Episode #233 - Perfectionism - Faith Crisis

Perfectionism is a very unique coping mechanism built to calm our personal anxieties.   However, it can be an often is problematic to life in this world and the church.  We can view the church and world's requirements as daunting, overwhelming and difficult to bear.  Yet when we come to understand why we use perfectionism as a coping mechanism we can better come to know the Savior and the mercies and grace of his atonement.

Transcript

Episode #233 – Perfectionism – Faith Crisis.  I am your host Damon Socha.  Today we are going to explore the idea of perfectionism.  What it is? Where it comes from and starts? And how we can manage it in our lives.  This particular topic is personal for me and so you will hear me speaking directly in the first person as I discuss it.  Let’s get started with what perfectionism is not.  When we speak of a perfectionist so often we cast a wide net and allow the fish to sort themselves out on their own.  Perfectionism is not craftsmanship.  Meaning producing a quality product or service and continuing to improve even when you have mastered the art is not perfectionism.  At least not entirely in the sense that craftsmanship deals with different emotions when it comes to perfection.  The craftsman understand that there will always be tiny flaws in his work.  They accept those flaws as part of the finished product.  Yes they will continue to hone their craft but those flaws don’t stop them from continuing to produce a fine product.  They don’t see the flaws as glaring or completely diminishing the entire product.  There is nothing wrong with producing a high quality product.  Perfectionism is also not simply desiring order and consistency in ones life.  One can certainly have a very consistent and ordered life without ascribing to the tenants of Perfectionism.  Often individuals draw peace and contentment by having ordered their life.  This is not necessarily perfectionism.

Perfectionism rises from a particular set of anxious and or fearful emotions that drive us to use it as a coping mechanism.  When you find yourself inside of perfectionism, life becomes about an image that is presented to the world.  Perfectionists tend to be more sensitive to others emotions and criticisms, tend to be more loving and kind, more compassionate, and also more reactive to pain physically and emotionally.  Perfectionists tend to avoid places where their image might be questioned or where they might feel emotional pain.  Because of their sensitivity to pain, especially emotional pain, the perfectionist presents an image to the world that allows them to avoid emotional turmoil that may lead to pain.  They are concerned with small blemishes and see them as glaring weaknesses.  Criticisms, even ones that contain significant praise are treated as daggers and become fodder for late night quarrels in the mind to be rehearsed like a play until the audience falls asleep due to exhaustion.  Any praise is quickly disregarded and banished to the darkest realms of the mind.  You see the perfectionist struggles with both praise and criticism of any kind.

Because the image must be crafted carefully so as to avoid any emotional injury, a perfectionist is always thinking and rethinking how and where those cracks in the image may appear.  Many times the perfectionist concerns turn outward and to physical things.  Skin blemishes, hair in the wrong spot, clothing, cars, homes, landscaping and so much more.  Small cracks or even imagined cracks in the image are treated as emergency surgeries before the outward world can see.  We spend a great deal of energy and time creating and maintaining this image.  So much so that we often crash and isolate ourselves when we are alone.  Our relationships tend to be at arms length until we have established some trust to let others into our outer shell and image.  This can make us appear standoffish, cliquish, or unconcerned.  Which strangely is exactly the opposite.  Most often we are compassionate, kind and loving understanding full well how difficult life can be at times.

But why? Why and how do we become perfectionists.  Is it just in our nature, our DNA as it were.  Is it in our parentage and upbringing?  Where does it originate?  Perfectionism is a unique coping mechanism.  The reality is that many things can cause us to manage our emotions in a perfectionism way.  However, the driving force for perfectionism is anxiety and fear.  We are by nature sensitive individuals in an insensitive world.  Anxiety arises from many causes.  It can be experiential in the sense that it is brought forward by experience.  It can have genetic components and negative experiences.  It can be brought about by one abusive situation or a multitude of them.  It can arise on its own due to the emotionally sensitive nature of the person.  To understand perfectionism is to understand that its origin is almost always grounded in anxiety.  Perfectionism is the art of redirecting our anxieties to cover perceived flaws and weaknesses in our lives.  The purpose is to avoid negative emotional experiences.  Perfectionism is nothing more than a coping mechanism for anxiety.  And anxiety is nothing more than the emotional and mental response to the unknown.

