Friday, 10 March 2023

Perfectionism — A trauma response.

 Author: Amaka Babundo (Alias: Full-time Baby girl πŸ˜ŒπŸ’…



Recently, it dawned on me that most of our mental health concerns are related to past traumas. As a result, when I heard someone on a podcast say, "We're all adults facing childhood trauma," it really resonated with me.


Now that I've given it some serious thought, I realize how accurate that remark is, and how true it actually is.


Perfectionism is easily one of the worst traumas affecting many adults around the world today. In the face of it, a person thinks, “well, if it wasn't about doing everything right, I'd have been worried.” But the hard part is, perfectionism doesn't end at just that. It's a whole lot more. Think about doing everything right to the point where you're literally sick and depressed because you missed one mark out of a hundred in an exam? Think about wanting everything to go your way all the time?

See now?


What makes it even much worse is, the trauma that's the root cause of this behavioral anomaly, is usually in some past event which makes solving the issue two times harder. Not only because one might have forgotten which experience exactly but also because it's become an albeit seemingly indelible habit.


I guess that's why they say, “old habits die hard.” Yes, because you've come to recognise it as a norm and it's in the blood and the brain is now used to it.


Although the thoughts of attaining the level where we do just about everything perfectly is alluring to every human, it is equally rather ironic, that our greatest strength lies in embracing our imperfections and in making peace with the very fact that absolute perfection is not within our domain and so, all we can do is only try. 


Perfectionism stems from desiring everything in your life to be perfect but as humans, the only perfect thing in our life is our imperfection.

  

Trauma on the other hand is a disturbing experience and it could be as a result of sexual assault, child abuse, death of a loved one, among other things.


What perfectionism does is to give you the impression that for you to heal in whatever trauma that happened in your past, you have to ensure that everything in your life is perfect. 


There is no problem with this but the fact that your actions are tied to a negative and strong emotional wound from the past provide a tiny opening for an extreme obsession in relation to the quality of your actions. 


 So, you're simply pulling so much emotional baggage from the past, like a heartbreak, which corners you into a corridor where you think and accept the fact that if you, maybe, clean your house a million times a day, then it will be clean, and maybe, that will heal your heart. 

Only problem is that it won’t. Cleaning your house more times over is a temporary distraction to keep you from the actual cause of your emotional hurt. 


“What you need to heal from trauma is to go through it.”


Allow yourself the chance to cry, eat, rewatch the same movies over and over again and pretty much do anything that makes you happy, then remind yourself that there is only one “you” in the world and heartbreaks are only a part of life, not the end of it.

2 comments:

  1. I agree with you. Myself, I am in an eternal struggle with perfectionism and it's it's biting hard.

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    1. I hope and pray that you'll be able to break free soon. 🀍

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