
Emotional maturity is the foundation of healing, yet trauma, manipulation, and survival strategies can keep us trapped in immature coping patterns.
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Hello. Welcome to the show. This is Emotional Badass, where moxie meets mindful. I'm your host, Nikki Eisenhower, life coach and psychotherapist. And on today's episode, I want to get into maturity. Hello, y'.
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So I think there are two major issues that are affecting highly sensitive people at nearly every turn, even if you never thought of these as the two main issues. But I do see these as some of the main issues that we're living through and dealing with as a society and as individuals in this particular timeline we find ourselves in. The two issues are maturity and manipulation. I think these two things are at the root of so much of our internal personal struggle and so much of our external struggle in how we relate to the world and to each other. I just don't know how we keep moving forward as a society and within ourselves as people if we don't learn to name and acknowledge how manipulation and maturity are, or immaturity, rather, are primary human issues found throughout every socioeconomic class, every intelligence level and variation, every race, every culture, every system ever made by man, from church to government to medicine, and in how we relate to ourselves. Lots of highly sensitive people have asked me over the years to define what a safe, healthy person is in terms of ourselves. How do we become remain a safe, healthy person for ourselves and for each other? And how do we identify who's actually safe and healthy for us to invest in? My answer is typically that a safe person is one who understands and has a high moral compass towards maturity and honesty, inwardly and outwardly. I've worked with abuse and neglect recovery and addiction recovery for 19 years. Abuse and addiction in our early lives, y'. All, These are two things that can traumatically stunt the development of emotional and mental maturation. It can also both of these things. Addiction and trauma. And typically, addiction can follow trauma as we try to soothe our harried nervous systems. But trauma and or addiction incentivizes mistruth and manipulation as survival strategies. In homes where there's a lot of chaos or a lot of abuse, we learn to lie. We learn to sweep things under the rug. We learn to hide things. We learn to deal in half truths and mistruths. To survive, I would sweep things under the rug to try to make sure that attention didn't come to me. Because if attention came to me, it was typically bad attention. So if we've learned some survival strategies that are more immature than mature, we can work on that. This may be the answer to the next question. I get a lot. What actually is healing like what is it like? I know I'm supposed to do it, but what is it? We all understand healing. If we get a cut on our arm, we understand that it's a process of our bodies healing, growing back together, filling in that cut with more skin, maybe scar tissue that's actually stronger than the original tissue. We understand that kind of physical healing. We can see it, we can feel it, we can look at it, we can touch it. When it comes to our emotional sides, our mental relationship with ourselves, what healing is, is maturation actually maturing our parts that are stunted because of trauma or family of origin issues or circumstance. Or maybe we stumbled into addiction without even a whole lot of trauma first. Maturation and authenticity, y'. All, These are the things that aid our nervous systems to navigate the world with healthier boundaries and more peace. We can't have boundaries if we don't mature into boundaries, work. We can't have peace if we don't mature from a sort of middle school adolescent drama. These are the two main things that I have spent years and years teaching highly sensitive people and survivors as the foundation of bettering their lives. Boundaries and peace. And what underlines both of those things is maturity. Maybe, just maybe, healing is maturing and growing and developing our parts that have been underdeveloped. Whatever the reason, now, when it comes to maturity, something has changed in my work in the last six or so years. Something that never happened in the decade before in my work. This is my 19th year in mental health, but for the last six years or so, I've had parents, and I mean good parents, available, lovely, imperfect parent, admitting to me like Catholics confess to priests, in a state of contrition. I don't know how to relate to my kid. It's like he or she is a decade younger than I was at the same age. And it weirds me out. I don't know what to do with it. This is also something child free people have also acknowledged. I've also had almost anyone that works in high school or college education acknowledge the same thing, asking me why younger people feel so much younger than they ever used to. I've also listened to hiring managers the last few years across the entire country, and they have told me stories of young adults laying under desks at work to take naps. Even on days when everyone is told to be on your toes, the big boss will be here today. I've heard many recountings of young adults in the workforce having a lot of difficulty or plain out refusal to understand or accept that work is Work and not a therapy space. Often thinking that any and every struggle or discomfort is deserving of a half day or a full day off. And many who are in public facing roles are confused by management giving direction. Like, hey, this needs to be a political free zone or it's inappropriate to meet and greet people at your work by sharing a mental health diagnosis that there is a time and a place and work is not the time and place to share that aspect of yourself. Professionalism requires some boundaries between work and personal life, y'.
