My unborn child is very active these days. I never realised that him wiggling in the right places could be so ticklish. It certainly focuses the mind on becoming a parent

I’m the kind of person who tries to make epic steps feel more manageable by reading about them. I know that no book can tell you how things will actually be but it does help fill in time before I can actually get on with getting to know our son better and figuring out our own way through!

Some of my reading got me thinking about the word immature and the way we use it. It was a word I first came across in year five when I was about nine. At that point I thought that being mature meant the same as being good while immature behaviour was the posh grown up way of saying naughty behaviour just as our head wanted us to use the posh and grown up word urine in place of the word pee now.

It’s that judgemental aspect that I’ve been thinking about. Studying developmental psychology I think I did an essay about how brain development related to our ability to perform cognitive tasks. I remember a number of examples where research initially suggested that children of a certain age were not able to understand a concept but later research had shown that they could if the question was presented differently. However the message remained that there are things humans can do with a mature brain that young children whose brain’s are maturing are not yet able to do however much they want to.

I came across an article on Facebook recently comparing when parents in a survey expected their children to be able to do things like sharing and turn taking and controlling their impulses compared to when science currently suggested that the average child had matured their brain enough to achieve this. Parents expected these things younger than science and the article suggested that these unrealistic expectations could well lead to conflict.

This turns my first definition of immature behaviour completely around. Here while the behaviour may not be good the speaker would be saying ‘I understand that this is something that you are doing because you haven’t got a mature enough brain and body to avoid it yet.’ In that case telling someone off for behaving in an immature way would make no more sense than telling them off for not being tall enough to reach a shelf yet. However this didn’t seem quite right either.

During my reading I came across material from The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential. Their work with brain injured children led them to reject the idea that developmental milestones occur when a child reaches a particular age as though an alarm clock has gone off. Instead they found that brains grow by use. This means that a newborn who has had many experiences of changing light levels will develop a mature reflex to adjust their pupil sooner than one who has had this opportunity less often. They also mentioned how an assessor might be surprised by how much a reflex that had previously been assessed as perfect could still improve over the next month.

What struck me most about their material is that maturity is divided into many many different areas and can vary between them even in babies without brain injury. They also note how performance on an assessment of any of these measures of neurological maturity will be very different if the baby is tired or rested, hungry or comfortable, well or ill etc.

This really struck me because of my experience with mental health professionals who often struggled with the variation in how I was coping. “How can you complete two degrees but not be able to understand why you feel the way you do.” How can you talk to me so rationally now when you couldn’t sooth yourself and make sense instead of trying to hurt yourself just then.” “How can you have done the things you’ve done when you seem to have so much insight now.”

The most helpful therapy I have had involved imagining myself in parts. The therapist I worked with came from a background of family systems therapy. In many sessions we were able to work with parts of me while also holding on to my central self who was able to care for these parts and know what they needed. However this was not initially true when we worked with very young parts of me from when I was first experiencing physical and sexual abuse as a two and three year old.

What really worked for me was my therapist explaining that the little girl I had been was about the same age as her grandson and reminding me of how young my niece had seemed at that age. When I remember things at that time and imagine being there I feel grown up. In fact in all my memories I feel totally mature and grown up because I was the most grown up I had ever been at that time. My therapist assured her that in her seventies she could look on herself as a 30 year old and see ways in which she was not as mature as she is now too. It took a lot of time but I was able to move on from blaming myself for not taking care of myself then and later.

However these therapy sessions had other really important aspects for me. In the times when we looked at those memories and that part of me my therapist was initially able to respond to that little girl. For me a big issue had been that I had been unable to explain what was happening and although I had tried to talk to adults about it they had not understood and told me I just had to accept it ‘because that is just the way he plays.’ The experience of telling someone and in that childish way and having them respond as though I was still that child and hold me as I cried and became beside myself was very powerful. Afterwards we were able to bring me back to a place where I felt mature and able to leave and cope with the adult world.

Touch was a very important part of this process. I feel worried even saying that as I know that safeguarding is a very important issue. However for me it was so important. In previous many of my previous attempts at therapy behaving like a mature adult in the session had been very important. This included sitting on a chair for the session and not touching anyone and certainly not cuddling anything although imagining a pet or cuddly toy was all right. The skills to practice felt as though they were designed to help me pass as ‘a normal adult’ while coping with emotions that felt like a small child’s when these memories were triggered. It turned out that I couldn’t even talk about these memories while trying to look mature.

For me things moved forward hugely when my therapist suggested that I could sit on the floor if I wanted. Many of the sessions where I worked on the experience of that little girl happened with me literally sitting at her feet. We both always sort permission for touch but with that given pats on the shoulder, holding my hand and stroking my hair were a huge part of finding my way through those memories. Moving around helped too.

The session that now means most to me happened when I was in the middle of moving house. I arrived mentally and physically exhausted and distressed from experiencing flashbacks with strong urges to self harm. All in all a state in which therapists who had seen me in hospital might well have cancelled the session. I couldn’t actually get out a coherent sentence and she commented that I seemed to be in a very young place. She talked a little about limbic resonance and how a calm parent can use it to help their child. I then lay on my side on the floor and she did the same behind me resting an arm over me and we stayed there for forty minutes before going through our usual system for coming out of the session.

I left feeling calmer more able to cope and able to sleep. It also finally made sense of all the sheets of coping strategies and self sooth kits that I had tried to work on in the past. The approach I’d taken to cope with this kind of feeling as a small child had been self harm. That path had used and grown over many years. I had not really used any other path for feeling better, the first step was to hurt myself to get to a place where I could relate to other people without being too much for them. From that session I was finally able to see another way.

It’s a path that’s immature but because I’ve kept using it it’s stronger now two years later. Like a young babies reflexes how well I can do it depends on how I am. There are times when I can get through a period of distress using self soothing techniques because I can now clearly picture what I am expecting them to do. Other times I need to align myself with the cats or my husband even if they are asleep or phone someone. Other times I’m not coping so well and it takes my husband actually holding me close to help me through. There are still occasional times when my response is still the pathway that I grew and strengthened all those years.

It’s over a year since that therapist died of cancer. I don’t know exactly why she was able to work with me in that way but I’m so grateful that she did. Because of that work I am conscious of some of the beliefs about the world that I built in that time. There are times I still want to believe that if I am completely good bad things won’t happen. Knowing that for the little girl I was this was better than the terror of having no power in a situation where I was being hurt helps me figure out what’s going on when it comes up now. The same is true when I feel I’m being told to accept things that are not OK.

It’s true that there are aspects of my way of coping that are more immature than others. I believe that that is true to some extent of everyone but very hard to hear if you have grown up seeing being mature as being good. It turned out for me that being told that there were huge variations was not enough. I needed, and sometimes still need, the chance to function at the level of my less mature areas to be able to move forward.

Needing to address things that happened so young was a reason I was given for not being able to do therapy in the NHS. I was very lucky to find the money for private therapy and a person with wide life experience and the confidence and skill to work with me in both my immature and mature places.

At the end of our sessions we would always hug and she would say ‘well done that woman.’ It reminded me that connection is a really important thing for humans of all ages and sent me out into the world wanting to be with people with all their different aspects which interact with ours.