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If you’re like me, you often think, learn, or process in terms of analogies. One analogy that I’ve found myself discussing in session quite a lot lately is that of a soundboard.
Have you ever seen a soundboard at a concert or even at church? It’s the big electronic board that has a bunch of lights and sliders on it that controls and mixes the audio so everything sounds good for the audience.
The sliders (that an astute client informed me are actually called “faders”) are each controlled independently. They each control a separate value as it pertains to the audio output.
I see human maturity similarly to a soundboard.
You Have More Than One Fader
We each have multiple faders that can slide up or down depending on a few factors. Overwhelmed? Perhaps your irritability fader is all the way up. In a heated argument with your spouse? Your emotional regulation fader can get pulled down.
As humans, we have lots of “faders” internally.
- Work performance
- Emotional awareness
- Social awareness
- Overall maturity
- Internal age
…just to name a few!
How Does This Show Up in Your Life?
Just because some of your faders have a high reading doesn’t mean all of your faders have a high reading. It’s possible to be awesome at your job and completely abysmal at emotional regulation when it comes to your kids. You can be walking in sobriety from addiction and still not great at relational closeness. You can be remarkably poised when it comes to putting out a literal house fire and then have a low reading when it comes to insights about your own emotional experience.
Humans are complicated creatures and can hold many things that seem to be opposing on the surface.
Here are a few implications for how uneven faders show up in our lives.
Growth Is Not Uniform
As you embark on a journey of healing and self-actulization, you will notice different faders really getting pushed higher and higher. This is growth! Unfortunately it does not mean that all of you, every fader, is experiencing growth.
Example: You can grow in honesty but still really struggle with not getting defensive in conflict.
Do not take this as a bad sign-that you aren’t really improving in some areas. You totally are! It’s just a sign to keep going. To work towards improvement in lower areas.
The optimal outcome isn’t that all areas of you need to be at the same level. That type of uniformity isn’t really compatible with the human experience! Said another way- we are just messier creatures than that!
Instead, the goal is this balancing act and dialing in of yourself as different areas drop below their optimal level and need attention.
It’s about continued mindfulness of how you’re showing up and the knowledge of which faders tend to drop out in various scenarios typical for your life.
It’s a Feature, Not a Bug
We aren’t “all or nothing” creatures. And this is actually a feature and not a bug.
It means you can be deeply competent and deeply insecure at the same time. You can be spiritually grounded and emotionally reactive in conflict. You can be growing — and still have work to do.
That doesn’t make you a fraud.
It makes you human.
It means one loud moment doesn’t define your entire character. When something spikes — irritability, defensiveness, shame — it isn’t your identity.
It’s a setting.
And settings can be adjusted.
Who’s Holding the Controls?
Let’s take the soundboard analogy a little further:
- Who is running your board?
- Are you?
- Your fear?
- Your trauma?
- Your spouse’s mood?
- Your boss?
- Your childhood experiences?
Whose Responsibility is the Board?
Well. Ultimately, it’s yours. Sometimes we like to think that others have the power over our faders. But the truth is that no one has authority to adjust our faders unless we grant them that power.
- Once you identify “who — or what — is adjusting my levels,” the question becomes, “how do I get agency back to manage my own board?”
- How did you learn to read your board and set your levels?
- There are two skills involved here: Self-assessment and self-leadership.
- You may never have learned to adjust your faders! That’s one of those things that isn’t good but it wasn’t your fault. The good news is: this is absolutely within your power to learn and change.
People who are good at self-assessment and self-leadership mostly had good models of these skills in childhood, or they have done a good bit of work on themselves. At the risk of sounding stereotypically therapeutic, if you feel like adjusting your levels is a foreign concept, you likely came by this lack of skill honestly, and it’s probably a family of origin issue.
If you’re reading this, you already have what it takes to learn to set and adjust your level. (This is one way therapy can be incredibly helpful.)
Reminder: You Are Not the Loudest Fader
Most of us think we are the loud fader.
We say, “I’m just an angry person.”
But what if anger is just one slider that’s been pushed too high in certain environments?
What if it isn’t your identity — just your current setting?
When Faders Get Stuck
What if some faders got jammed at age 12?
- This is another way to think of the term “arrested development” as the result of a trauma.
- Some people have parts of them that essentially stall out at the age in which a trauma occurred, or at the age of a first exposure to an addictive substance.
Some faders were set long before you ever had a say.
- If you grew up in chaos, your vigilance fader might always hover high.
- If love felt unpredictable, your relational closeness fader may have learned to stay low.
The other thing to consider is that development happens in layers.
- Some parts of you have had decades of practice. Others are still catching up.
- You may have a well-developed “competence” fader because you learned early that achievement brought safety.
- But your vulnerability fader may still feel risky — because at some point, it was.
To be completely honest with you, we can’t erase what happened. We are never going to turn you into a person who never got hurt. But we can learn to care for, support, and integrate the faders that were damaged (and thus becoming stuck). We can process negative experiences so that they don’t remain at a glaringly different level than other faders on your board.
Remember: when some of your faders get stuck at a certain level, not all of the faders are at that reduced level.
That’s a pro and a con!
- It’s a pro because other areas can be relatively high and you can function wonderfully.
- The con is that the areas that are affected can cause a lot of negative impact, because they tend to be the ones that have a lot of relational implications.
When we learn to manage our soundboard, flexibility emerges. And where there is flexibility, there is health and growth.
Conclusion: Maturity Is Intentional Adjustment
At this point, I hope you’re having some “ah-ha” moments with this analogy.
“Oh. I’ve been misjudging myself.”
“Oh. That explains my shame.”
“Oh. That’s why I keep sabotaging myself in conflict.”
The goal isn’t to max out every slider.
The goal is to know your board well enough to notice when something is distorting the sound.
To recognize when your defensiveness is louder than your values.
To catch when exhaustion has quietly pulled down your patience.
Learn your patterns. Take responsibility. And the output of your soundboard will improve as you take active steps to adjust your levels.
Maturity isn’t perfection.
It’s learning how to reach for the controls with intention.
