Emotional Maturity After Emotional Abuse: Why It Can Feel Impossible and How to Start Reclaiming It
Emotional maturity appears natural to some people, like they don’t even have to try to be cool as a cucumber during an argument, and easily make connections with others like they’ve never even heard of insecurity. While it may be easy for some, it’s not so easy for others. For someone who’s experienced emotional abuse, complex trauma, or relational trauma, emotional maturity can feel like a foreign language.
Before we dive into why, let’s talk about what emotional abuse, complex trauma, and relational trauma mean. These words are discussed often on the internet (and I’m glad these issues are being more openly discussed to help people feel validated and less alone), but they aren’t always defined. Emotional abuse refers to patterns of behavior where someone consistently undermines your sense of self, manipulates your feelings, or uses fear, shame, or guilt to control you. This can include gaslighting, belittling, withholding affection, or expecting you to constantly meet another’s needs while dismissing your own.
Emotional abuse often leads to relational and complex trauma. Relational trauma is a broader category that captures experiences where your trust, safety, or attachment in relationships has been repeatedly violated. It can be subtle, like growing up with unpredictable emotional availability, or extreme, like ongoing neglect or exploitation. Complex trauma refers to exposure to multiple, chronic, or prolonged traumatic events—often of an interpersonal nature—typically occurring during critical developmental periods such as childhood. Unlike a single traumatic event (like an accident or natural disaster), complex trauma usually involves repeated experiences of abuse, neglect, or relational harm, often from caregivers or other trusted figures.
Emotional abuse and relational and complex trauma leave deep imprints on the nervous system, shaping how you experience yourself, others, and even basic human connection. And here’s the thing: the way we were raised created the blueprint for how we interact with others and relate to ourselves as adults (and these blueprints aren’t always so healthy). For example, if we were raised to hide our emotions because they’re too much for others, we may find ourselves struggling to ask for help or be vulernable with others.
With that context, let’s explore what emotional maturity can look like—and why each aspect can be profoundly challenging if you’ve experienced emotional abuse or relational trauma. My hope is that these examples will help you feel less alone.
1. Allowing Imbalances in the Relationship
Healthy relationships aren’t always perfectly equal. Sometimes one person gives more energy, attention, or support than the other, and that’s okay. Emotional maturity allows for these natural fluctuations without judgment or resentment.
For someone who’s been exploited or taken advantage of, this can feel impossible. If your survival depended on carefully measuring who gave what and when, letting go of that tally can trigger intense anxiety. You may fear being used again, or feel a compulsion to “correct” imbalances immediately. Learning to sit with temporary inequities without assuming the worst is a radical act of reclaiming safety and trust.
2. Assuming Best Intentions in Others
Part of emotional maturity is giving people the benefit of the doubt, assuming they’re doing the best they can in a given moment.
For trauma survivors, however, this can feel like a betrayal of reality. Experiencing manipulation, cruelty, or outright harm teaches your nervous system that people are often unsafe. Assuming best intentions can trigger hypervigilance or panic, because your body is wired to anticipate harm rather than generosity. Yet with time and careful practice, noticing the difference between past experiences and present reality becomes possible… and it’s profoundly liberating.
3. Not Keeping a Tally
Mature relationships aren’t about keeping score. Emotional maturity allows you to give and receive without constant calculations of who “owes” what.
But if someone has consistently kept track of your mistakes, used your actions against you, or weaponized your behaviors, this is incredibly hard. Survivors often carry invisible scoreboards, keeping count of how much they and the other person have given to protect themselves from being exploited again, or to avoid getting in trouble for not giving enough. Learning to let go of the tallying habit isn’t about forgetting past harm; it’s about creating space to engage with relationships without constant fear.
4. Understanding Someone Else’s Point of View
Empathy and perspective-taking are central to emotional maturity. Seeing the world through someone else’s eyes helps relationships feel more flexible, collaborative, and safe.
However, if you grew up in environments where no one made an effort to understand you, attempting to understand others can feel like betraying yourself or forgetting your own experiences. It can trigger self-doubt or feel like comfirmation that you’re inherently wrong or bad, as your nervous system questions whether this is “safe.”
You also may simply not know how to see someone else’s POV if it wasn’t modeled to you as a child. If your caregivers automatically doubted you and questioned your perspective without getting curious or hearing you out, then naturally you probably learned to do the same thing with others. Because what was modeled to you was being right at all costs, not creating a safe space where all parties are heard.
5. Communicating Clearly and Directly
Direct communication is often praised as a hallmark of maturity: stating needs, sharing feelings, and asking for what you want. Sounds simple, right? But for many of us, it isn’t natural or straightforward.
For someone trained to read minds, anticipate others’ moods, or avoid conflict to stay safe, speaking clearly can be terrifying. Emotional abuse teaches that saying what you need can provoke anger, shame, or abandonment. Practicing direct communication becomes a nervous system exercise: allowing the fear and discomfort to be there as you choose to try out speaking up and telling your truth.
