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The trauma behind perfection

A broken hear

Does your need for perfection run deeper than you realise?

 

The danger of perfection

In my line of work – working with trauma, something I see a lot is the need to get everything right.

And not just ‘right’ but to make it perfect.

What I’ve also noticed, and what many people don’t realise, is where that need for perfection comes from.

 

The root of perfection

If you’ve suffered with any form of trauma during your childhood, and let me be clear: ANY FORM of trauma includes abuse, violence, neglect, teasing, bullying, rejection, on-going and repeated abuse, a handful of incidences, even a single traumatic event –  there is a good chance your need for perfection, and to do everything perfectly, is based on a fear of getting in trouble and being subjected to more trauma.

You see, when we’re young, we don’t have a lot of experience or understanding of our emotions and what they mean. We simply process the events and situations that we are in, and the people we are with, as ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

These two states of life are how we see and feel the world. We either like it or we don’t.

And this is where it all starts for you, as a child, trying to sort out what is happening through that simple view of the world.

Important side note: please don’t ever compare your trauma to someone else’s. Never, ever say to yourself that someone else had it worse than you so you should ignore what happened and “suck it up”. A single event can have just as much impact on someone as multiple events. Simply watching an event happen to someone else can cause trauma within you. If it affected you, scared you, caused you a great shock i.e. was unexpected – then it’s trauma and it’s a trauma to you.

 

Good and bad

This is how you have come to need everything you do to be perfect.

Because, you will feel on an unconscious level, that if you don’t, you’re going to get in trouble.

You have, without even realizing it, taken on a belief that YOU must have done something wrong.

The abuse and victimisation that you suffered through and were subjected to was taken, by you and your young mind, as a punishment.

You did something wrong.

Have this happen for long enough over many situations – hours, days, weeks and years, and it can feel like it’s not just you that is ‘bad’ but that your soul is bad too. You might feel (and act) like you’re the bad apple in every group, every situation – possibly feeling like you just don’t fit in and aren’t good enough.

This will all lead back to the belief you’re likely to have about yourself: You are bad.

You must be, right? Why else would these things that are clearly wrong in their very nature, being done to you? You must have done something wrong (bad) to deserve it and so now, bad things are being done to you as a form of punishment.

You take it on as truth: You are bad.

Girl with her head in her hands
It can feel like you are the bad one in the family.

 

Fear of getting it wrong

As per a lot of my posts I want to share with you a personal story about how the fear of my childhood affected me well into adulthood.

There are two elements to this story but both end with me, and my brother, being yelled at and hit for getting things wrong.

The first one was around doing our homework. One of the worst times of my day.

We’d come home and sit at the apricot coloured breakfast bar and read out the questions we had to answer.

Mum would be there preparing dinner with a wooden spoon in her hand.

Every time I got something wrong mum would scream “NO!”, charge her way across the kitchen and slam her wooden spoon onto the bench next to me and continue to yell and scream the question at me. The more answers we got wrong the madder she would get, and then the physical pain would start. She’d hit us with the spoons. And yes, we ended up with a few ‘half’ wooden spoons i.e. they snapped down the middle.

Our answers to questions became meeker and meeker as we became more and more fearful of what would happen if we tipped her over the edge with our wrong answers. A wrong answer, to our minds, meant pain. Emotional, mental and more often than not, physical pain.

As we got older, there was an added element of being laughed at and being humiliated for wrong answers too…

 

Punishment for making a mistake

Essentially, what she was saying to our young minds, is that when you make a mistake you will be punished.

If we managed to get an answer right, get this, we were still yelled at! “YES! Write it down then!”, she would yell.

We lived in a constant state of fear of being yelled at and walloped with whatever she had in her hand.

And dad was very much the same. Make an innocent comment or speak your truth – as all children do. (We don’t have a filter when we’re young – we say it how we see it, right?)

But do that around my dad, make a mistake, accidently trip up and break something – completely innocently, and a very large hand would smack you around the head and send you flying.

