I am going to make an assumption. Secretly, deep down, you don’t feel good enough. Nobody else knows this, or very few people do. To the outside world, you might appear ‘successful’, maybe even happy, but the underlying feeling you have is that you could, and should, be better. Here are a few things that might resonsate with you.
You put certain things off, or even avoid doing them altogether, because you fear you will fail at them.
You take on tasks, even when you are already overloaded, because ‘if you want a job done well, you should do it yourself’.
You find accepting compliments difficult, or even uncomfortable, but if someone criticises you, it stays with you for weeks, possibly longer.
There is a voice in your head that constantly says, ‘why did you say that?’, ‘what does this person think of me?’, ‘stop talking now, you sound like an idiot’.
When you make a mistake, you feel like it is catastrophic and entirely your fault, and it negates any good work you have done previously.
You basically don’t like yourself very much.
If some, or all, of these things resonate with you, you probably have what psychotherapists refer to as a ‘be perfect’ driver. What this means is that you are driven by a desire to be perfect, and when you fall short of this unrealistically high expectation (which is most of the time, as nobody can be perfect), you feel bad about yourself. This is difficult to live with. On the one hand, it can make people extremely successful, as their desire to be perfect makes them work incredibly hard. On the other hand, it can also lead to severe depression and anxiety, as the expectations you set for yourself and others are unrealsitic and can never be met - you are constantly disappointed with yourself, and quite often others, and nothing is ever good enough. This is a hard place to be.
If someone with a ‘be perfect’ driver comes to counselling, we often end up focusing on two areas. The first is where they get their sense of worth from. The desire to be perfect often comes from a place of wanting to feel worthy - of attention, love, respect, or admiration. There is often a strong need to get a sense of worth from others. The rationale is, you are only worthy and a ‘good person’, if other people think you are perfect. If you are constantly dependent on people thinking you are perfect to feel good about yourself, then no wonder you often don’t feel good about yourself. You can’t please everyone, you can’t constantly be perfect, and all humans make mistakes. So, where could you get your sense of worth? From yourself.
This is where the second area of focus comes in, becoming perfect at being imperfect. The great thing about having a ‘be perfect’ driver is that you probably want to improve yourself. Once you have identified that your desire to get a sense of worth from others is unhelpful, and that you are constantly setting yourself up for failure and disappointment by expecting perfection, you will probably want to change this. So, you need to start being perfect at being imperfect. This is hard though, because it involves accepting yourself as a flawed human being, and starting to like that flawed human being. Ironically, in order to change, you have to accept yourself as you are, warts and all. Imperfection is good enough.
In counselling, the trusting relationship between the counsellor and the client provides a space for a client to be accepted - warts and all - by the counsellor. When you share your deepest fears and imperfections with a counsellor, and they accept you without judgement, this can be a powerful experience in which a client can slowly come to accept themselves as an imperfect, but good enough, person.
I wish it wasn’t necessary to go to counselling to realise this. I wish we lived in a society where we were more forgiving and accepting of ourselves and others. However, judging others, and caring about what others think of us, has become the norm. Social media, especially Instagram, enables us to show a filtered version of our lives. The number of ‘likes’ we get, makes us feel a sense of worth, and reinforces the idea that we have to be this perfect (fake) version of ourselves to be valued. If you have a ‘be perfect’ driver, I have one more recommendation for you. Avoid Instagram.