Sound like you? If so, you know all too well the emotional price one pays for being perfectionistic. The need to be perfect creates a no-win scenario. When you achieve something, all you can say to yourself is, “That’s what I should have done. No big deal.” If you fall short, though, even just a little, you no doubt think, What is wrong with me? What a stupid idiot I am! I can’t do anything right. Either way, you lose.
If I sound especially outspoken on this lie, it’s because I have battled it ever since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I remember as a youngster being upset after hitting a home run during a Little League game because it hit the top of the outfield wall before it went over (a “perfect” home run, of course, clears the fence by at least fifty feet!). I remember being bothered that I made a 100 on a quiz in elementary school one time because there were 5 bonus points, and I didn’t get any of them. As a tennis player in high school and college, I’d hurl tennis rackets across the court when I didn’t play “perfectly.” I broke so many rackets in anger, I kept the local sporting goods store in business. I made a fool of myself on more occasions than I care to admit. Why? Because I believed it wasn’t good enough unless I played perfectly.
Jim began to face his struggle with perfectionism during our work together. A couple of things I challenged him on were accepting that he was a human being, not a machine, and learning to take small steps rather than always “swinging for the fence” in everything he did. One of our exchanges went like this:
“Look, if I don’t strive to be perfect, I’ll just be mediocre,” Jim said, admitting his biggest fear.
“So, you want to be a robot?” I asked.
Jim had been tapping his fingers on the chair’s arm. He stopped his tapping. “What?”
“Only a robot, a machine, can be that perfect.”
Jim laughed. It was the first time I’d seen him laugh in several sessions. “Funny you should put it that way; I often feel like a robot or that I’m trying to be like one.”
“And how does that feel?”
“Awful.” Jim sighed. “I feel stuck. Clogged up. Like I can’t be a normal person.”
“That’s it,” I said. “Your perfectionism isn’t really allowing you to be a human being, is it? Jim, as paradoxical as it seems, I think you will find that the more human you allow yourself to be and the more realistic your standards become, the happier you will be and the better you will actually do. You can have your cake and eat it too—achieve your best but get to be a healthy human being in the process.”
Jim thought a minute. Then he said, “That sounds good in theory, but how do I know when I’m being realistic and not perfectionistic?”
“That’s a good question. You’re a golfer, right? What’s your average score over eighteen holes?”
“I usually shoot around 90,” he said.
“Could you leave this office today and shoot a 72?” I asked.
“No, that wouldn’t be possible,” he admitted.
“Why not?” I pressed.
“It’s just not realistic. Nobody can shave that many strokes off his score in one try. At least I couldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t it be realistic, then, to try to make small improvements in your golf game? What about realistic goals such as keeping your head down more often or keeping your left arm stiffer so you can drop a stroke or two off your score in the months to come rather than perfectionistically stepping out on the golf course thinking you should play like Tiger Woods right now? In its extreme form, your perfectionism is the equivalent of thinking you should hit a hole in one every time you step up to the tee. Nobody, not even Tiger Woods, can do that, and it is just downright self-defeating to try.”
Jim tapped his fingers on the chair’s arm for a long moment until finally he said, “I’m beginning to see what you’re getting at. I suppose I could work on making small improvements, a little at a time.”
Jim was starting to get it. He first accepted that perfectionism is self-defeating. He began to see that beating it demanded that he allow himself to make the same mistakes that other mortals make. He had to focus on doing his best and not worrying about how he compared to others. It meant letting “good enough” be good enough. It meant being willing to see mistakes as an opportunity to learn and grow rather than as a launching pad for self-hate and condemnation. It meant focusing on making progress toward a goal rather than demanding to be there right now.
Jim is working hard to defeat his perfectionistic approach to life. Oh, he is still a “driver” by nature and probably always will be to some degree, but he is slowly learning to accept his limitations as a human as he holds himself up to more realistic standards. For the first time in years he is beginning to feel some satisfaction and contentment in his life. He is beginning to experience positive feelings as the lie of expecting himself to be perfect is gradually done away with. Jim, in a sense, has joined the army in that he now focuses on being “all that he can be” rather than trying to be somebody perfect that he never could be. And, oh, yeah, his golf game has gotten better.
“I Must Have Everyone’s Love and Approval.”
People who believe this lie are basically saying to themselves, “It is essential that everyone I come into contact with like me/accept me/approve of me/love me/think I’m the greatest thing since sliced bread, or my life as I know it isn’t worth living.” Such people become social chameleons in that they often change “color” to fit the interpersonal “terrain” they are in so that everyone will approve of them. But after people do this long enough, they lose all sense of who they really are, their true “color” as persons. “Who am I? What do I really think? What do I really feel?” These are the questions I hear from clients burdened by this lie.
