Emotional maturity doesn't mean emotional immunity

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Happy Sunday & thank you for opening this week’s #TheLifeofJLOWE newsletter!

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms reading today’s newsletter, and especially to my own mummy and grandmas who I’m so incredibly lucky to have around to celebrate them another year. 💝 

Today my (not-so-little) brother also graduates from college (he doesn’t read my newsletter) so congrats to him and to all the other readers out there who are graduating this 2025 grad season too! 🎓

Emotional maturity doesn’t mean emotional immunity

Recently I went on a walk and the quote above came to mind — emotional maturity doesn’t mean emotional immunity.

I talked a bit about something similar in my newsletter a few weeks ago, but didn’t have the words to summarise succinctly exactly what I was feeling. It was this feeling of frustration from being unable to connect your own emotional growth with someone else’s emotional stagnancy, and I discussed ensuring that you only give of yourself to others what they’re ready to receive.

For me, although it’s now pretty self-explanatory, the quote above means that just because you’ve done the work to be able to process your emotions, regulate your emotions and your responses to various emotions, it doesn’t make you immune to actually feeling them.

If someone pisses you off, gets on your nerves or even intentionally tries to provoke you, with a certain level of emotional maturity, you’re able to regulate your response and not lash out, argue or express the reaction that they’re trying to illicit.

You’re able to emotionally regulate yourself in the moment, whether through deep breaths or even just walking away from the situation altogether, but you might not be able to actually get the feeling off your chest right away.

And that’s because you’re not immune to feeling. You’re not immune to your emotions. And you never will be.

It’s not about never getting upset, but rather about handling yourself when you actually do.

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Lack of Emotional Immunity is a Blessing in Disguise

Honestly though, that’s what I think the whole point of emotional intelligence is. It’s to be able to live life and experience every human emotion fully and give each one space. It’s to not live in fear of sadness, anger or grief, but to live in the fullness of our ability to experience those different states of being despite what negative or positive connotations society has placed on them.

When I think about the fact that we’re not immune to our emotions, I’m grateful. I’m grateful that I can be pissed off, annoyed, sad, happy, excited, full of love and everything in between.

I’m grateful too, for the fact that I can learn how to handle each of those emotions and respond to them in a way that doesn’t set me back but helps me to grow, despite still having to — at times — endure through them. 

There’s a ton of power in being able to be present in how you’re feeling, whether you’re feeling a “positive” or “negative'“ emotion, so that you can later reflect on why you were feeling that way, and to evaluate your responses (and potential responses) in any given situation.

It allows you to accept where you went wrong and subsequently approach others (and yourself) with more compassion in future interactions. It allows you to take each experience of an emotion as a lesson and as a tool to understanding how to build better human interactions with one another.

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Conclusion

Feeling your emotions fully is a fundamental part of being human. No matter how well you learn to respond to different emotions, you’ll never be immune from actually feeling them. 

Emotional maturity doesn’t mean never getting upset. Emotional maturity doesn’t mean never feeling sad.

Emotional maturity doesn’t mean always feeling happy and it doesn’t mean being able to brush your emotions off whenever they come up.

It means not being afraid to feel. It means being able to regulate your responses when they arise. 

Emotional maturity doesn’t mean emotional immunity. And that’s a blessing in disguise not to be forgotten.

Until next Sunday,

Justin