Perfectionism

I was at a conference recently where the facilitator spoke about perfectionism running through family lineages and the damage it can cause. It really struck me, and the more I’ve reflected on it, the more I’ve recognised how true it can be.

The expectation of perfection — without room for mistakes, errors or simply being human — is an incredibly high bar to live under. If we step back and really look at it, how could anyone ever meet a standard that says, “Never make a mistake”? It’s an impossible and, in many ways, bizarre expectation.

And yet, when perfectionism is passed down through generations, it can create a real sense of avoidance and intolerance around mistakes. We may learn to fear getting things wrong rather than seeing mistakes as an inevitable and valuable part of being human.

Ultimately, we learn through what we might call our mistakes — if we are given the safety and space to reflect on them with a supportive other.

This is one of the ways psychotherapy can be so supportive: creating a space to sit with our experiences without judgement, to become curious about what happened, what we might learn from it, and what we may choose to do differently next time.

Perhaps one of the greatest gifts we can give the next generation is not the expectation that they get everything right, but the knowledge that they are safe to get things wrong, to reflect, to learn, to repair and to try again.

What a gift that would be.