The Perfect Blog

I tend to describe myself as a recovering perfectionist. By that I mean that I acknowledge that I still maintain a number of my perfectionist tendencies, but that I’ve been working diligently for a number of years now to release from my own personal expectations about perfection in an attempt to offer myself more compassion and to elevate my self-worth. Wow, that's certainly a psychological mouthful!

For a fairly large chunk of my life, I have lived under the illusion that if I tried to do everything perfectly that I would eventually become the best version of myself. There are definitely some positive aspects of this desire to become the best version of myself. I have always been an extremely driven, hard-working person. Because I am also blessed with what I consider to be high level executive functioning skills, I have had a tendency to be a highly productive person in all aspects of my life. As a result, I have achieved many amazing things in this lifetime.

Unfortunately, one of the things that has evaded me in this quest to be perfect, is having a healthy level of self-worth. Even though I repeatedly hear people tell me how awesome I am, I tend to tune out that praise and pay far closer attention to the fact that to myself, I’m not doing everything that I would like to be doing at the level I would like to be doing those things at. It can be a curious and sometimes debilitating whirlpool that sucks me down into a place where I hunger for more and more affirmation, with hopes that the external affirmation will somehow elevate my level of self-worth.

Are you following me into this rabbit hole here? Do you notice any similar perfectionist tendencies in yourself?

In case you’re wondering why I consider myself to be a recovering perfectionist instead of recovered perfectionist, I offer you this case in point. I’ve been writing my blog for well over a decade now. For the most part it’s been a weekly piece of writing. There have definitely been some gaps where I’ve taken a month or two off or times when I have been a little bit less consistent with my cadence in general. Each time I take a little break or get out of rhythm, I tend to come back and write a piece that has some level of contrition connected to it. In fact, I’m doing it right here, noted by the simple fact that I am mentioning it yet again!

My last published piece was in early December of last year. In the four months prior to that early December piece of writing, I had only published five new pieces in four months; far from my goal of writing a weekly piece. The blog that I did publish in December was a piece titled My Two Greatest Addictions, which promised a “Part 2“ that I never even wrote!

As crazy as it may sound, there are parts of me that have actually been walking around for the last three months feeling some level of shame on an almost daily basis that I haven’t written a new blog or even finished my last blog: it’s as if I feel like I’ve let my faithful readers down in some way. That then triggers my people pleaser parts who I wrote about in the addiction piece from early December.

There are also parts of me that realize that it’s completely ridiculous to feel any shame about this whatsoever! My logical parts know that there is not one single person out there in my audience that is thinking to themselves, “Boy that Jim is a real loser. He hasn’t sent out a new piece of writing in almost 3 months now. He should be ashamed of himself!” This is the dialogue that goes on inside my head seven days a week 24 hours a day. In my opinion, there are parts of me that are doing this shame processing and self-analysis even while I’m sleeping.

So what’s been holding me up from writing a new blog over the last few months you ask?

As the gap in time between blogs lengthens for me, I feel an increasing need to try to craft the perfect blog for my return to writing. Thus, I remain the recovering and not the recovered perfectionist.

Many experts in psychology point to three main root causes for perfectionist tendencies. While perfectionism can also be influenced by genetics and environmental factors, those three main causes are anxiety, fear of failure and trauma. As I look back across the arc of my life, I can say check, check and check! All three of those root causes have been a part of the story of my life.

I have lived under varying levels of anxiety for my entire life. I realize that some of this is genetic and that there are a number of members of my family of origin who have experienced an ongoing relationship with anxiety for the entirety of their life as well. For me, my desire to avoid failure and seek affirmation has been driven by my anxiety about not being enough. That then fuels my perfectionism which creates a cycle of anxiety and perfectionism that feed each other on an ongoing basis. It’s the whirlpool again. Down I go.

My wife Christiana has often pointed out to me that I have a tendency to catastrophize things. At times I can get completely off the rails by the simplest of things like losing my keys, running late for an appointment and even the proverbial spilled glass of milk. My fear of failure is so catastrophic that there are times when I slip into my victimhood so deeply that I come away feeling worthless.

There have also been times in my life where my fears about everything have been so heightened and my stress levels have been so high that I have experienced panic attacks. If I’m not mistaken, at one point I wrote about the time that I was totally convinced that somebody had put anthrax in the flour canister at our house in Michigan so we should never rent that house again to be sure that nobody accidentally died. Or the time I accidentally hit a toll gate on the Skyway bridge, broke it and was convinced that they would review the camera footage and start a manhunt for me. I was so worked up that when I got back to Chicago, I went directly to the South Loop police station to turn myself in. You should have seen the look on the face of the desk Sargent! I know, that these things sound ridiculous, but this is what happens inside my head sometimes. It has been entirely out of my control at points.

