I’m creating an island, but it’s not the stress-free vacation kind you dream of.
I had this revelation yesterday morning as I was thinking about relationships and how they can be so exhausting and HARD. I wrote down why they were so difficult and at the end of the list, I came up with the following:
“There is no perfect partner. DeAnne, you know you are not perfect. You cannot be an island.”
I realized the health of my closest relationships reflects my own personal health and my proclivity towards perfectionism. My need to do my very best and to be the best.
I don’t accept anything less than 110%, and living a life this way is ok as long as everything is going great. But the mental exhaustion eventually catches up over time and creates a disaster. Not to mention, everything going great is completely unrealistic.
When you think only you can handle every aspect of your life in the best way possible, you end up taking on the world all by yourself. We weren’t meant to live this way.
A 2015 study in the journal of Psychiatry Research found that environmental factors play a substantial role in creating perfectionists, along with genetics. Children learn how to avoid highly negative emotional events by acting a certain way or doing certain things. We create habits of always doing something in response to uncomfortable emotions instead of feeling them.
That’s a problem.
Clinical psychologist Nick Wignall summed it up well. “Perfectionism isn’t about being perfect, it’s about feeling perfect.”
While growing up, we begin to fear negative emotions. But the truth is sadness, loneliness, fear, anger are not dangerous (unless we act out our feelings). The emotions won’t last forever - they come and go like our thoughts.
Our goal is to observe our emotions vs. take action, to become emotionally aware.
When we feel triggered (to perfectionism), what happened?
What emotion did we feel and what action did we want to take (drink, eat, sleep, exercise, etc.).
Our plight for a healthy mind requires new habits. So instead of drinking a glass of wine, we sit in our feeling(s). We want to build a tolerance not to alcohol, but to our negative emotions. The longer we can sit with them, the stronger and healthier we become.
Imagine teaching our children the ability to tolerate negative emotions. We CAN be the change we wish to see in the world.