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And this is increasingly a wild idea to people in the workforce. This is strange that many are confused by what used to be totally normal and typical boundaries. Y' all have heard me say for years that our pendulums swing. So in this way we've seen maybe so much work life separation that we now have a blurring of boundaries in work and personal life. And hopefully, hopefully I'm crossing my fingers as I say that we can work individually and then as a society to get more balanced, to have reasonable boundaries between work and home life, reasonable boundaries between me, where I start and stop and where you start and stop, where we can balance our personal with our professional. There's also a struggle in the west right now. There are a lot of desires to be seen as a myriad of various victim. And this can make our work environments more like a dueling of victim identities than a place where work gets done. Maturity is not so spoken of in mental health. My deduction is that I can look and really see that. There was a great push in the 90s and the 2000s when I was in school to become a counselor. Great big push to become evidence based and basically validate psychology as more of a harder science instead of the soft science. Psychology has always had the reputation of. It's very clear to me that there's so much in our human emotion, there's so much in our maturation process that is very tricky, if not impossible to isolate and run through the scientific method. I am far from anti science. I love science. I'm just very unsure that if our current science is bought or if it's honoring this actual scientific method that made a science so pure for so long. I think maybe we've left that and there's a lot that's murky. For every study anybody can present me with each other. Even the best science, the most solid science, good science, I see a hundred different things that would influence that study that aren't studied. Where does that leave us? Emotion, maturity, manipulation, these are such complex forces, so complex to Study so complex to understand. These are forces that in any present moment are playing on our histories, on our past. Also incorporating fears of the future all at the same time. Let's think about an emotion like sadness. Check in with yourself on the last time you were sad. How often are we just purely sad if we were to have scientists study sadness? The last time I was sad, I was also disappointed. I was also frustrated. I felt hopeless, confused, upset, overwhelmed, shocked, taken aback. To study something like sadness, something that a 2 year old can start to understand. I'm sad, somebody's crying, they're sad. So simple and yet so complex sadness. So much there than just studying one little thing like sadness. Our past experiences and our learning as well as our personalities, our temperaments, various intelligence levels as well as our generalized stress levels at the time, our environments, even our hydration levels and hunger levels, y'. All, our relationships, our work satisfaction, our support networks. So much goes into our feelings and our thoughts in any given moment and our feelings and our thoughts are what shape our processes and our processes internally become our expression externally and we either express as more mature or as more immature in any one given moment. Maturity and manipulation are very important for us to understand as highly sensitive people. We need to understand these forces within ourselves and then in relation to each other. Another complexity if you will. I love my Factor meals. Their convenience, their ease, their tastiness. And I think you're going to love them too. As my husband travels back and forth to another state to help his mom, I'm ordering boxes of Factor to help me stay on task and not be stressed out with having to come up with meals for Juan while I handle everything else in our house. So not only is Factor tasty and nutritious and helpful and all offer chef prepped meals that are dietitian approved and delivered right to my door. Now it's actually really helping me stay grounded and give myself proper nutrition and ease while we're managing the real life things that happen when we are grieving and we've lost someone. So eat smart@factor meals.com emotional50 off and use code EMOTIONAL50OFF to get 50% off your first box plus free breakfast for a year y'.
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I love my Air Doctor air purifiers. We have one in the bedroom that we run every single night. I cannot express to you how much you can actually walk into the room and feel that the air is clean. Air Doctor is the award winning air purifier that eliminates 99.99% of dangerous contaminants like allergens, virus, viruses, smoke, gases, mold, spores and more. Head to airdoctorpro.com and use code badass to get up to $300 off today. Air Doctor comes with a 30 day money back guarantee plus a three year warranty. That's an $84 value for free. So if you try it and you don't like it, you can send it back. Air Doctor makes it easy. Get this exclusive podcast only offer now at airdoctorpro.com a I r-o c t o r p r o.com using promo code Badass. If we don't understand maturity and manipulation, then maturity and manipulation are the very things that get swept under the collective societal rug. And in my professional opinion, this is where a lot of dysfunction is able to hide in our society as well as in our homes. There are rugs everywhere, y'.
