One of the more inconvenient realities of perfectionism is how it destroys women over time. We don’t want to acknowledge this, yet I feel compelled to use my platform to make known this shadow side of perfectionism. The high rates of depression in women during midlife, the steep spike in heart related disease and deaths, and the dispensable nature of women in business, families, and communities when they hit midlife all speak to this phenomenon. Women strive for perfection as a means to try and cling to their worth according to society, culture, family, and religion. And yet, this method is slowly killing us.
If a woman uses perfectionism throughout her lifetime as a means to create social currency, the true cost to herself is her body, her mind, and her soul. The true cost to society, on the other hand, is that she is unable to share the full capacity of all of her gifts and over time as we cripple more and more women with this perfectionistic ideal we all lose out on the gifts that this collective group could have given us. It’s hard to know what the losses really are, since it is hard to know what life would have been like had these women lived to their full potential. In essence, we cannot know what we have not experienced.
I happen to disagree with that last statement. I think that we can know what we have not experienced, or at least that we can see glimpses of it when women shed their corsets of perfectionism and live into their authenticity. When we see this we are always in awe and often inspired. I think of the recent book, Untamed, by Glennon Doyle, or the short story written by Keah Brown called Never Too Much in the Anthology You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience edited by Tarana Burke and Dr. Brené Brown.
These two women, Glennon and Keah, share with us their own journeys of wrestling through being the version of themselves the world wanted them to be, in order to live into being the women they authentically are. The reason that testimonies like these inspire us is because we can see ourselves in them. We long to be the people that break the old patterns of being the versions of ourselves that we believe others want for us and becoming the versions of ourselves that we desire to be.
So how do we break these patterns? How do we show up differently in the world? Where do we even begin to fight back the magnitude of how perfectionism, in particular, holds us back? These are great questions. And the answers to them are individual to each of us. Our journey to authenticity is one that will be unique to our individual lived experience, yet one that will be uniquely beneficial to all of us. This paradigm of taking our own heroines journey in order to become the version of ourselves the world needs, lays out just how complicated this venture will be.
As a Clinical Psychologist and an expert in helping women transition in midlife, I would say that the first step in your journey is always becoming more self-aware. Aware of how perfectionism has held you back. Learning how staying small in body, mind, and action as the “perfect woman“ has limited us to a small cage in our lives. And the worst part, acknowledging the cage was never locked from the outside so much as it was locked by our own adherence to perfectionistic ideals from within. This is a hard self realization and one that will require significant amounts of self compassion.
This would not be a journey I would tell you to enter into lightly. Instead, I would encourage you to find the resources that you need in order to practice that self compassion while coming to the self awareness that you have participated in your own suffering by aspiring to the perfectionistic ideals of culture, society, family, and religion. I would also strongly encourage doing so in community with other women who are also taking on this challenge. One of the ways that women excel is in our ability to combine resources and support with one another, and in so doing transcend our own limitations by networking with the strengths of others. What better scenario to do this in than while we journey out of perfectionism?
I strongly urge you to join us at Learn to Love Your Story, exploring the ways that we can lean into our authenticity and away from the social conditioning to which we’ve grown accustomed. You can start by joining our mailing list, listening to the podcasts, reading the blogs, and joining us for events when they come up that seem to most resonate for you. Share this journey with other like minded women. Give yourself the huge gift of showing up differently and letting go of these old patterns of suffering.
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Keywords: perfectionism, midlife crisis, women in midlife, changing the narrative, empowerment, self care, self awareness
The content in this podcast and video is not a replacement for therapy and is not clinical, medical, or mental health treatment. Dr. Natalie Marr is a Licensed Psychologist in the state of Minnesota. Her work with LearnToLoveYourStory.com and all affiliate social media entities is educational and coaching based ONLY. She IS NOT offering therapeutic services of any kind on these mediums.
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