Emotional Literacy Is Not Emotional Maturity
On avoidance, shame, and the performance of emotional awareness
You meet someone. There is chemistry. It feels intense, playful, and real. For the first time, you decide to date intentionally; you willingly show them not only the shine but also the shadows of your skin, your map of fears and wounds, your triggers. They lean in. They praise your honesty, and the depth feels mutual. Then one day your trauma surfaces. You are not composed; you are just human. And instead of leaning in, they lean back.
If you have ever experienced the anxious–avoidant dynamic, this story may sound familiar. But what interests me is not demonizing either side. After all, we are human; we all carry patterns and conditioning.
What truly interests me is this:
Why has emotional avoidance become so culturally normalized? Why do we continue to label emotional expression as “too much”? And why does vulnerability still feel unsafe when we all claim to value authenticity?
Therapy Language Is Not Emotional Work
We live in a time where psychological vocabulary is everywhere. Attachment theory is mainstream. We know the words: secure, avoidant, anxious, trauma response, triggers, boundaries. But knowing the words is not the same as embodying the work. You can cognitively understand attachment styles, which you might have learned in therapy, and you can even speak with impressive emotional literacy, but still be unable to sit in discomfort when it actually rises.
Emotions live in the body. They are not just concepts.
If you have never learned to experience your own discomfort somatically, to stay with the pressure in your chest, the tension in your throat, the shaking in your hands, then when someone else becomes dysregulated in front of you, your nervous system will default to what it learned in early childhood.
I don’t know about you, but early childhood rarely taught me to hold complexity. As long as no adult had space for my emotions, I learned to hold them alone. As long as vulnerability was unsafe, I learned to withdraw. As long as discomfort was punished, I learned to shut down. This is the hard side of becoming not a “perfectly curated and regulated version of yourself,” but just someone who can feel the feelings and not run from them. It is not just about learning how to hold emotional space; it is more about unlearning your own patterns and building internal safety step by step within, so when the other reacts from their own trigger, you observe and witness not from judgment but from compassion.
We all grow up with those patterns. We call them personality, boundaries, or needing space. But sometimes they are simply avoidance.
When “I Need Space” Is actually Regulation And When It Is just Withdrawal
Needing space can be healthy. Stepping back to regulate is mature. But there is a difference between space taken to process and space taken to escape.
The first one leads to repair; the other leads to distance without accountability. The difference is not in the words. It is in the return. Do you come back willing to reflect? Do you take responsibility for how your nervous system reacted? Do you remain open to the discomfort of conversation? Or do you maintain composure while leaving the other person alone in their vulnerability?
Calmness is not always regulation. Sometimes it is dissociation dressed as maturity.
The Performance of Calmness
But this idea of being calm and “chill” while really meaning detached comes from a deep seed planted within the system we have been living in for centuries. A system that rewards emotional control over emotional depth.
We are taught to keep going. To stay composed, not be disruptive, above all not be too emotional. These ideas are introduced from the moment we enter the school system, and later reinforced in a 9–5 structure that drains your life source every day. It is the repetition of the same message across different stages of life: regulate yourself, minimize yourself, adapt.
And this pattern slowly turns into self-hate, and eventually into pointing the finger at others.
We get uncomfortable when we see someone crying on a plane or breaking down in public. We are uncomfortable when trauma becomes visible. So we learn to perform calmness by curating vulnerability. We speak about authenticity, and above all, we love to quote therapy language.
But when raw emotion appears, in ourselves or in others, shame rises. And shame makes us retreat. The most efficient mechanism of this system is using shame to justify our own dehumanization. We shame ourselves for being human. For being imperfect. For feeling intensely.
Under the flag of strength, we isolate. Under the flag of independence, we disconnect from others and ourselves. Under the flag of emotional maturity, we avoid our emotions and contribute to relational harm.
Shame, Isolation, and the Illusion of Strength
And this is where the root becomes clearer.
The issue is not just personal immaturity. It is the structure that taught us to survive by disconnecting.
We have built a culture where integration of shadow, ego, and “ugly” parts happens alone, almost like penance. We say things like: Go fix yourself. Go heal privately and please just come back “regulated.” But do we mean regulated or numb?
True integration does not happen in isolation. If it did, isolation would not be contributing so heavily to mental health decline.
True integration happens in relationship. In witnessing. In repair. Our power as humans lies in community. Yet we glorify self-sufficiency to the point of emotional exile. Strong has become synonymous with silent. Independent has become synonymous with unneeding. Regulated has become synonymous with detached. But detachment is not strength; it is often avoidance disguised as being neat and tidy.
Once again, the system has succeeded in making us forget our biggest strength as humans: community.
My Own Accountability
I am not writing this as someone standing outside the pattern yet. And to be honest, what actually hurt the most this time was having believed that I was already over this pattern. But I take accountability for my part: I hadn’t built my own net of anchors before investing in someone new. Once again, not justifying the need to “be” or to “have” anything other than what you already are, but merely seeing where building my own safety can help me relate from a more grounded point of view.
This time, I saw the signs the first time. I felt the reaction, and I stayed. I listened to the words (words are not actions), and I saw the second warning; still, I stayed. By the third, he ran. And if I am honest, I feared losing an anchor. I did all of this while traveling solo for the first time, so the pattern wasn’t exactly the same.
Despite that, when you do not have a safety net of key people in your life, it is easy to hold tightly to the one you have invested in. I would even dare say it is human. However, I told myself I would think about it later. I postponed clarity. I chose hope over confrontation.
That was me.
But also, after two and a half weeks of sleeping alone again, I realized healing is not real if you never participate in dynamics. You cannot claim integration if you never risk attachment. And growth, for me now, has been noticing that the time between seeing and accepting has clearly shortened. I no longer wait years. I no longer pretend not to know; once you see, you cannot unsee.
For now, I am building new anchors in my life. Not because I want to be independent from connection (I do love islands, but I don’t want to become one), but because I want connection that is reciprocal.
We need others. Denying that is denying our humanity. Alone, we do half the work. In relationship (any type of relational dynamic), we are invited to do the rest.
Calling Humanity Up
So this is not about blaming one gender; I could easily go there. Women have been shamed into silencing their anger for centuries, and all that anger has been redirected toward ourselves. We do have healing to do with that anger, mainly letting it out, but that is a topic for another piece.
This time is about questioning a culture that teaches us to perform emotional awareness without embodying it.
If we want safe love, we must learn to sit in discomfort, our own and others’. We must distinguish between space and avoidance. Between calmness and dissociation. Between vocabulary and accountability. And we must stop labeling dysregulation from trauma as weakness. The question is not who is anxious and who is avoidant.
The question is:
When discomfort rises, do we retreat into performance, or do we stay present enough to grow?
That is where emotional maturity begins.
PS: I wonder why some people are still in awe of how quickly the birth rate is declining. But how are we going to be able to hold space for a child if we cannot safely hold space for each other?
With love always,
Maria Luisa.
If this reflection resonated, you are welcome to join my newsletter.
I share writings, insights and gentle reminders to support your own Spiral Way.