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Now, many highly sensitive people and trauma survivors tell me, Nikki, I was born an old soul. I would raise my hand and go, hey, I'm an old soul too. And that suggests to me that we do sense maturity, even if it's difficult to put into words or to name what it is that gives us a sense of maturity so that we can also understand and explore what gives us a sense of immaturity. One of the problems in discussing maturity is that in the west, it's almost evolved into an insult. Like, it's an insult if I were to look at someone and go, oh my God, you're so immature. And this is in all of our subconscious, all of our subconscious. So let me bring it to consciousness where we can work with it by acknowledging it. I'm not insulting anyone when I say someone may be immature. That's not a way to dismiss somebody. That's not a way to stroke our own egos and go, well, if you're so immature, I am Captain Mature. That's our egos getting involved into it. A very immature part of ourselves. If you feel stung in recognition as I go through what actually makes us more mature or more immature, and you recognize, oh my goodness, I have parts that really are struggling with some immaturity, please Shake off that sting and receive my offer. This is an offering. New information is an offer. You're going to hear me talk about that later on in the information of this episode. Maturing is good. It brings peace. It brings a quieter mind. It helps us navigate the upsetting with far less upset. Doesn't that sound like getting very close to a superpower? Maturity helps us learn how to accept or reject so many invitations from the universe that invite us to overreact, to act out that our younger parts jump on impulsively emoting, impulsively behaving in ways that aren't connected to our best thinking or our maturity. Part of maturation is accepting to that you are responsible for all that you do in this life and all that you don't do. And there is a piece, at first glance, might scare our younger parts, our inner parts, but there's a piece the more that I embrace. I really am responsible for all of it. Everything I do, everything I don't do, every hard earned lesson learned and every lesson shirked, only for me to have to face again. I responsible for all of that. That's my real superpower, is taking that responsibility. We're going to break down what maturity actually is, which is going to help you identify what it isn't. Maturity, like consciousness, like love, can't be touched. I can't point to it. It's not a structure like a brain or a heart or a hand. It's not like an appendix that can be there or can be taken out. Maturity is intangible. All of us who stay alive will age. All, Every single one of us. We will get older if we stay alive, but not everyone gets more mature. Even that is a thought that comes from maturity. The understanding that, oh my goodness, we all may age, but not all of us accept wisdom and live from it. The good news, if we feel a little immature in some of our parts, is that we can absolutely mature ourselves. What a natural thing to mature. If we only allow it and we don't fight it. We can cultivate more wisdom, if only we are willing. So where do we find this maturity that we can't touch, we can't point to, we can't operate on? Well, we can feel it, can't we? We can observe maturity in demonstration. Ours and other people, if they are to show us maturity in action, that's where we see it. We actually see it in human action. And life has this funny way of inviting us again and again and again to have our maturity tested, to have our coping strategies, our resiliency and tested. And each time we take one of those invitations, we each either pass or fail. And that pass or that fail then offers another invitation. We are invited to grow. We're also invited to regress. We're invited to stay the same or to evolve. That's what growth offers us when we choose it. Evolution. Beyond. I want to be beyond the way that five year old Nikki operated, the concepts that she understood in the world. I want to be beyond what 10 year old Nikki knew as her best strategies for life. Isn't that a beautiful thing when we allow it? I don't think anybody gets to 21 or 25 or 30 or 35 and goes, well, I'm done maturing. I know it all. Someone check that box. I'm done. That sounds super ridiculous. Every day we have an opportunity to meet ourselves with maturity. Let's break down what that actually is. So these are some qualities, if you will, that typically prove or show that maturation maturity is an undertaking is happening. Number one, emotional regulation. Now stay with me if you have trouble emotionally regulating right now. But maturity means emotional regulation. So a mature person can recognize, understand and manage their emotions, especially in stressful situations. They're less likely to react impulsively. They're less likely to let their emotions be the controllers of their behaviors, their actions. Instead, maturity tends to respond thoughtfully even when things are difficult. Now, people with post traumatic stress symptoms, which are a lot of you listening, let me explain for you and to you by sharing some of my story. For many years, and I didn't understand this, why it was happening. I understand it now looking back and I understand it from my work, being able to see this very same thing in other people's lives for so many years. But for many years my mind absolutely possessed the maturity to understand fully that it was my job to manage my emotions, no matter the stress level. But what I had to understand was that my body, my Nicky body did not process or take into account what my mind knew in the moment of my body getting triggered. See all the trauma I grew up with, all the unsafety in my own home that I grew up with. Not having a soft place to fall, having a lot of hardship, a lot of abandonment, a lot