Most perfectionists are overthinkers and tend to overthink to the negative extreme.  We cover all the possibilities.  We do so to avoid what we refer to as a surprise.  Surprises for us are not happy events.  In fact, for someone who has anxiety, surprises are actually very negative events.  It means that we were unable to predict what might happen and this makes us feel very vulnerable and concerned that someone might somehow discover our weaknesses.  So when we are surprised we make sure to log that event and anything that might trigger that event into the mind for a further exhaustive review that will provide no benefit.  So our perfectionist behavior stems from an anxiety disorder.  Now perfectionists are not made alike.  We can be perfectionists in part of our life and not care in others.  We can be a moderate perfectionist in that we do care in some things but in other things we no longer listen to the audience.  We can be a full blown perfectionist in every area of our life.  The key to understanding the perfectionist is what causes them anxiety.  It is the underlying anxiety that induces the brain into this perfectionist lifestyle. 

I was blessed with relatively severe anxiety as a child and through my teenage years.  I worried about everything and anything and naturally built my image to align with what I thought would provide the least resistance.  That is what we are all about as perfectionists.  We really want the path of least resistant because any resistance heightens our already anxious mind and body.  We are creating an image to limit our anxiety or manage it in a sense.  So I started early creating this protected image.  Now some might call this masking and perhaps perfectionism is a form of masking. But I crafted my image over time and through my teenage years into early adulthood.

Now in addition to the normal pressures of life, I like many of you had the pressures of a Christian life.  The way that I was supposed to live, think, feel and be.  This naturally added to my anxieties and so I built an image within the church membership as well.  When we build these protective layers to manage the anxiety, we tend to build them to suit our audience.  For instance, I had a natural ability to retain doctrinal knowledge, and apply it.  That became part of my image, although I will admit that creating such an image requires significant dedication to that the image itself does not fall apart.  We will enlarge and incorporate our strengths into our image and tend to minimize our weaknesses to the extend that the image we create is not always and perhaps never really is in alignment with who we are and how we are progressing spiritually.

We can spend so much time building and maintaining the image that we have little time to work on things that matter most in our lives.  Our mind is often occupied with what could have been.  We will dwell in the past and become so focused on predicting the future that our world may quickly fall apart when something such as death or a long term illness arises.  As perfectionists we are so often focused on the small things that preparing for large scale events just never occurs.  We need control or at least to feel control in our lives and so we tend to ignore those large scale events in mortal life.  We may also do just the opposite and obsess ourselves with large scale what-ifs.  What if my spouse died?  What if a tornado hits us?  What if World War III comes?  Control is so critical to our nature when we have serious anxiety problems.  Control and predictability over life’s events provides us the antidote to our anxiety.  At least that is our mantra.

We deep down know that full control over the events in our lives is not feasible or desirable from a gospel sense.  But it is the driving force that allows us to eventually sleep at night.  When we apply the perfectionist coping mechanism to the gospel, it can take on a whole new meaning and cause a significant increase in our efforts, both for building the image and the maintenance of it.  Eventually within the gospel we are faced with the effort problem.  The gospel requires both faith and effort for us to obtain salvation.  We become acutely aware at an early age that obedience is a primary concern in our lives.  Sin cannot be tolerated.  Hell is real.  Poor choices lead to hell and se we become focused on our behaviors.  So not only is effort a concern but lack of effort or effort in the wrong direction is also problematic.  It is here where those of us afflicted with anxiety begin to build the perfectionist coping mechanism.  The goal is eternal life.  To obtain eternal life, I must become like the Savior.  To become like the Savior I must be obedient to the commandments.  To reduce my anxiety about what I must do to become like the Savior and to reduce the unknowns I am going to set up and organize my activities so that I am in compliance with the commandments.  But there is no real guideline as to how to do this.  So I begin by making rules about what I will do and won’t do.  I make rules about scriptures, temple attendance, music, my communications with others, my lifestyle, what I watch, what I listen to and so forth.  Everything in life has a rule but that would be too simple to create rules and just follow them.  The perfectionist is not ever satisfied with the rules and boundaries they create.  They are consistently reviewed and reformed.  Mistakes are magnified, successes diminished.  They become increasingly concerned about the perfect set of rules.  The reason for this is simple.  This is what a person with anxiety can control.  They can control their actions and so they focus heavily on those outward actions.