The fear I developed around making a mistake was incredibly intense. As a child, it was terrifying.

 

Years later

I was working in a corporate environment in my 30’s and one of my tasks was to send out group emails to our team of 150 people.

If I ever, and I mean EVER, sent out an email with a single spelling mistake on it (because I don’t know about you but I seem to do my best proof reading AFTER I hit the send button – and these blogs are no different actually! 😊 ), all the blood would drain from my body, into my legs, and I’d almost pass out. I was cemented to the spot, frightened that I was going to be yelled at, humiliated and physically punished.

No one in the office actually cared. No one ever came up to me and said “Marie, how dumb are you? You made a spelling mistake on that email”, because we’ve generally all done it at some point.

But that didn’t stop the fear I felt about making a mistake and getting something wrong.

 

Perfection means “I’m good”

I see various types of people and personalities emerge from an abusive and traumatic childhood.

Some people will become ‘bad’ in their nature. Simply living up to their belief that they are a bad apple – bad at their core, and so they will follow that path in life.

Young girl in a pink top sitting on the grass
Our inner child is desperate for love and compassion

They’ll follow the destructive path of proving they are the bad one because that is how they’ve processed what has happened to them. It’s what they know and what they have been taught.

You can see this today with people that we call troublemakers. The drug takers, the ‘lost causes’, the damaged people that we might say “have done it to themselves”.

Actually, in the majority of cases they haven’t. They are the ones that need the most love and compassion, because inside, is a very emotionally damaged child that doesn’t feel worthy of love. They believe they deserve pain and torment and so create chaos in their lives to prove it.

Another type of person I see is someone who strives to fit in, who is constantly beating themselves up to be better, to do it better, to get it perfect the first time – to NOT. MAKE. A. MISTAKE.

Because their inner child, the part of them still in pain, believes that they’ll be punished if they get it wrong, and is desperate to be seen as ‘good’.

A mistake, even twenty, thirty, forty years later, can affect them on a level they won’t understand or connect to, but which is very real, nonetheless.

To make a mistake means more abuse to their inner child.

And so, their need for perfection comes at a dangerous cost. It becomes an unnatural and desperate NEED to not get into trouble – to not be punished.

 

Procrastination

Procrastination can also be caused by a fear or anxiety of getting it wrong.

This fear can be that deep seated that it causes us not do it or even try.

To distract ourselves with everything but the one thing that we feel we might be judged on.

Procrastination is where I hover. I’m not about perfection and I don’t feel I bring punishment into my life. I do, however, find excuses.

I actually realised that I’m the type of person that would rather do nothing and fail than give it everything I’ve got and fail. At least if I don’t put any effort in then I won’t be disappointed and I have an excuse already on hand.

It took me a while to see the beauty in my mistakes – the valuable learning I needed.

I still now, years later, have moments of writing and creating videos which, depending on my confidence level of the day, may take a back seat to cleaning the ENTIRE HOUSE, as I’ll convince myself that that is more important.

Now I’m really not a fan of cleaning. I can think of a thousand things I’d rather be doing than cleaning my house yet again (!), but what do you know – I’ll suddenly find myself enjoying cleaning the house from top to bottom as it’s a distraction for me to not have to face being vulnerable in front of an entire world that may hold a different opinion to me or that may attack me because I say the “wrong thing”.

 

Knowing the truth

I have found when my clients have a realisation about where their trauma has directed them, it’s a wake-up moment.

When they can see and understand their drive for perfection has come from a place of fear, they are able to relax a bit more and they make massive strides in their healing journey.

However, that is not always the case…

One of my clients was scared of losing her desire for perfection because of the line of work she was in. It was a competitive industry and doing it ‘perfect’ meant a job, even being the lead of a troop.

So, the objective now was to make the journey to perfection a loving one rather than one of desperation.