of pain, a lot of violation and betrayal. My body learned in an attempt to take care of me that it needed to just react, it needed to freeze sometimes, it needed to fight sometimes and it needed to fly sometimes, it needed to run. Because my body learned that almost every day of my development. Here I am as an adult, understanding in My mind what it is to regulate my emotions, but being unable to do so in the moment of getting triggered, my body would react in fight or flight. Even when my mind knew that conflict was reasonably safe, or if my mind knew that whatever stressor I was facing could and would get handled, it was figureoutable. That was the split, that was the dissociation in my post traumatic stress symptoms, that my nervous system was very much separated from that logic in my mind. And my nervous system was so well intentioned, it wasn't trying to screw me over and make me look immature, make me feel immature and ridiculous at times. It really wasn't trying to do that to me. My nervous system was doing its best effort to try to protect me by sending me into fight or flight, but it actually was over protecting me, making me appear immature, which was very confusing, very embarrassing. To have a lot of maturity born an old soul, a lot of maturity in my mind available to me, but my body reacting in a way that felt outside of my control. Someone I've never heard mention in mental health ever, is an acknowledgment that a panic attack in an adult y', all, and I don't mean upset or discomfort. I don't mean the mean the way that it has become normal in our common vernacular to go, oh my goodness, I didn't like that I'm so triggered. That's not what I mean. I mean an actual real panic on an adult sized body that is hard to watch, y'.
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It's hard to watch and experience if it's happening to you, it's hard to be an adult outside of that, watching that happen for somebody else. Because the closest thing that a panic attack looks like, it looks like a toddler having a fit. This felt like such a betrayal of my own body, my own systems after so much trauma, betrayal from my family. And the weight of that was the thing that if anything, got me close to really thinking about suicide and considering it. It was this shame. That's why I'm naming it today. Because if one of you out there can hear me and understand that your body is trying to protect you, and I'm so sorry for the embarrassment of that because you feel out of control, like a toddler out of control when all you want is control and all you wanted when you were little wasn't a reasonable sense of safety and control, I suspect this is an underlying cause for a whole lot of suicidal ideation and then behavior towards that end. We're going to talk in the Patreon. This Year on one of the live streams about suicide more. Somebody's asked me to do that. It's such a tough topic to talk about, but we must. It also felt like a betrayal because my body used so much energy trying to get me to save my life when my life wasn't in danger. It almost looks like somebody trying to swim without water, y'.
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So if this is you right now, please offer some understanding to yourself, some self compassion, that post traumatic stress symptoms are sort of a severing of mind and body and healing is about uniting them and getting them to work together again so that my body can actually hear this wisdom and this logic and respond to it instead of whatever stressor is attempting to trigger me in the moment. A trauma response hijacks us, y'. All, we have to understand this to be able to work with it and on it without this understanding. Highly sensitive people shame and judge themselves way too harshly. We say in post traumatic stress recovery that the amygdala gets hijacked. This part of our brain actually takes over our rationality. We literally cannot think when this happens. And that's by design because if you're chasing me with a hammer to cock me on the head and I stop to go, why is Susie Lu over there chasing me with a hammer? I I'm doinked in the head if I stop to think. So by divine design, I was made to not think during a threat. Too much threat in childhood sets us up to not be reasonably vigilant, but hyper vigilant. It's too much. It's overkill. Let's understand this so we can use our energy to heal it instead of to continue to be in this exhausting loop of triggering. You may be very mature in your mind, but if you have these post traumatic stress symptoms, it's going to take some work to get these two parts communicating, working together again in unison in harmony. It took a while for my brain to believe that I had changed my life enough to be out of danger, that there was a permission and there's still a permission today. There will be for me every day in my life that I am safe enough to feel grounded and calm. And I don't need to be hypervigilant. That helps my system stay calm. If this is you, please go to yoga yesterday and start paying attention to your body the way you would have liked someone to pay attention to you as a child. See if my body got tense as a child, what I really needed, I didn't even know to want it back then. But what I Needed was someone to go. Nikki. Oh my goodness, you seem really tense. What's wrong? Are you okay? So that I could talk through what was going on, so that I could get some adult coping strategy to help me with what was going on. Healing is working on this repair that happens over time between mind and body. We cultivate enough trust and safety in our own selves and in our own lives until our brains can trust that safety and sort of leave the energy that we learned in childhood. Because I can stay more grounded now from this work. Now I can operate from my maturity of mind. My body can listen to it. I was put on this earth sort of pre programmed with an old soul, y'.
