in the middle of restaurants. Or in this case, the Cabinet Room.”— Jonathan Martin (2025), senior political reporter for Politico
It is blindness to our own immaturity that underlies our support for public figures with Immature Personality Disorder. And the more people and more prominently they display these flaws, the more normal we consider it to be, and the more broadly we accept it.
This has reached a point where a dysfunctional president fails to be recognized as having a mental disorder. Everyone either ignores him or debates the merits of his dysfunctional actions. Can you not see the danger inherent in this?
“The worst terror for humanity is that we have a past behind us that is with us. And there is always a horrible chance that it will repeat itself – so that the present will become the future.”
— paraphrasing William Golding (Lee 2025), author of Lord of the Flies
An Intellectual Metamorphosis
“One disadvantage of your teenage and early adult years is that you tend to experience adversity without perspective. It’s hard to place your own experience in a larger context when you haven’t yet experienced that context.”— David French (2025), opinion columnist for the New York Times
If you think back to your youth you will find that you have confused memories of being 12 years old. This is because you were confused when you were 12, and when you’re confused you have trouble forming memories. Memories are perceptually connected events that make some sense to us. Memories don’t hold together without sense; they’re like dreams.
When we remember, what we remember is more the sense of the situations than the events themselves. We remember more of what it felt like and less of what actually happened. If you could remember an accurate timeline of the events of your young life you would find your 12th year rather empty.
In my case, my 12-th year must have been filled with boredom. I was starting to think and there seemed to be nothing worth thinking about. I have aimless memories of returning from empty days at school to empty days at home, largely alone, interspersed with memories of trees outside and television sitcoms. My father was usually away and my mother, present or otherwise, was always away.
I was 11 when I had my one and only memorable schoolyard fist fight, at the end of 6th grade. It was one of those planned affairs somewhat like a duel: “I’ll fight you at the far edge of the soccer field at recess.” I think I landed one punch. It gave me a great sense of presence. Surprisingly, it didn’t become a habit.
At twelve I must have been entering 7th grade and a new school, high school, the school for adults. I have a memory of sitting in a particularly awful orientation class thinking, “This is worse than grammar school. This is ridiculous!” I don’t know what others my age thought. I suspect they didn’t think much, and never have.
At 13, with a great sense of relief, I gave up shoplifting and started rock climbing. I was introduced to the idea by a 15-year old acquaintance who’d returned from Outward Bound. There were no climbing gyms, programs, books, or anyone else doing it, but I found a few small cliffs and it seemed straight forward: just go up. Like the hormones that stimulated sex, the cliffs stimulated fear. I found great relief in doing something I was able to control.
After that there were many memories, not clear ones but events started to unfold in connected sequences. Climbing made sense as a series of decisions and adventures. School started to make sense as a ridiculous circus of skillless adults and unthinking children.
School was a comedy of menace, as dramatized in Harold Pinter’s “Birthday Party,” a play my parents memorably took me to in New York City. It’s important for an adolescent to see the true adult world, to see that the adult world is neither healthy, normal, nor mentally well-balanced.
In this crucial time one is forming and accepting assumptions about behaviors and motivations. It’s important to recognize, if possible, that you are making and accepting these. If you fail to recognize that these are modeled behaviors, not logical or effective behaviors, then you may never realize these are arbitrary. If you don’t question what you are learning at this point in your life, you may never question it. Clearly, most people don’t question these “adult norms” in adolescence or ever.
Immature Personality Disorder
“So many people reach chronological adulthood without having mastered the core elements of adult emotional functioning.”— Susan Heitler (2016), psychotherapist
Immature Personality Disorder is a real thing. We don’t hear about it because it describes everyone and no one wants to admit it. You’ll surely recognize many people you know as being described by the following symptoms, but see if you can recognize them in yourself.
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- Frequent irresponsible behavior.
- Propensity to not fulfill commitments.
- Prone to act before thinking.
- Susceptible to changing plans unexpectedly.
- Easily manipulated by others.
- Pronounced mood swings that are often puerile.
- Unstable emotional and behavioral manifestations inappropriate for a person’s age.
- Genuine but fleeting repentance for acts committed and soon forgotten, potentiating repeat behavior, but absent of perversity and wickedness.
- Inability to manage one’s assets.
- Appetite for wonderment and acquisition of unneeded goods even if it jeopardizes one’s well-being.
- Absence of a project or purpose, with a focus on instant gratification.
- Propensity to lie frequently in a puerile and often foolish way.
- Childish or absurd disinterest or devaluation of the opinions of others.
- Tendency to adopt risky behavior: substance use, pathological gambling, irresponsible sexual behavior, dangerous driving, and unstable relationships.
- Sense of entitlement.
- Tyrannical in demands and ungrateful for the efforts of others.
- Excessive cowardice or reckless temerity.
- Unjustified and indifferent feeling of superiority.
- Theatricality, looking to stand out even at unjustified cost.
- A lack of feelings of closeness or familiarity, with frequent invasion of the space of others.
- Savage egotism often denied, but apparent to others.
- Fearful and suspicious character.
- Absence of mental disability.