Denise grew up being a “pleaser,” and she derived most of her identity and sense of security from keeping people happy with her. Her grades were always good. She rarely caused her parents any trouble, and she went along with her friends on most everything. Now at age twenty-three, she was beginning to see that all the years of pleasing others had come with a big price tag. One of her first statements to me told the whole story: “I can’t stand it when someone is upset with me. I feel that I have to do something to make him feel better toward me.” Then she glanced down. She was not one for a lot of eye contact.
“Something happen recently?” I ventured.
“I started going to a church that’s a different denomination from my parents’. They don’t like it and are putting pressure on me to switch back,” she mumbled.
“How would you feel if you did?”
Denise looked me straight in the eye. “I’d hate it. This new church is what I have been looking for, and I feel closer to God there. But Mom and Dad, they’re making me crazy. I feel as if I’m about to explode! I don’t know what to do!”
“I get the impression you know what to do.”
“I do? What? You mean, I need to go to this new church?”
“Isn’t that what you’re telling me? Don’t let me put words in your mouth,” I said, knowing full well she might try to please me too.
“Yes,” she said quietly, “it is. I really want to stay there.”
“What about your parents’ approval?” I asked.
“I sure hate not having it. Maybe I can explain it to them and they’ll understand?”
“And if they don’t?”
“I would feel horrible,” she said. “I know I need to be more independent of what they think, but I really struggle with it.”
Denise’s need for approval was a no-win scenario in the same way that perfectionism is. If you get someone’s approval, you can’t really enjoy it because you changed “colors” to get it and weren’t really being yourself. Yet if you let yourself be who you are and someone doesn’t like you, you become anxious and knotted up inside. Each day is a lose-lose proposition and presents the same life-draining task: Can I gain and keep people’s approval?
This lie puts our emotional well-being into the hands of oth
ers. It gives people a sizable amount of power over us, and some people will gladly take advantage of it. Manipulation, especially from those nearest to us, is made far too easy. We pleasers end up being victims who take better care of others than of ourselves, often hiding our ever-growing resentment and bitterness in the process.
The truth is that some people aren’t going to like us no matter who we are or what we do. In an attempt to gain everyone’s love and approval through chronic pleasing, though, we lose any sense of who we really are. We can never really enjoy it when others like us because we feel that we “faked them out” in getting their approval. The bottom line is that we must be courageous enough to be who we are and stand up for what we know is right, whatever the cost may be, and let it be the other person’s problem if he doesn’t like us for it.
As a person who struggles with wanting to please others, I know all this is easier said than done. It is hard to make the shift from seeking everyone’s approval to authentically being who you are and living your life by proper values and ethics. Steps in that direction are very painful. Not taking those steps, though, makes our lives even more painful. In the end, having a lot of people’s approval won’t be meaningful if it came at the expense of living life with integrity. What does it profit us if we gain the whole world’s approval and lose our own souls in the process? Absolutely nothing.
“It Is Easier to Avoid Problems Than to Face Them.”
When I was a college professor, I noticed an extremely interesting phenomenon among my students. I’d give them a reading assignment, but most of them wouldn’t do it! Can you imagine? I found that fact out by giving pop quizzes (you should have heard the moans!). The students who didn’t do the assignments must have believed that the best way to deal with a problem in life is to avoid it. Oh, the “avoiders” wasted a lot of time worrying, made Fs on the quizzes, ended up doing poorly in my class, and often crammed four years of college into seven, but they still thought avoiding painful things was the easiest route to go.
Other students, fewer in number, took the approach of doing the assignments whether they wanted to or not. The “facers” went back to their dorm rooms, apartments, or the campus library and cracked the books, however little desire they might have had to do so. When they were quizzed, they were ready. When final grades were given out, they did well. When four years of college had passed, they walked across the stage and received their degrees.
In life “avoiders” ignore problems, hoping they will either go away or be solved by others for them. Of course, we all know that problems just don’t go away and that our lives get much worse when we are unwilling to face them. Psychiatrist Scott Peck noted in The Road Less Traveled:
Fearing the pain involved, almost all of us, to a greater or lesser degree, attempt to avoid problems. We procrastinate, hoping that they will go away. We ignore them, forget them, pretend they do not exist. . . . We attempt to get out of them rather than suffer through them.
This tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness.2
I am concerned that far too many of us as parents damage our children by rescuing them from facing their problems in the misguided “love” empowered by this lie. I, unfortunately, do this with my kids every so often.
