When we fall in love with one person, we give up the ability to be with someone else and begin focusing our time and attention on deepening the relationship with the person we chose. If we do this long enough, we can develop ever stronger emotions, which are only possible because we have given up the breadth. Here we can recognize the importance of appropriate emotional maturity, as it depends on how strong emotions we can endure and not escape from the depths back to the breadth of shallower and weaker emotions. If courage, the ability to sacrifice, and a sufficiently developed emotional maturity allow us to do so, we can come deep enough in love to open up to us all the breadth and complexity of emotions that deep love gives to those who have come to this heaven.

A person cannot properly carry out selections and the sacrifice of breadth to achieve depth in a family where the parents do not have the appropriate emotional maturity because they cannot pass on what they do not have to the child. At the same time, in such a family, the child sacrifices his opportunities to regulate and maintain the relationship with his parents, and this prevents him from the natural approach of growing up, sacrificing breadth and focusing on what he wants to be.

The natural design of parenting and growing up requires that both parents have an appropriately developed physical and emotional maturity for parenting in a certain complex environment. In such conditions, a person can develop his personality, character, and behavior in accordance with his combination of genetics and patterns taken from the environment in which he lives. Because there is no negative influence from the environment on what he wants and needs, he can sacrifice breadth to go deep into an area that aligns with him as a whole. Parents can feel this and, sacrificing breadth for depth, support him appropriately and selflessly to help him grow up because, due to the appropriate emotional maturity, they can bear the change that the departure of an adult child represents for them.

Aleš Ernst, author of the AEQ method and AEQ breathing