The problem that the perfectionist cannot fully control the outcome or salvation.  The Savior is by nature a large contributor to our salvation and provides guidance and direction on a regular basis.  A perfectionist will look for recognition and praise from the outside religious world to know how they are progressing.  They will regularly wonder what the Lord actually thinks of them and if they will ever make it to salvation.  Deep down they rationally understand that the Lord can save everyone but they doubt their personal weaknesses can be overcome.  They doubt that they could ever control their actions sufficiently to bring them into compliance with celestial behavior.  The problem with perfectionism is that is runs on anxiety.  The gospel runs on love not anxiety and guilt.

Perfectionists always feel condemned.  They rarely feel the love of the Savior in a merciful way.  They struggle to feel the uplifting grace provided through the Savior’s atonement.  They rarely feel truly worthy of the Savior’s time or efforts.  This is not because they don’t believe or would believe.  It is because anxiety is a problematic emotion in the body and it tends to block feelings of love, peace, and hope.  Anxiety is a difficult beast of an emotion.  It will cause serious doubts to occur on a regular basis within our souls, when no doubt should exist.  Because it is the nature of the perfectionist to reduce anxiety in their lives, they often find the gospel daunting, unforgiving and exhausting.  They spend so much time trying to create a celestial set of rules and image to appease their anxieties that they never really get a chance to know and feel the Savior’s love in a deep and meaningful way.  They never feel enough to others or to the Lord.  They can feel as though the gospel is a heavy burden and can begin to see it as a cross to bear rather than a loving and forgiving environment.  They fully see and understand the judgement and justice side of the atonement through their anxiety but struggle to feel the compassion, love, understanding and kindness the Savior has for them.  And so when burdens get to heavy to handle and we are struggling with perfectionist anxieties, exiting the gospel can feel like a real option.  So often this is where we see the faith crisis occur.  When our anxieties and pressures become to much and the image we have created is to heavy to bear the whole thing collapses upon itself and we retire from church service.  It is not because we do not believe, because we do.  It is not because we cannot live the principles, because we can.  It is because our anxieties have stretched us so thin that we cannot see another way out.

So if we find ourselves in this perfectionist way of life as so often I have, we must come understand and trust in a loving Savior who sees your difficulties and sacrifices and says well done though good and faithful servant rather than couldn’t you have done a little better.  We must give our anxieties to the Savior.  Those anxieties that have caused our coping perfectionism to occur.  This is no easy task.  To give up anxieties that are deeply lodged in our minds and hearts can feel almost impossible.  It is these anxieties that have kept us from emotional pain and suffering.  If we give them up we become exposed to the very thing we are trying to avoid.  Yes that is true but we must understand what it means to give our anxieties to the Lord.  We must first express these anxieties and problems to the Lord and work to receive answers and healing.  If we have anxieties about our body, the Lord is willing to hear those concerns. Whatever our concern he is willing to hear.  The second thing we must do is to confront our anxieties and fears with the Lord.  Confronting may take on many forms but the key to any confrontation is to see it in the light of truth.  So often the anxieties we fear most melt under the light of absolute truth.  Third we ask for help from the divine source.  And he will help us to move mountains if necessary.  We cannot address perfectionism at the point of our behaviors.  Those behaviors are coping mechanisms for the deeper problems brought about by anxiety.  We must address our anxieties with the Lord and learn to trust in his Redeeming love.

What does this mean in practical terms?  We ask for help with our anxieties and we search for answers to our difficulties.  So often much of these anxieties can only be address by the Lord and his power to heal.  So many of our anxieties have come about by mortals who are imperfect and sometimes even malicious.  Reducing our anxieties is coming to terms with our past in a way that the Savior can provide his healing balm.  When we reach out to the Savior even in small ways he can heal the wounded soul and fill it with love and trust where darkness and emptiness dwell.  It may take some time to work through our perfectionist coping mechanisms.  These types of mechanisms often come in layers and interwoven to each other.  The untangling, separating and healing process will be no easy task and certainly we can look to others to help but most often pouring out our heart to the Savior to ease the burdens and to heal the wounded soul is the remedy we most need.  May you find rest and peace this week as you find new meaning, healing and hope through the atonement of Jesus Christ.  Until next week do your part, so that the Lord can do his.