A number of years ago, we began attending a new church. My young (at the time) son, Matt, wasn’t thrilled with the Sunday school class. And at a very high decibel level, he expressed his feelings each time we dropped him off. It was unpleasant, to say the least, to walk away from him crying and frightened as he was. For six Sundays in a row, I wanted to say the heck with it, turn around, pick him up, and take him into “big” church with us. That short-term solution would have made his problem go away and all of us feel better. The long-term result, though, would have been disastrous. He’d begin to expect me to rescue him whenever he cried loudly enough about other things, and I’d be stuck in a pattern of being the rescuing Dad with a spoiled brat of a kid. So I stuck it out, faced the problem, and made Matt face his—being in a Sunday school class he initially didn’t like. And as often is the case, Matt grew to enjoy Sunday school to the point that he’d become upset if he couldn’t go. Go figure.
Yet I still mess up. One night during the last school year I was up until two in the morning putting the finishing touches on my son’s science project while he had a grand old time sleeping. I was facing his problem for him, not making him face it himself. Ugh! I hate it when I do that!
When parents make a habit of rescuing a child from her problems, the child is deprived of the chance to develop the appropriate coping skills she’ll need for handling life later on. The child often turns into an adult who is incompetent, lacks confidence, and constantly looks to other people to solve her problems. We must, absolutely must, show our kids how much we truly love them by making them face their own problems even if they think we are “the most horrible, awful parents on the planet” for a while. It may take them twenty years or so, but they will thank us later.
We, as adults, must model all this for our children by facing our own problems for them to see. We can’t afford to be like my college students who run from doing their homework just because it is unpleasant. Each day has enough problems of its own, and these problems become like a huge snowball rolling downhill and crushing us at the bottom if we don’t have the courage to face them every day.
Those who avoid their problems usually end up with more problems in the long run. Those who face their problems each day save themselves a great deal of unnecessary suffering down the road. It’s as simple as that.
“I Can’t Be Happy Unless Things Go My Way.”
I once had a teenage client who was quite obsessive about things having to go a certain way for him to have a good day, so I asked him to write a list of what would have to happen for a day to be a good one. His incredibly detailed list included the following:
• Wake up to my favorite music playing on the clock radio.
• Wear certain clothes and tennis shoes.
• Don’t have to eat anything I don’t like for breakfast.
• Get to sit in the back of the school bus.
• All my friends are nice to me all day long.
• Get to go skateboarding at the end of the day.
• No homework.
• Get to watch my favorite TV shows all evening.
• Get to go to bed when I want to.
• Parents don’t bug me about doing chores or keeping my room clean.
The list was so long and detailed that it was literally impossible for things to go just as he wanted. Consequently, he’d never had a happy day. Something always spoiled it.
Be honest: Are you the type who can enjoy life only if things go the way you want them to? Can you be happy if your car breaks down, someone talks too loudly in a movie theater, service is slow in a restaurant, a friend is five to ten minutes late all the time, and the cleaners ruin your favorite outfit? Yes, you say?
In reality, things sometimes (oftentimes?) don’t go the way we want them to. That is an inescapable reality of life. Traffic lights turn red right as we get to them, people interrupt us when we are busy, kids spill grape juice on the brand-new carpet, and companies lay us off when they downsize. Welcome to the real world. But how many of us have come to truly accept that about life without allowing it to turn into a huge source of resentment? How many of us have really come to grips with life being difficult? From my observations, not very many.
Some years ago, I put a videotape in our VCR, and the tape came straight back out! Since our VCR doesn’t have an automatic eject feature, I lifted the little plastic door to see what the problem was and guess what—inside our expensive VCR were two toy cars, a stick, and a couple of Band-Aids! My young son had stored his most prized possessions there. At that moment, with a costly repair bill dancing through my brain, I was more than a little angry that life wasn’t going my way. And at that same moment,
I told myself the lie that I couldn’t be happy (or content or peaceful or thankful or anything else emotionally “good”) given what had just happened. What a horrible price we pay for thinking things have to go our way in order for us to be happy.
I see the “my way” lie at its worst in marriage. The “I” in many marriages is so strong that the “we” is never allowed to develop. These marriages often become nothing more than two “I’s” pulling in separate directions and fighting all the time, sometimes over the silliest matters.
Jon and Debbie, a young couple I’ve been counseling, come to mind. They had been college sweethearts, inseparable. But during the first half-dozen or so sessions they had with me, they sat at opposite ends of the couch. For five years they’d been married, and except for the first few months, their whole marriage had been a battle of wills.
“I feel Debbie always has to get her way,” Jon bitterly remarked in one session.
“I feel the same way about you,” Debbie chimed in. “You’re always so focused on what you want that what I want never gets noticed.”
“That isn’t true. I do things for you all the time,” Jon answered.
“Only things you don’t mind doing,” Debbie muttered, inching even farther into the corner of the couch.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s stop a minute. How do both of you feel about the word we?”
They both looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Debbie finally said.
“The I in your marriage is stronger than the we, and both of you are resentful about that. Do you think in I or we terms?”
“Well, I guess mostly I,” Jon said, leaning closer, his eyebrows cocked in the suspicious position.
The Lies We Believe Page 3