 

Loving the perfect journey

Once you’re aware of the fears that drive you, it can bring you moments of clarity about your patterns and behaviours and, essentially (hopefully), allow you to take a step back and reassess your attitudes towards yourself and how you go about creating and fulfilling that.

If you acknowledge the fact that you’ve been running on fear you’re halfway there. After that, it’s simply about keeping your mind in check when you start to panic or get frustrated when you can’t or don’t get it right the first time.

 

Your fears and frustrations can be dealt with on a deeper level by using Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). This process will allow you to release the emotions on a physical level as well as emotional.

If you haven’t tried EFT before, here is a link for further information: Emotional Freedom Technique for healing

 

Be loving to yourself

The journey that we take to perfection, which you can now, perhaps, label: ‘Mastery’?, can be a loving one.

A child covered in paint
Even Picasso had to start somewhere… 🙂

It can be an expression of our deepest, most compassionate selves.

When a child falls over, do we scold her?

No, we give her love and tell her to try again.

Do the same thing with yourself.

BE a loving person to yourself.

Make everything that you do an adventure and an experience. Because it’s essentially a discovery about who we are.

Love the mistakes you make along the way. Because one of the things I’ve come to realise is we learn so much more from the mistakes and trip ups we make than we do when we get it right the first time.

Have you had those moments? You do something bang on, perfectly, the very first time and then you say to yourself “how did I do that?” – and you can’t remember or re-do it?

You KNOW you can! But you just don’t know how you got there.

And so, the journey to recreate that moment begins.

Imagine you had to teach what you’d just discovered and had ‘winged’. You couldn’t, because it had to be broken down into steps.

Your journey now is to learn the steps to mastery.

It can be beautiful if you allow it.

You can love your stumbles and trip ups as much as you love the final destination.

You won’t get in trouble for your slip ups – especially if you own them.

 

So much of what we deal with in our lifetimes can be traced back to our childhoods and how we were treated.

Mother hugging her child
So much of ourselves can be traced back to our childhood.

Is your need for perfection a stressful one?

If you’re struggling to understand why, or it’s causing you anxiety, I’m here to help.

Please get in touch.

I’d love to go on this journey with you. 🙂

Contact me here

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Diving deeper into your pain

Person free diving down to touch sea bed

How do you go deeper into your pain using Emotional Freedom Technique?

 

It’s all about questioning the pain…

Have you been tapping on an issue that has been bothering you for a while now? Perhaps it’s physical pain or maybe you’ve been feeling like you’re on an emotional rollercoaster, so you’ve focused on what’s at the surface?

It’s great if you have! Its a massive step towards taking ownership of what is going inside of us. (And around us!)

But, are you now finding that there is a limit to how far the “tap on what you know” I talked about in my previous blog can take you? (click here). Do you just know there is something deeper that you need to get to?

If you’re stuck and are asking yourself how do I go deeper using Emotional Freedom Technique, the answer is simple:

You have to ask your pain the right questions.

The hardest part about EFT

Being an EFT practitioner is all about guiding people to deep dive into the core of their physical or emotional pain. The only way we can really do that is to get people thinking about and connecting to themselves.  YOU have the answers inside of you. You know, on a deeper, hidden level, what has caused the problem. We, as EFT practitioners, are there to help support and guide you through the process of discovery and release. And we do that by asking questions.

Let me give you an example here:

Lets say you have physical pain in your back and you simply start tapping on that pain and it disappears. Great! That was just your body wanting some attention or to make you aware that it wasn’t entirely happy.

But what about when you’re tapping on the pain and nothing changes? The pain and the intensity stay the same.

This is where you have to start asking yourself, and your back pain, questions. (Yes I mean that in the literal sense. You have to talk directly to your back pain like it is an entity or a conscious part of you).

Have a conversation with your pain – like it’s a separate entity.

How do I go deeper into my pain?