“Immature Personality Disorder, IPD, is almost always (the result of) a permissive education… nourished by excessive and unhealthy indulgence, the individuals sometimes develop a feeling of uniqueness, of entitlement to a special status, not only within their family, but often in the world… These individuals integrate a conviction of superiority often fueled by their own parents, and they acquire behavior that is of unbearable boastfulness, arrogance, haughtiness, intemperate and abusive devaluation of others, which is underlined by a monstrous, given its excess, feeling of self-worth and inability to understand their own limitations, with the individuals revealing the most incredible lack of common sense and manners.”— Almeida, Ribeiro, and Moreira (2019), psychologists
You may say, “Oh sure, I know people with some of those features!” but that is not the point. The world is full of characters, many of whom are rewarded for playing their roles.
“It is important to be able to recognize the behaviors these individuals tend to engage in and respond to them accordingly. One frequently shared feature of these ‘high-conflict’ personalities is emotional immaturity, a trait that can cause substantial problems in interpersonal relationships.”— Tracy Hutchinson (2022), psychologist
What is not expected is that you are playing some of these roles and don’t recognize it. In fact, everyone plays two, three, or more roles without recognizing how different they are in each. It’s only to people who play similar roles in your life that you behave in a similar manner. And if mature and responsible experiences shaped your characters, how mature and responsible were your experiences?
Where did your characters originate? Where did you learn to be a friend, partner, parent, grandparent, or child? We can say we learned our public presentations from presenting ourselves in public, though that often casts us in roles we’re unprepared for. And even in those cases, the characters we adopt are the ones who express our most familiar needs, not the best or most mature, but the most thoroughly learned from experiences in our early past.
You Can Advance Your Stalled Development
Your maturity is determined by the limits of your self reflection and whether you are flexible enough to navigate the world with minimal damage to yourself and others. As you should already appreciate, the conflicts in your life are sustained, generated, or accepted by you and your greatest conflicts come from relating with others or, in some cases, yourself.
What you should do as a mature personality is recognize value in yourself and others where it exists, encourage what is valuable, and discourage or disallow what is not creative. The mature person does not waste their time with indecision, they engage and act, or else they direct their attention elsewhere. The point is to engage where appropriate, act where opportune, and learn wherever possible.
Being right, successful, or recognized are of limited value outside of making investments. What you want to do is play a larger role and create more opportunities. You want progress not only for yourself but for the supporting elements in your environment. This isn’t altruism, it’s pragmatism. Emotional maturity is the ability to deal with reality.
Most of us have had emotionally immature parents. It is the exceptionally rare parent who is ready to give their children all the understanding, support, and attention they need. My parents were unquestionably immature, but I was lucky that I projected my dissatisfaction on the world and found people to fight against rather than internalizing the injury.
“Emotionally immature parents fear genuine emotion and pull back from emotional closeness. They use coping mechanisms that resist reality rather than dealing with it. They don’t welcome self-reflection, so they rarely accept blame or apologize.”– Lindsey C. Gibson (2016), psychologist
I’ll be 70 next month and I’m still nursing childhood injuries from my neglectful parents. They were no more aware of their neglect than I was of their being neglectful. And in the decades since my 12th year I gained little insight into the nature of their neglect of how that neglect affected me.
I must give credit to my therapy clients for showing me the pattern of unresolved self-doubt that always leads back to childhood. This does not answer my questions, nor will it answer yours, but it told me where to look. All paths of unfulfilled meaning and self-doubt lead to the nameless past that seems to contain no memories, the time before your head, heart, spirit, and body formed an independent person.
To revisit and revise your past will sound painful and unappealing, but I assure you that it is not. The rewards are quick to be found and, until you do go back, your way forward in life and purpose will not manifest. It’s that important. You must go back and fix yourself. You cannot imagine how much better things will be.
“I’ve been married for 5 years now, and, in the past, whenever my husband would go into a rage, I would feel like I’m being yelled at by my narcissistic mother, and I would freeze. But I’ve learned that my husband (and mother) is the fearful child, and I’m the adult who can assert herself to be respected. In other words, I don’t have to remain in a relationship where the other person feels out of control and resorts to yelling. Therapy has truly helped.” — a comment linked to a YouTube video titled “ Why Some Adults Can’t Act Their Age.”
References
Almeida, F., Ribeiro, P, and Moreira, D (2019 Sep 27). “Immature Personality Disorder: Contribution to the Definition of this Personality.” Clinical Neuroscience & Neurological Research 2 (2). https://comum.rcaap.pt/bitstream/10400.26/33844/1/Immature%20Personality%20Disorder%20Contribution%20to%20the%20Definition%20of%20this%20Personality.pdf
French, D. (2025 Dec 14). “What Happens if You Refuse to Recognize That We Are in a Death Spiral.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/14/opinion/maga-right-wing-young-voters.html
Gibson, L. P. (2016). Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents. Tantor Media, Inc. https://ia600505.us.archive.org/3/items/1570719797-658/1570719797-658.pdf
Heitler, S. (2016 Mar 4). “Can You Spot 10 Signs of a Childish Adult?” Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/resolution-not-conflict/201603/can-you-spot-10-signs-childish-adult
Hutchinson, T. S. (2022 Mar 2) “Spotting Emotional Immaturity in High-Conflict Personalities.” Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-pulse-mental-health/202203/spotting-emotional-immaturity-in-high-conflict-personalities
Lee, A. (2025). “William Golding’s Island of Savagery.” History Today 75 (12). https://www.historytoday.com/archive/portrait-author-historian/william-goldings-island-savagery
Martin, J. (2025), “The President Who Never Grew Up.” Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/12/04/trump-presidency-child-renovations-entertainment-attention-00676183
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