Bad childhood experiences have a vague way of following us into adulthood, dressed as something completely different, like thinking of getting everything right.
If you grow up feeling that love is something you have to earn by good grades or good attitude, the connection between childhood trauma and perfection may mean more than you would like.
This is not to call yourself corrupt.
Ultimately, it’s seeing the difference between perfection versus perfection, capturing the perfect pattern of thinking running on autopilot in your head and finding ways to overcome perfection without damaging your parts that really care to do a good job.
Bad childhood experiences and the pain of perfection
Glenn R. Schiraldi, Ph.D. Posted in Psychology Blog today, November 7, 2024
This post is part of a series on bad childhood experiences. Read the other section. Here.
Highlights
- The rigorous pursuit of perfection poses a high risk to health and performance.
- A simpler and more flexible approach to adhering to higher standards leads to healthier and better performance.
- Perfection, driven by fear and self-doubt, is often rooted in bad childhood experiences.
Bad childhood experiences, including disruption of child / caregiver relationships, often lead to low self-esteem with insufficient emotions.
In adulthood, this can be played in many ways, such as fake symptoms and Mr. Nice Guy we have described before.
Related: 8 Signs of Perfection of Toxins and Solutions
This post explores the third response to the painful insecurity of broken self-esteem – perfection – as opposed to superiority.
As Emamzadeb (2024) noted. “Excellence can be defined as the setting of working towards and becoming stuck with unrealistic ambitious goals … On the other hand, excellence can be defined as the tendency to strive for higher standards but can be achieved in a flexible way.”
These different ways of pursuing personal goals have different effects on satisfaction and achievement in life.
Perfection
Those who are perfect think that trying to be perfect will help them move forward. So often they are diligent and have a high conscience at work.
However, they tend to doubt themselves and their abilities, feel dissatisfied with their efforts and overreact to mistakes. Their tendency to overwork often interferes with relationships, sleep, exercise, and leisure activities.
Their relentless and unlucky attempts really get them bad results. Fatigue, workaholismAnd a range of psychological adjustments related to stress, such as depression, anxiety. AlcoholismAnd even the tendency to want to commit suicide.
Perfect people lack self-compassion and find it difficult to cope with their imperfections. They become very self-critical when they do not meet their high standards.
They can also strain relationships when they show their perfect demands on others.
Fear drives many of your attitudes to perfection. They are afraid of losing expectations, doing wrong and being judged unfavorably by others.
These fears often lead to a series of delays in trying to do the right thing, failing to turn the job around for fear that it is not good enough or seeking the approval of others too much.
The roots of perfection can often be traced back to childhood. Perfectionists may be very critical or reject the caregivers who make them feel inadequate or who create romantic conditions on the performance.
In other cases, caregivers may be sending anxiety around the wrongdoing.
Common perfection patterns usually evolve in childhood, such as:
- My value is equal to my work. Therefore, I have to perform perfectly.
- People will love me only if I perform perfectly.
- It’s too bad to make a mistake.
- My job is perfect or I’m a loser.
- Failure is proof that I am bad.
- I should have done better.
Excellence
People who strive for excellence can be just as ambitious as those who excel at pursuing high personal standards. But they are motivated and follow their different high standards.
They are driven by love, safety, unconditional patience, kindness and the joy of growing up. They accept their imperfections and allow themselves to make mistakes as they try to learn and grow from their mistakes.
Unlike the perfect ones, they enjoy perfect endeavors without endless effort. Their real goal is to become capable, as opposed to perfect people.
Ironically, because they are less stressful, they tend to do better and achieve more than perfect ones in the short term and make more progress towards their personal goals and personal growth in the long run.
Not surprisingly, those who aspire to excellence are higher in life satisfaction, lower in depression and other psychological symptoms, and are less likely to feel like cheaters compared to supplementers.
Therefore, many researchers conclude that perfection is not necessary or useful for people who want to do a good job and achieve personal growth.