As it relates to trauma, over the last year I’ve been speaking more openly about the fact that I experienced sexual trauma in my childhood. To be perfectly clear, it had nothing to do with any family members. It did not happen directly to me in Catholic school, but I witnessed things that triggered my PTSD response. My story is that I was not abused by any adults at all, but I was traumatized by sexual bullying and abuse from older boys when I was about 10 years old.

Whenever I get around to writing that part two piece about addiction, I will might share more, but for now I acknowledge that as a survivor of childhood trauma, it can be very easy to perceive everything in life as a threat. As a result, perfectionism has been a coping mechanism for me to try to gain some sense of control and psychological safety in my life. I remember reading an article at one point about the three P's of perfectionism.

The first P is the perfectionism itself, which is to have an unrealistically high set of expectations for oneself and others. At the level of Self, that perfectionism can lead to seeking constant affirmation and pushing myself to unattainable extremes before collapsing and feeling like a failure. As it relates to other relationships, the perfectionism can create an impact that others feel like you are judging them, even when that is not your intention.

The second P of perfectionism is procrastination, which shows up for me in that I often try to find the perfect time to do something so that I can do it in a perfect way. I remember back before my daughter Emma was born when my wife worked four nights. I would try to get everything I wanted to get done around the house before I allowed myself to sit down to enjoy my dinner and watch something on TV. Over the years I found myself not sitting down to eat until 10:00 or 11:00 PM after I had crossed as many things off of my to do list as I possibly could. Let's just say that did nothing good for my sleep hygiene or my waistline.

The third P of perfectionism is paralysis. This happens when the procrastination allows the mind to wander into the minutia of having all the littler details in order before even attempting to tackle the larger and more important overall task, which is one of the main reasons that I haven't even attempted to write a new blog since December.

Over the last five years I have been actively working on healing the various root causes of my perfectionist tendencies. In the process I have learned some powerful, yet simple tools that have helped me along that path of healing. The five most important tools I have utilized are:

• Mindfulness - While mindfulness has certainly been a buzz word for many years and can be an infinite topic, at it's core, the concept of mindfulness is pretty simple. The mere state of being consciously aware of the fact that I need work on this area of myself is a huge leap forward in the healing process.
• Take Baby Steps - Taking action breeds clarity. I learned this simple truth from one of my root teachers, Mike Dooley. When I feel like I am procrastinating or slipping into paralysis, just take a step forward in any direction. It doesn't even matter if the step is in the exact direction of the desired destination. Any baby step will do.
• Celebrate All the Mile Markers - It's really tough to run a marathon if you won't allow yourself to feel any sense of accomplishment until you hit 26.2. Take the time to celebrate each and every mile marker along the way. In the past I have tended to only celebrate the BIG finish lines of life which robs me of countless opportunities to elevate my self worth by taking notice of the little wins along the way.
• The Rule of Average - Many years ago when I was going through one of my toughest transitions in life and I was really beating myself up, My mom said, "Why don't you just try to be average today? You don't have to be great, or even good...just shoot to be average today." That message has stuck with me and helped me get through times when I can't be everything I would like to be for myself and others.
• Practice Self-Compassion - Compassion is a powerful medicine for healing perfectionism.To me, compassion in general always starts with self. If perfectionism is my inner coping mechanism for not feeling good enough, the best way to disarm those feelings of not being good enough is to change the way I talk to myself inside my own head. Self-compassion allows me to accept myself as broken and beautiful at the same time which gives me the opportunity to continue to grow.
  Perfectionism is both a blessing and a curse. As a general rule we try to keep the word perfect out of our vocabulary as home, replacing it words like "preferred" or "ideal." In doing so it is my greatest hope that I will help Emma unpack her own predisposition to perfectionism before it takes hold of her any further. It is a practice that requires some effort, but as they say, practice makes, well, you know.

I hope you enjoyed my return to blogging with my perfectly imperfect blog. I hope to be back next week, but I'm not going to put any undue pressure on myself. Until next time, whenever that is. Peace and blessings,

PS.... It's good to be back. Writing is very therapeutic for me. There are some other reasons that I haven't written much lately, but I didn't want to jump into those even bigger topics right out of the gate after my recent writing sabbatical. I'll dig into that more next time.