6. Giving Grace and Allowing Room for Imperfection
Emotional maturity means letting people make mistakes without overreacting. It’s about giving grace to others and to yourself (though there are of course times where this isn’t appropriate).
For survivors of emotional abuse, this can feel counterintuitive. You may have been held to impossibly high standards, harshly judged, or shamed for mistakes. And without self-compassion, it’s damn near impossible to find compassion for others. Self-compassion is a difficult but important part of healing. It’s a conscious choice to dismantle internalized criticism, go against the way you were raised, and find safety in softness and understanding towards yourself, and then to others.
7. Allowing Others to Live Differently Without Judgment
Emotional maturity also involves accepting that others may live in ways you don’t fully understand or agree with, and doing so without judgment.
If your uniqueness was ridiculed, criticized, or punished, this can feel threatening. You may unconsciously enforce rules, moral standards, or ways of being on others to recreate a sense of safety. Learning to tolerate difference, and even celebrate it, is an essential part of reclaiming freedom in relationships.
8. Not Jumping to Fix Someone Else’s Feelings
Mature relationships allow space for emotions to exist. You don’t need to immediately fix someone’s sadness, anger, or disappointment.
For those raised in environments where your feelings were ignored, dismissed, or forced into “solutions,” this is extremely hard. Trauma teaches that feelings are dangerous, messy, or wrong. Allowing others (and yourself) to feel without pressure to fix is a subtle but powerful form of emotional maturity. It signals that emotions are valid and manageable, rather than inherently threatening.
9. Saying Sorry When You Mess Up
Finally, emotional maturity includes owning your mistakes and apologizing when appropriate.
If you were punished for small errors or conditioned to hide mistakes to avoid shame or retaliation, saying sorry can feel unsafe. Trauma can teach that admitting fault leads to punishment, anger and rage, or rejection. You have to learn that not everyone lacks compassion or capacity for imperfection like your caregivers, and that some people even appreciate apologies and feel closer to you because of it. It can feel scary at first, but ultimately will t’s a step toward authentic connection.
Why Emotional Maturity Is Hard After Trauma
All of these examples highlight a core truth: emotional maturity is not simply about being “nice” or “grown up.” For trauma survivors, it is a radical act of nervous system retraining. As you reparent yourself, you create a whole new blueprint for how to relate to others in a healthy way. The very patterns that define healthy maturity—empathy, grace, patience, honesty, and flexibility—are often the exact skills that trauma interfered with developing in safe ways.
Even within mental health spaces, emotional abuse and relational trauma can be minimized or misunderstood. Survivors may hear messages like “just set boundaries” or “stop overreacting,” without recognition of the lifelong effects of manipulation, neglect, and betrayal. The result is often shame, confusion, and a sense of failure, as if your struggle with emotional maturity is a personal flaw, rather than a normal response to abnormal experiences.
Steps Toward Reclaiming Emotional Maturity
Rebuilding emotional maturity is a gradual, often messy process. It involves both internal work and relational experimentation. Here are some guiding principles:
Self-awareness: Begin by noticing patterns of hypervigilance, fear, or over-responsibility without judgment. Awareness is the first step in rewiring nervous system responses.
Boundaries: Create safety by practicing saying no, asking for needs to be met, and protecting yourself from manipulative behaviors.
Gradual exposure: Practice small acts of trust, empathy, and flexibility in safe relationships. Each success retrains the nervous system.
Self-compassion: Recognize that struggle doesn’t equal failure. Your nervous system is learning to navigate safety after repeated violations.
Guided support: Working with a therapist trained in trauma and relational dynamics provides both structure and safety as you experiment with emotional maturity in real-time.
How I Support Survivors
I’m Martha Carter, a licensed therapist providing virtual services in Colorado. I specialize in helping people who have experienced emotional abuse, relational trauma, and chronic patterns of self-abandonment reconnect with their authentic selves. My approach is somatic and neurobiology-informed, meaning we work not just with thoughts and behaviors, but with the body’s nervous system, the part of you that remembers trauma even when your mind tries to move on.
Through immersive therapy sessions (aka extended sessions starting at 90 minutes), we dive deep into the ways your nervous system has adapted to unsafe environments. We explore patterns like over-responsibility, fear of judgment, or difficulty assuming others’ good intentions, and gradually practice new ways of being that feel safe and sustainable. This work is designed to help you develop emotional maturity, not as an abstract goal, but as a lived, embodied experience where you can trust yourself, your feelings, and your connections with others. By doing longer sessions instead of weekly hour-long sessions, you can save both time and money by healing faster.
Healing after emotional abuse and relational trauma isn’t quick or easy, but it is possible. With patience, practice, and the right support, clear communication, perspective-taking, and compassion,can become not just attainable, but deeply fulfilling. You can reclaim relationships that feel safe and nourishing, and most importantly, a sense of self that feels whole.
About the Author: Therapy Colorado Springs
Martha Carter is a licensed therapist providing virtual services in Colorado. She is trauma-informed and trained in somatic, neurobiology-based modalities to help people with all types of trauma and chronic pain heal from the inside out.
(Colorado residents only)
