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March 10 - April 9, 2024
Then, remembering that ideals are not meant to be achieved, only meant to inspire,
Marissa’s goal, like the goal so many of us fall prey to, was not to process what happened but to learn how to control her feelings about what happened.
Perfectionists intellectually understand that they cannot change the past, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to change the fact that the past had an impact on them. To accept the latter is to encounter too great a sense of losing control, of defeat, of failure.
A telltale sign that a perfectionist is in a maladaptive space, dichotomous thinking occurs when the range of possibility is eclipsed by the extremes of a spectrum. There’s no gray area in dichotomous thinking—for example, you’ve either succeeded or failed, you’re beautiful or ugly, you’re revered or the laughingstock.
Once you’re aware that you’re engaging in dichotomous thinking, don’t try to force yourself to stop thinking in black-and-white terms. If you can find some gray area, that’s great.
Morin points out that punishment is about trying to control someone through pain. Discipline is about trying to teach someone to empower themselves through structure.
Look at punishment up close and what you’ll see is desperation. When we feel desperate and out of touch with power, we grasp onto punishment to feel in control. Feeling in control is not a substitute for empowerment.
Occasionally, we’re stuck because we’re genuinely confused about what’s happening and what to do about it, but that kind of confusion is rare. Nine times out of ten, we know exactly what to do to improve our lives, and yet we struggle to do it. The reason we’re struggling is that we’re engaged in a cycle of self-punishment.
The broaden-and-build theory asserts that if you can get yourself into a positive headspace, your “thought-action repertoire” broadens. When you’re in a positive state, your thoughts about the possible actions you can take expand; you realize you can do a lot of different things, and you make choices that promote future positive states.
As Fredrickson points out, positive emotions aren’t just “end states” that signal optimal functioning; positive emotions produce optimal functioning.
How do you broaden your thought-action repertoire? With self-compassion. Practicing self-compassion expands your thought-action repertoire because it pulls you out of fear-based negativity and towards increased feelings of safety, reassurance, and positivity. Research demonstrates self-compassion’s positive association with a greater sense of self-worth, increased personal initiative,[10] increased resilience to stress, more realistic self-appraisals of strengths and weaknesses, lower levels of depression and anxiety, reduced rates of burnout, increased motivation to make amends for past
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Three Main Reasons We Choose Self-Punishment Instead of Self-Compassion 1. WE MAKE OUR WORTH DEPENDENT ON OUR PERFORMANCE
perfectionists in an adaptive space base their self-worth on existence, whereas perfectionists in a maladaptive space base their self-worth on performance.
Another way to say that you’re worthy is that you believe you deserve something positive. Another way to say that you’re unworthy is that you believe you don’t deserve something positive. What Ava decided she didn’t deserve was any compassion, comfort, or safety. That’s why taking a hot bath, simple as it may be, felt genuinely impossible for her that night.
The conditions we place on our self-worth and the self-punishments we enlist when we don’t meet those conditions are unconscious. We move through our daily routines without realizing that we have put our worth at stake.
2. WE NEVER LEARNED THAT SELF-COMPASSION IS KING
Our main strategy is to play whack-a-mole with our pain because we think pain is automatically unhealthy. We’ve adopted this sanitized, “healthy people can bypass pain” view of emotional well-being (otherwise known as toxic positivity) because we prioritize analytical intelligence over emotional intelligence.
You can’t heal or grow without self-compassion. In the absence of self-compassion, the best you can hope for is stagnation.
Some of us think of self-compassion as an indulgence—emotionally petting ourselves while we avoid personal accountability. We don’t realize that self-compassion is what ushers us into personal accountability.
3. WE MISTAKE SELF-PUNISHMENT FOR PERSONAL...
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Numbing looks like engaging in an activity that helps you ignore the feelings you don’t want to feel. Unlike taking a break for the purpose of restoration, numbing behaviors are distractions designed to repress your emotions. You’ll recall the examples at the beginning of this chapter: overeating, overspending, overworking, getting caught up in drama, substance misuse, mindlessly watching TV or scrolling social media, and the like.
In the absence of self-compassion, choosing the healthier option feels wrong.
research has demonstrated that it’s not perfectionistic strivings that are harmful to our mental health, it’s the self-criticism we lacerate ourselves with that endangers our well-being.
Pay attention to those who describe themselves as “recovering perfectionists.” Notice that they aren’t people who have lowered their high standards, learned to want less, or stopped chasing the ideal. They’re people who have committed to self-compassion as a default emotional response to pain. That throbbing thorn in your brain isn’t perfectionism; it’s self-punishment.
Your brain likes streamlined; hence, you gravitate towards what’s familiar even when what’s familiar is hurting you and you know it. The “devil you know” is more appealing to your brain than uncertainty.
You will never experience the future; you’re always and only in the present moment. If you’re waiting on the future to feel joy, you will never feel joy.
You engage in the process for the sake of enjoying and learning from the experience, not for the glory of a future win.
but hitting the goal can never make up for the fact that you were disengaged and not feeling any joy or connection the whole time you were in pursuit of it.