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That wisdom is there for me. Trauma just moved me sort of far away from it, so I couldn't hear it, I couldn't activate it. It's why healing is about getting more honest, more authentic with who we actually really are instead of the information that trauma leaves us with. The only thing you really need to successfully be able to work with this is a willingness, willingness to practice and willingness to cultivate some patience. I'll say more about that in a minute. These are deep reasons that I primarily teach boundaries and peace as foundations so that we can create some safe containers to have enough safety to work on repairing this relationship of our own minds to our own bodies and get out of hyper vigilance and just live and thrive instead of survive moment to moment. Here's the second thing I have for you when it comes to maturing self reflection, y', all, self reflection. We all know what that means. It's not always fun, but boy is it necessary. Maturity involves being able to reflect on one's own actions. Our choices, our behaviors, the decisions we've made in the past that are done, that are settled. We have to deal with the consequences now. A mature person will take responsibility for their mistakes. Well, learn from them and use those lessons to grow. If you listen and like this show, you likely have a very strong ability to self reflect, a willingness to do so, maybe even too much. Think of the people in your personal life and world who don't self reflect at all, who don't learn from mistakes, who blame outwardly in refusal to look at their own part or contribution. Codependent people out there raise your hand if you're recovering from codependency. And listen closely. You can only mature yourself. You cannot make someone else mature. You cannot make someone else want to mature. We can explore reflection on the world stage too. I said a few months ago in an episode that Democrats in the US needed to reflect, which is toward learning, growing and yes, maturing. And if the party is to do so, it must reflect. Think about the difference you have felt in your body when a celebrity, let's say, gives one of those public relations company approved apologies that feel pretty empty, contrived, performative instead of from an honest reflection and acknowledgement of a mistake, of a lesson learned. Which one actually resonates with you? Which one is suggestive of real maturity versus sweeping it under the rug and just trying to get away with it? Number three, accountability through radical personal responsibility. This is how we become more mature, y'.
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Accountability. A mature person is accountable for their actions and decisions, both good and bad. So celebrate the wins y'.
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Own your wins, but also own your mess ups. People who lean into a victim mentality sort of only look at their mess ups, but not in a way that learns from self reflection, more in a way that wallows. Mature people own their mistakes and don't blame others when things go wrong. They don't make excuses and they don't pick fights as a distraction from taking responsibility. Be honest with yourself here, y'.
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I had to be very honest and it's uncomfortable to be so honest with ourselves. I certainly understand why people shirk some of these things. It's not comfortable to mature ourselves. It's not comfortable to grow up. It's not comfortable to embrace how flawed we are as humans and really deal with that. I had to be very honest with myself to be able to mature past the response of becoming defensive. Defensiveness is one of the four horsemen, y'.
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The four horsemen are known to kill relationships, and defensiveness is what happens if and when you aren't accountable to yourself. A mature person holds themselves accountable before anyone else has to. If somebody else has to call you to the carpet to make you accountable, you have not been accountable. And if you get defensive in that moment, your immaturity is showing. I had to be honest with myself that I was raised by highly immature narcissistic parents. I had three parents, y'.
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And I mean never ever, ever, ever did I see one of the three people who parented me take accountability for their faults, their mistakes, or full on failures. Which meant I might have been born with an old soul mature programming, very available to me. But I hadn't heard enough old soul mature language or played witness to enough accountability in action to know what accountability was or that I should do it and then how to do it when I felt so buried and burdened. By shame. So from that thousand ton shame, I was supposed to go, hey, I'm wrong. I screwed up. That's really hard to do when your worth is on the ground is a puddle. Now, the other example I had was my grandmother who went out of her way to be so right all the time and never make a mistake that I didn't get a lot of example of seeing her own mistake, she very much suffered. I know she suffered. I know it's part of why she even died of a brain tumor, y'.
