Becoming Perfectly Flawed

Ideals are like stars: you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the ocean desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, you reach your destiny.

~Carl Schurz

Anything worth doing is worth doing well.

I don't know who said this originally, but I know it's been repeated by nearly every parent in the English-speaking world for decades. And I'll bet if I investigated a bit, I would find some kind of similar saying in most other cultures, too.

Most of us were brought up by loving parents who, for very loving reasons, pushed us to do and be the best. Their intent was, of course, to help us understand the relationship between hard work and personal success. They were equipping us with the ability to struggle, work around, and rise to challenges. And in many ways they were right. If you don't practice the piano, you'll never get better at it. If you want to be a better baseball player, you're going to have to work at that, too. If you want friends, be nice. And if at first you don't succeed.... well, you know.

But somewhere along the way, our culture has amplified and altered the way we view this basic and logical truism. We've gone from a culture of hard-working innovators to a society increasingly populated with intense perfectionists. I don't mean "perfectionist" in the way that most people hear it -- as someone who really likes to keep things tidy, the stereotypical "hospital corners" personality. In fact, I've met perfectionists with incredibly messy cars and homes.

The perfectionism I see so often in my clients (and my friends, and myself) is more subtle and insidious than a quirky need to have things neat. It's the pervasive idea many of us have that if we don't do something absolutely perfectly, right away, every time -- then something is horribly wrong. It's a little voice inside us that tells us, not only that things must be perfect, but that we have the control to make it so. It's this mistaken belief that is often at the root - or at least a contributing factor - of the increasing levels of anxiety many of us feel.

Maybe it's partly because we live in an era of immense and immediate personal freedoms. We have access to information, people, and resources at a speed with which we couldn't even imagine just 20 years ago. In our current society, we seem to have almost limitless choices about how to spend our free time, work time, and family time. Rather than growing up to become exactly who our parents were (occupationally, geographically and personally), we can choose to construct our lives however we like, from thousands of options - with millions on millions of possible permutations.

For the most part, our freedom and mobility is a good thing. It’s kind of the antidote to the caste system in a way – because with a little hard work and creativity, just about anyone can become just about anything. But with so many choices, so many opportunities to succeed or fail, so many criteria against which to measure ourselves – we feel more pressure than ever to do the right thing. The perfect thing. It’s almost like we no longer have any excuse to fail. No wonder 15% of the U.S. adult population experiences clinical anxiety at some point in their lives. It makes me feel a little paralyzed just thinking about it.

I have so many clients who enter my office expressing inordinate frustration with themselves for not being “successful” in a particular area of their lives; and then after a short interview I find that they have accomplished amazing feats in their careers, built loving relationships, cared for their families, pursued recreational activities with gusto, and still found time to bake cookies for the PTA meeting or to help a friend who is experiencing a serious problem. And yet they feel entirely devastated and worthless because their boss said something nasty to them or they had an argument with their spouse.

By way of illustration: Recently, my husband and I went to my best friend’s house to have dinner with her and her family. We all stay busy, so it’s a treat when we get time to hang out. In a rare turn of events, we were able to go out early in the afternoon and spend a leisurely evening eating dinner, drinking wine, and playing games. The only slight fly in the ointment occurred when my friend realized that she’d forgotten to turn the crock pot on that morning – and so the chili she’d thought she was cooking all day was ice cold and inedible. The solution was a quick phone call away, though, because all we had to do was place a quick order for pizza and in 30 minutes we were all happily fed.

Now, my friend is a highly intelligent, well-accomplished woman. She and her husband have a great marriage, two wonderful little girls, stable jobs, a nice home, loving family, a wide group of friends, and a great support system. My friend is that special kind of person you call on when you really need support – she has a rare gift for emanating calm in a crisis. And yet, this amazing woman spent most of the evening apologizing for messing up dinner. Almost every hour, she would suddenly remember her mistake, and – rather than just enjoying a relaxed evening with friends – her imperfection would weigh so heavily on her that she would scowl and apologize again.

[And when she reads this, I suspect that rather than noticing all the wonderful things I’ve said about her (which are true), she’ll worry for days that she ruined the evening (which she didn’t) by apologizing too much…]

I’m not picking on my friend. I see this in my own behavior, too, and that of countless others in my life. Somehow we are training ourselves to “filter” out all the positive, wonderful, and enriching parts of our lives and to focus primarily on the negative things, the places where we can improve. Of course, it’s good to understand your weaknesses and to find room for self-improvement; but when we beat ourselves up for imperfection, we will find ourselves taking fewer risks and enjoying life less.

As human beings, we are by nature incapable of total perfection. But when we forget this fact, it’s easy to paint ourselves into the corner of not doing something at all, because we convince ourselves we can never do it exactly right. We don’t speak up in meetings because we worry that our ideas won’t be well-received. We don’t go swimming with our kids because we worry that we don’t look good in a bathing suit. We avoid trying something new because there’s a vague possibility we could be hurt or embarrassed.

Sometimes we also turn our perfectionism on the world around us. We scream at fast food employees for forgetting to leave off the onions. We wrap our kids in bubble-wrap and equip them with hand sanitizer and an emergency cell phone before sending them outside to play (or worse, decide not to send them out at all). We threaten to sue everyone in sight when life doesn’t go our way. When fear and anger rule our lives, everyone loses.

Perfectionism simultaneously creates both the illusion that we are in control and the paralyzing fear that we are not. And when we model for our kids that perfection is the goal, we set them up to fail – and for a host of problems like anxiety, panic and eating disorders (all of which are related to the need for control and the fear of loss).

If you think I’m just waxing philosophical with this, consider this: Eating disorders – arguably the quintessential expression of perfectionism and control – have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. Approximately 1% of all adolescent girls suffer from anorexia, while 4% of college-age women suffer from bulimia (men also suffer from eating disorders – but they are about 3 times more common in women). Research suggests that only 60% of those with eating disorders will make a full recovery, and up to 25% of cases can be fatal, particularly without treatment*. In this case, the push toward perfection isn’t just annoying or quirky; it can be deadly.

As a society and as individuals, we must learn to release our need to control every aspect of our lives, and we must stop pursuing perfection over balance and fulfillment. We have to start working towards an acceptance of our beautifully flawed selves, and to see life’s minor setbacks for exactly what they are. Small mistakes should be met with a shrug and a laugh; major mistakes with a commitment to make amends and do better next time. We need to abandon the perfection myth and fall in love again -- with life’s ups and downs and with our own beautiful brokenness. We owe it to ourselves, and more importantly, we owe it to our daughters.

*I got these statistics from ANRED (Anorexia Nervosa and Related Eating Disorders, Inc.) You can learn more about Eating Disorders by visiting: http://www.anred.com/.