Related: 10 Trauma responses that you think are personality
The solution
Here are some ways to turn perfection into superiority:
1. Apply “Failure”.
Florida State University researcher Sarah Redden and colleagues (2022) have theorized that worrying about mistakes is at the heart of perfection.
They told the research participants that they had to practice debugging by exposing themselves to two weeks of online work that they had repeatedly done wrong.
With repeated practice, they realized that mistakes were not as frightening as they thought. Over time, participants reduced their levels of perfection, anxiety over mistakes, depression, and social anxiety.
So you can look for opportunities to make mistakes with a realistic attitude: “What big if I make a mistake?” Life can be happier when we connect with the expected results and focus on enjoying the process.
2. Cultivate self-compassion.
Practice being kind with your mistakes. Instead of blaming yourself for the imperfect result, take a moment to breathe and repeat it aloud or tell yourself: “This is a time of sorrow, sorrow is a part of life. Let me bring kindness to this time, let me give you the mercy I need.” (Neff, 2022).
Do this often until kindness to yourself becomes a habit.
3. Cultivate a sense of humor.
Excessive severity is a sign of mental illness. We have to laugh at ourselves because we all do funny things sometimes.
4. Remind yourself where your values come from.
There is value as a person is given at birth that comes with unlimited potential. Performance does not add to or undermine the inner value of being human.
Personal growth and achievement help us enjoy our values - and increase our satisfaction in life – so it is good to have goals to achieve. Set achievable goals Enjoy your progress, but separate your values from the results.
5. Define social media.
This creates pressure to achieve uncertain goals.
6. Set goals for recovery to compensate for fatigue.
Make a written plan for recreation, sleep and exercise regularly so that your work does not lose its balance.
7. Reset success.
John Wooden, the greatest coach in men, defines success as the satisfaction of knowing that you have done your best, not the results or what the scoreboard says.
Set yourself a value regardless of the outcome. Love is more powerful than fear.
Related: 10 Ways to Shame on You
8. Pursue your goals with pleasure, not a mistake.
There is no shame in trying and being short. This is what imperfect people do when we learn to improve.
About the Author
Glenn R. Schiraldi, PhD, has worked at the College of Stress Management at the Pentagon, the International Crisis Stress Foundation, and the University of Maryland, where he received the Outstanding Teacher Award in addition to other teaching / service awards. His 14 books on stress-related topics have been translated into seventeen languages and include workbooks, rescue, negative childhood experiences, workbooks, self-esteem. The Resilience Workbook, and The Post-Taumatic Stress Disorder Sourcebook. Founder of Resilience Training International (www.ResilienceFirst.com) He has trained paramedics and physicians around the world on a wide range of aspects of stress, injury and resilience.
Written by Glenn R. Schiraldi Ph.D.
Originally Appeared on Psychology Today
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. How to get rid of the perfect mindset?
You really do not “get rid of it” overnight, but you can loosen its grip. Start by separating perfection from superiority – one wants progress, the other wants safety from criticism. Let things be good enough sometimes on purpose. Notice the pattern of thinking rather than obeying them. Celebrate progress, not just perfect results. And under it all, ask what you really fear will happen if something is not perfect. That fear is usually the real thing to work on.
2. What kind of injury causes perfection?
It rarely has a single event. Perfection usually grows out of love on the condition that love or approval feels associated with achievement, good behavior, or does not cause problems. That can seem like harsh criticism, having unpredictable parents, or harsh criticism, growing up in a home with addiction or chaos, being praised only for results, or having to “apply” stability for struggling family members. The general article is not a specific event, it is a lesson learned: feeling innocent is safer than seeing as you really are.
3. How do you treat?
Therapists usually do not attack perfection, they just follow what lies beneath it. Common approaches include cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to capture and challenge all thought patterns, self-empathy work to weaken internal critics, and sometimes trauma-focused therapies if they are rooted in childhood experiences. Many jobs also have an attitude, such as intentionally doing something “imperfect” in order to show that the world is not over. The goal is not to lower your standards, it is to lose your self-esteem from your results, so you do not always practice for safety.
