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April 20 - April 30, 2025
We think of self-compassion as optional, when there’s nothing optional about it. You can’t heal or grow without self-compassion. In the absence of self-compassion, the best you can hope for is stagnation.
We don’t know how to take personal accountability, but we feel bad and want to do something. Enter the cultural and thereby individual default: self-punishment.
First of all, it’s not difficult to create pain and make yourself feel like shit, so you’re not proving anything. Do you know how easily I could derail my entire life? I could do it in nine minutes flat with my eyes shut and no Wi-Fi.
I promise you this: we are all in enough pain already. We don’t need to invent more pain for ourselves through self-punishment.
Unlike taking a break for the purpose of restoration, numbing behaviors are distractions designed to repress your emotions.
Restoration regulates; numbing represses. After you restore, you feel reset. You feel recharged. Restoration feels good. Numbing doesn’t make us feel good; it makes us feel nothing. When the numbing wears off, we still have our pain to answer to.
Blame is especially ineffectual for perfectionists because, as people who strive to be accountable (even when we don’t understand what that means), guess who perfectionists blame first?
Messy perfectionists blame themselves for failing to follow through and blame the world for being too bureaucratic.
Procrastinator perfectionists blame themselves for not being perfectly ready and blame others for being so presumptuous as to dare to begin without being fully prepared, qualified, or perfect.
As your pain grows, at some point your primary goal shifts from growth to pain avoidance. Instead of being motivated to practice habits that support your goals, you become motivated to practice habits that support numbing your pain.
In a state of shame, you believe that who you are is bad. Guilt says, I’m sorry about what I did. Shame says, I’m sorry about who I am.
Because you haven’t disrupted your self-punishment with self-compassion, your mind can only stay on one channel—the “every painful mistake I’ve ever made” channel.
You in fact no longer feel anything except “tired all the time.” Are you tired all the time, or are you numb?
Until you can meet yourself with some compassion, you’ll reject the good in your life. No matter how small the good is, you’ll honestly believe you don’t deserve it.
We’re all in need of healing. We all have something to recover from. Recovery of any kind runs in direct proportion to how much we are willing to abandon self-punishment.
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.[13]
Similarly, if you decide to love yourself as a matter of course, others may be quick to object, to subtly or overtly explain your unworthiness to you, or to assign stipulations to the degree to which you are allowed to be joyful and free. None of these objections can change your mind unless you allow them to.
You summon power by becoming aware of what you’re choosing, why you’re choosing it, and what you could be choosing instead.
The fact that the learning process involves a lot of repetition is frustrating. We hate repetition. We automatically assume repetition means we’re failing. Repetition can also mean we’re learning.
That paradigm shift would look like you centering your identity on your possibilities instead of your limitations. It would look like you remembering that not only do we all make mistakes, we all repeat mistakes, sometimes for years. Most critically, that paradigm shift would begin and end with you extending some compassion to yourself.
Punishing yourself takes an extraordinary toll on your energy. Once you stop punishing yourself, you may be surprised at how much free space is cleared up in your mind, heart, and soul.
Your problem was never that you’re a perfectionist, and your problem is no longer that you punish yourself. Your problem is that you’re not being your full self.
You’ll need to let go of what no longer serves you, fail forward as you discover what’s meaningful to you, and be compassionate with yourself no matter what. Enacting this trifecta calls for a focus on healing, not changing.
You can change without healing, but you can’t heal without changing.
If you could fully accept the immutability of your worth, that would be all the healing you’d ever need. This is very upsetting news for perfectionists. Perfectionists love a project.
What does work is to engage the invisible tedium of moving away from who you’re not and moving towards who you are. It’s not a glamorous process, you won’t get any credit for it, there are no instructions, and there’s no finish line because it never ends.
If your goal is merely to survive, it’s important that you close yourself off to any risk. If your goal is to extend your survival skills to “thrival” skills, it’s important that you learn how to take risks.
Relinquishing predictability is an ambitious task for two reasons. First, it makes you feel like you’re losing control (because you are, and this is a good thing). Second, it takes continuous effort to let go of what’s familiar and try something new.
When you engage in a dynamic that’s familiar, the incentive is that you don’t have to process any new information.
Your brain likes streamlined; hence, you gravitate towards what’s familiar even when what’s familiar is hurting you and you know it.
The more stressed you are, the harder it is to tell the difference between good familiar and bad familiar; all you register is comfort.
Procrastinator perfectionists plan to make a plan about learning how to best make a plan. Messy perfectionists play Jenga with their goals, continuing to shift the top priority in a way that’s built to collapse.
Letting go of the immediate gratification attached to bad familiarity is only the beginning. You also have to let go of the outcome of your striving.
Goal setting isn’t problematic. The problem arises when you hook your joy onto a future outcome: I’ll be happy when I get this or I’ll be happy if I can keep this.
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.
When you’re in an adaptive space, you don’t give failure any power. Not only does failure not have the final say; it doesn’t have any say.
To focus on the process, you have to start honoring the process. Honoring the process can be divided into two parts: acknowledgment and celebration.
Building meaning is what makes us happy, not desultory acquisition.
When you focus on the process, you focus on the victories that are happening now. You focus on what’s ready to be enjoyed now.
Acknowledging the process requires you to give credit to yourself for the work you’ve done to get to where you are now.
That sense you privately carry, that you still have so much work to do, that you’ll never be done, that you’ve been working on self-improvement for so long and yet it feels as if you haven’t even dented your vision—that represents your ambition, not your defeat.
Step out of reflexive self-loathing and dare to be impressed with yourself as you are, right in this moment.
In the absence of celebration, a sense of buoyancy that carries us through the seasons starts to wane. Our ability to process change individually and collectively is disrupted.
There’s no card at the store for the personal goals that you’re investing so much of yourself into. When you lead a self-defined life, you have to be the one to put a stake in the ground and say: “This is important. This is a big deal!”
You have to initiate the celebration of the middle of the process yourself. This is how adaptive perfectionists live—inviting joy, connection, support, and gratitude into their lives during the process, not just after the win.
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.
You can’t control grief by subtracting joy from your life. You can’t control grief, period.
The positive moments that are happening in your life now are real. Whether they stay or go does not make them less real now.
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. This is especially true for perfectionists.
A process can involve months, years, sometimes decades of progressive steps taken towards achieving a vision. Amidst any given process, something is always breaking and in need of repair.