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She put so much pressure on herself to be perfect. So in multiple ways, I didn't get a lot of muscle development in how to own a mistake, how to be wrong and still feel worthy. It sounds wildly simple, and it is simple. But that doesn't mean it's easy. It's not easy till we get a whole lot of practice with it, and then it's certainly not comfortable. It's just easier. We get to practice so that we can learn to say, I'm sorry I dropped the ball, or, wow, I really screwed that up, or I own that that was my responsibility and I failed. Or I'm sorry I said I would do that and it didn't get done. That's on me. Or how about, hey, I made a mistake, and I'm doing my best to right that wrong. I hope you can forgive me. Now, this is not only a whole lot easier to do than sit under a billion pounds of shame, but it's like an exhale for my inner psychology. It's an exhale for my inner child who looks at me for safety and security. How are we to trust anyone, even ourselves, if we're playing perfect? By never owning our flaws and our mistakes? It's a play. It's a pretend. I can't trust pretending as a. As a realness, as something solid for me to lean on when I need to lean. If we cannot own the missteps and mistakes and failures that we have over a lifetime, particularly when we are growing and learning something new, evolving, then we won't mature. And maturing is good. None of us have to be perfect. We never had to be perfect. Growth is allowed. Owning mistakes is allowed. So I'm going to pause here, and I'm going to continue this episode as our exclusive Patreon episode, our exclusive episode that only is shown in our communities, y'.
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If you would like to listen to the rest of this episode on if you would like to continue this deep dive into. Into what maturity actually is, then now is your moment. To finally come join the Patreon. Come join at the $5 level. You'll be able to listen to this episode and every other exclusive episode. You'll be able to listen to the public episodes commercial free. Our exclusive episodes have absolutely no ads. You'll come and support me supporting you, supporting getting this show out all over the world. I want to thank these patrons. Part of what you get when you sign up is you get a shout out. So I want to shout out and thank ALM 1178. Thank you so much for taking a risk and a chance and coming to explore our Patreon. As you can hear, you don't have to give your real name, y'.
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I'm going to thank Andre and Nora, Bo B o Beatrice Joy. What a beautiful name. I want to thank Lisa and Brooklyn, Elizabeth, Melody, Karen, Shannon and Stephen, y'.
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Thank you so much. I think of the Patreon and our communities as healthy little corners of the Internet. I love that you can come and pop in and when you need something for you, it's there. You can search the archives of everything we have ever recorded and produced for Emotional Badass in the last seven years. Healing and growth is really about letting ourselves learn almost a whole new language. And you wouldn't expect yourself to learn Italian or Spanish or German overnight and you wouldn't wake up and just expect yourself to know that foreign language. We get to learn. We get to grow. It's a good thing. We can learn any language that was once foreign to us, particularly healthiness, and become our own best supports as we craft and cultivate lives that we love to live, that we get to thrive within. If you're interested in learning more, you can also come get a free trial and just check us out. Patreon.com emotionalbadass Light and love I will see y' all in Patreon to complete this episode and dive even more deeply. And I'll see the rest of you next week in a brand new exclusive episode. Till next time. I'm an emotional badass. You are an emotional badass. And together we are where Moxie meets mindful.
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Podcast: Emotional Badass
Host: Nikki Eisenhauer, M.Ed. LPC, LCDC
Date: February 23, 2025
In this thought-provoking episode, Nikki Eisenhauer explores the critical role of emotional maturity in personal and collective healing, especially for Highly Sensitive People (HSPs) and trauma survivors. She unpacks how maturity and manipulation are foundational forces in our internal and external struggles, discusses the importance of developing boundaries, and provides actionable insights for cultivating greater peace and authenticity in the 21st century.
Timestamp: 00:26 – 03:50
Timestamp: 03:51 – 06:45
Timestamp: 06:45 – 12:30
Timestamp: 12:30 – 14:36
Timestamp: 14:36 – 16:50
Timestamp: 16:50 – 19:30
A. Emotional Regulation
Timestamp: 20:10 – 25:00
B. Self-Reflection
Timestamp: 29:00 – 32:00
C. Accountability and Radical Personal Responsibility Timestamp: 32:01 – 34:50
Timestamp: 35:00 – 39:00
Nikki’s inviting, compassionate tone makes this episode accessible and actionable, especially for HSPs and trauma survivors. She challenges listeners to see maturity as a journey—not a destination—and to embrace accountability, reflection, and regulation as central pillars of growth. The episode masterfully blends personal anecdotes, professional insights, and practical tools for anyone seeking greater emotional health in the modern world.