Perfection is the solution of a young mind trying to grow itself up in an atmosphere of judgement, contempt, hostility, and hatred. This perfection-as-solution–born in the absence of nurturing guidance—is a response to parental shaming.
“Shame is an experience of one’s felt sense of self disintegrating in relation to a dysregulating other” (2015 de Young).
The shame that a hostile or critical parent can engender in a young developing child when its woven throughout the fabric of their relational history risks healthy social/ emotional development. If that child is highly sensitive, it has an outsized negative effect, a traumatic effect, on social/emotional development.
In a household full of criticism—where siblings were negatively compared to each other creating cycles of jealousy and hatred, or a household of willful parental disengagement (often called neglect), where most attention offered freely was judgmental or hostile– perfection-as-solution makes sense.
A child desperate for warm connections and positive attention will arrive at perfection-as-solution as the only answer to that most painful question: how do I make them love me? If the child’s pursuit of perfection-as-solution is successful to any degree, it shines positive attention on the family, further reinforcing pursuit of perfection-as-solution. Perfection-as-solution can temporarily banish the child’s experience of shame– “their felt sense of self disintegrating”, further reinforcing perfection-as-solution as a habitual response to life’s challenges.
For the parent projecting perfection, all evidence of imperfection must be hidden. Challenges in the parent-child relationship can only be imperfect because of the child. This blaming of the child is shameful—clearly the child does not control the relationship. Since the parent cannot be accountable for any failures, the child is to blame. Children who grow up carrying parental blame are full of shame… parental blame becomes childhood shame.
Renowned healer and bestselling author Gabor Mate, MD posits that the pandemic and subsequent worldwide eruption of protests against police brutality have triggered states of “primitive agony’ in our deepest psyche. “How we perceive ourselves as being held by the world reflects how we were held in the beginning.” This agony echoes the internal states of our (dys)regulation during attachment.
Now, as adults, we can give attention, care and compassion to the wounded parts of our imperfect selves that are experiencing that ‘primitive agony’. This is how we heal. It is about the relationship we have to our worst selves, not our best selves. Perfection-as-solution has nothing to do with self-improvement. It is the attempt to appease the beast inside: AKA toxic shame.
The deepest challenge of healing is to love ourselves when we are broken, when we are guilty, when we feel, see, and act in ways that expose our personal fault lines, when we are wrong. Perfectly imperfect is our humanity. In our imperfection is the perfection of endlessly becoming who we really are. Authenticity, not perfection, is the prize worth celebrating.
DeYoung, P. (2015). Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame. New York: Routledge, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315734415
Mate, Gabor, (2020) When the World Cannot Hold Us. Psychotherapy Networker, Sept/Oct 2020