It may be the thing we forget the most: nothing is promised in this life. If we only celebrated what we could be certain of, that which we were sure we could never lose, we would never have cause for celebration. There is no such thing as officially having anything.
“Doing the work” is not solely about learning how to recognize and speak our sadness, our anger, and our angst. Doing the work is just as much (if not more so) about learning how to recognize, speak, and celebrate our joy. So often, the latter is in fact the more challenging work.
Intentions are expressed not through what you do but through how you do it, not if you do it but why you do it. Your intention is the energy and purpose behind your striving; your goal is what you’re striving for.
When you set an intention, you’re giving yourself a way to feel success, satisfaction, and enjoyment during the process, not just in the afterglow of goal attainment.
Feeling bad for people without working to understand or connect to them is pity, not compassion. Compassion is active; pity is passive.
Emotionally mature people recognize that the way they treat themselves is a choice, and they take responsibility for that choice. If you don’t choose to treat yourself with kindness, what are you choosing instead?
Whatever you want therapy, or your relationships, or a quote, or your kids, or your work, or the car you drive, or the family you were born into, or the family you create, or your vacation, or even just your hair products to give you—whatever you want all these big and small pieces of your life to give you—at some point, they’re all bound to fall short. This is inevitable. You will feel disappointed, you will be left unsatisfied, and you will want your life to be a different way than it is.
Architecturally, a hallway is a liminal space. Anthropologically, liminality is defined as “the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.”
The primary challenge in a psychologically liminal space is to allow yourself to feel empty. In a liminal realm, your emptiness and your potential are the exact same thing. When you block your emptiness from existing, you block your potential from developing. Lao Tzu’s famous quote reflecting this truth was the title I gave to the very first blog post I ever wrote, “The Usefulness of a Pot Is in Its Emptiness.” Clearly, I did not understand SEO at the time. You have to have done a lot of grief work to be in a liminal space. Grief is always the admission charge for major transition. You have to
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When you ruminate, you mistake replay for reflection. When you catastrophize, you mistake worrying for preparation.
The most powerful perspective shift you could ever make is understanding that you’re already whole and perfect. While you may sometimes need medication or coffee or music or therapy or some other kind of ameliorative tinkering to get you thriving, that doesn’t mean you’re broken; that means you are a human being alive in the world.
Similarly, you’re more likely to feel frustrated that you missed the bus when you miss it by twenty seconds as opposed to missing it by fifteen minutes. The outcome is the same in both scenarios (you gotta catch the next bus), but you’re not basing your emotional state on the outcome; you’re basing it on the intensity of your counterfactual thought.
As a perfectionist, you will constantly encounter some version of the question “Am I doing enough?” Beyond using that question as a ringing bell to remind you that your worth is not tied to your output, try to remember that it’s not always about the new goals you’re able to achieve; it’s also about the old goal achievements you’re able to maintain—the relationships you keep in wonderful standing, the parts of your job you continue to perform so well, any healthy lifestyle choices you remain committed to.
Many people will rush to tell you how Carolina Beach could never compare to a city like Paris, for example, and they would be right. What’s overlooked is this: Paris could also never compare to Carolina Beach. We make rapid comparisons that our minds automatically plug into hierarchies of first-rate, second-rate, better, worse, etc. Get out of the mindset of better or worse and get into the mindset of different.
I’m not as smart as she is, so I could never do what she does. I’m not as hot as them so I could never pursue them. I’m not as funny as all the other people getting up on stage, so I could never get up on stage. Self-imposed upper limits on what you can and cannot do and who you can and cannot be are control tactics. You’re trying to control your vulnerability to getting hurt.
Yes, you will fall, and yes, you will feel the fall. But because you know your worth, the fall will not define you.
There’s so much subjectivity in whether you’re chosen or not, whether you’re considered “the best” or not, whether you’re even considered “good” or not. It’s all so silly; it doesn’t mean anything. What matters is that you’re living your life according to your values. There’s no point in comparing yourself to others because for one thing, you don’t know what’s going on in someone else’s private world. And for another, no one has the exact same set of values as you do.
Enacting your power looks like compassionately telling the part of yourself that wants to keep your world small the following message: What hurts me more than falling is not being able to be my full self.
For example, we justify agreeing to get coffee with someone whom we don’t really want to see by saying something like, “It’ll just be half an hour and then I’ll leave.” No. It’ll be the anticipatory anxiety for the week leading up to that half hour, the half hour itself, and then the negative recall of how you felt annoyed and immediately resentful upon sitting down, didn’t want to be there, and couldn’t believe she said that, even though she always says stuff like that, and that’s why you don’t like hanging out with her in the first place. When it comes to agreeing to engage in events we
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What Perry is saying is that it’s not the degree of fucked-upness from your past that holds the final say on your ability to be joyful and thrive, it’s the quality of connections you build into your life now.
Connection is the ultimate arbiter of mental wellness. When you’re disconnected, you can’t heal or grow; you can only numb and languish. Connection isn’t something that happens to you; it’s a choice you make.
Maybe life does give us more than we can handle so that we have no choice but to reach out to one another and connect. Otherwise, we might only connect when it felt easy or instantaneously good. Maybe God never gives us more than we can handle together.
