For many reasons, some adults don’t grow up. Emotionally stuck at ages 5, 8, 14, 16 … they live in a world of dependency, social anxiety, lack of boundaries, and/or low self-esteem. In the most extreme cases, these overgrown Peter Pans reject the idea of sticking their neck out and taking a stab at much of anything …. life experiences such as higher education, career training, or having a serious cause or career, have been dismissed as not in the cards for them; they’ve concluded that if they tried anything of substance, they would fail. Those who do work often have had the job delivered to them via a helpful relative or friend, and there they will stay until hell freezes over. Their idea of the perfect life is never making themselves uncomfortable.

Almost always there is an enabling factor, someone who provides sustenance, shelter, and sometimes, coddling. Just like a crutch used to help a person with a bum leg walk, their assistance allows the emotionally immature person to survive without growing up. Ironically, the enabler is an emotionally immature person as well, just in different ways.

In Pia Mellody’s book Facing Codependence, an owner’s (1) manual for every person with childhood developmental trauma (CDT), which is virtually all of us, she explains that because of things that happened and didn’t happen in childhood, we become stunted at an emotionally young age. It is frighteningly easy for a child to be traumatized, even by little things that, to an outside observer, would not look traumatizing. This is why most of us have thousands of trauma wounds over the course of our childhoods.

The way an emotionally immature adult acts today can help us know at what age they are stuck, obviously, some end up more functional than others. For example, black and white thinkers are stunted at around age 9, before they reached the abstract thinking stage, which happens at around age 11. Children need to meet certain developmental goals throughout their young lives so that when they reach the age to launch, they will have the will, drive, and motivation to do so. Some people with CDT have enough drive to go to college and have a career but their emotional development in…

A few years ago, I went to Los Angeles to attend Terry Real’s Relational Life Therapy training. He is world-renowned for his insightful take on male depression, healthy relationships, and narcissistic personalities in marriage, and has written several books on these subjects. (1) All are profound. Terry’s work is based on Pia Mellody’s’ model of Childhood Developmental Trauma; both he and I were trained in trauma by her, in his case many years before I did, and took what he learned and expanded it into a strategy for couples therapy. The fact that he has a plan for dealing with narcissists provoked curiosity because, in grad school, we were told those marriages couldn’t be repaired, and my personal experience has been that narcissists are in the top rung of most difficult people to do therapy with. Do they change? Not in my experience. I have met therapists who claim to love working with narcissists, but I find it hard to believe. I liken it to wrestling with someone four times my size with my hands tied behind my back. As soon as I pick up on the fact that I am dealing with someone with narcissistic traits, I take a deep breath and wonder why I became a couple’s therapist — it’s that hard.

So, no wonder I was willing to pay thousands of dollars to travel to get training from someone who has figured out a way to do it where you don’t come out blistered and bruised, and, you have a small chance at success. In the past, I would encourage each person to get individual therapy, but what I really wanted was for the spouse of the narcissist to get help to learn how to deal with their narcissist partner. They need to know if they are in an abusive relationship, find emotional support, and make sure they know how to get their emotional needs met on their own. Often, couples come in for couples therapy, stay briefly until I say something the narcissistic spouse doesn’t want to hear, and later, the long-suffering non-narcissist spouse returns on their own. They usually say something like, “You hit the nail on the head about my spouse’s narcissistic habits, and since you’ve met them, I want to do individual therapy with you.” That’s always a good idea.

Money and fame can be a blessing and a curse, and world-famous Jonas Brothers singer and United States citizen Joe Jonas and Game of Thrones actress and British citizen Sophie Turner are learning this the painful way. For years they have been media darlings, the public soaking up their beauty, fashion, romance, and celebrating the births of two young children. Now, since early September, we get to see their impending divorce and legal battles over who gets custody of the children. I’m sure now that they wish they weren’t so famous.

This celebrity divorce, just like all the others, provokes gossip-filled articles about divorce proceedings and any unfortunate legal disagreement, and is all over the Internet, talking about who did what to whom. Whether you’re talking about any celebrity couple, like actress Turner and Little Bird singer, Jonas, Hugh Jackman and Deborah Lee-Furness, or anyone else, I can tell you one thing for sure about all of them, we have no idea what happened or what’s going on. Anything you see on social media is a rumor, conjecture, worthless information, and page and space-filling, click-baiting garbage. The only facts we know are the court documents that have been filed, but again, just because something is filed doesn’t mean the information contained within it is true. Our legal system is a cat-and-mouse game meant to wear people down so they will stop fighting for the justice they deserve. I implore everyone to regard the speculative narratives about all celebrities as the garbage it is, but still, as a Marriage and Family Therapist who specializes in marriage crisis and the divorce decision, I see where we can all learn a few things from other people’s breakup stories, and that’s why I’m here.

Here are a few takeaways from my point of view:

1. No one knows what’s happening in any couple’s divorce. I work with couples who divorce and don’t even understand it entirely themselves. Stay out of the why and what for discussions and offer emotional support to your parting friends. The kind where you can listen to someone in obsessed anguish talk about the same thing 215 times in the morning and then go on to do the same in the…