Pain isn’t to be feared. Many guru’s and spiritual healers and advisors will tell you to sink into the pain. And it’s true. Facing it and acknowledging it takes courage. But not only will you move through the healing process quicker if you do that, it will also give you an incredible sense of accomplishment, confidence and personal strength. Because now YOU are in control of IT rather than the other way around.

One of the best ways I’ve found of diving deeper is to visually tune into the pain/sensation in your body and describe it in detail. (Remember that our emotions can also cause sensations in the body which is why I’m always asking people “can you feel that anger or sadness in your body?”). Use all of your senses to identify what is happening within you.

A few simple ‘sensory’ questions I’ll ask are:

  • Does it have a shape to it?
  • What about a colour?
  • Is there an outline?
  • Does it have a texture – thick, misty, light, watery? It can be anything at all.
  • How big or small is it?
  • Some people might find it has a smell or a taste.

Give as much detail as you can and also TRUST what comes up for you. You might think what you find is ridiculous, but believe it or not it’ll have a meaning for you as you dig deeper.

Shift your emotional pain: anxiety

So as another example: Lets say you’re feeling anxious and you’ve done a few rounds of tapping on the fact that you’re anxious but it’s just not shifting.

You’ve got to now ask the next stage of questions in order to go deeper.

Find where your anxiousness is within your body. You might have a sensation (big or small) in your chest, stomach, legs, neck, jaw. It could be anywhere. Don’t ignore it – even if it’s a pain or sensation you’ve had for years. Whatever it is you’re feeling physically is what you’re going to link your anxiety to at this next stage.

If you can’t feel anything at all, that’s ok, it just means the connection to the body isn’t strong – which is incredibly common. I find the more you do this work on yourself, the stronger the connection will become. It’s about building up a relationship with your body again.

In the case that you can’t feel anything at all, you can still tune into your body and see if you can locate it visually i.e. where do you imagine it would be when you close your eyes and look inside of yourself.

For the sake of this example let say that you can feel it and you’ve realised your anxiety is in your chest.

Stay tuned into that sensation in your chest and describe what it feels like. It is a tightness, a tension, is it twisting, churning or swirling – however you feel it is exactly right. Don’t doubt yourself.

Now that you’ve pinpointed it in your body, describe what it looks like. (For this exercise I usually tell my clients to close their eyes and take their consciousness into that part of their body and simply have a look around). What do you see when you look at that anxiety in your chest?

What you see isn’t a joke!

To help you feel like you’re not weird (a term generally used by my clients when they first start doing this 🙂 ), here are some strangely

There is no right or wrong to what you see.

beautiful things I have heard over the years about what people see energetically inside their bodies:

  • needles
  • peaches
  • blackness
  • leaking pipes
  • a parent
  • rocks or boulders
  • worms
  • sludge
  • bricks

There is no ‘wrong’ when you’re doing this work on yourself. Always, always, always TRUST what you first see.

Carrying on with the example above: Lets say you can feel the anxiety in your chest and it feels like a tight tension. When you look at it you see a brick that is green in colour and it appears to be heavy and rough.

If there is anything else you notice or feel, you can add that into your tapping sequence, but here you have some key points in order to help you go deeper and connect into what your body is trying to tell you. (Technically – you are still tapping on what you know, it’s just new stuff that you know now! 🙂 ).

A set up statement for the above could go like this: “Even though I have all this anxiety in my chest, and it feels tight, like a green, heavy brick is sitting in my chest. I deeply and completely love and accept myself”.

You can do many variations of that sentence. As long as you’re tuning into what you see and feel (or hear!) – then you’re listening to and acknowledging your body.

That’s stage two! 

You can still take that deeper

One of the next things I might do, depending on how the intensity is tracking i.e. is it becoming less or simply staying put, is to ask a question of the image you’re seeing inside of you.

So if we stay with the same example as above – the ‘green, heavy brick full of anxiety in the chest’. Have a conversation with it. Ask the green, heavy brick what message it has for you. What does it need to tell you? What can you do to help it release and feel safe?

Your body knows

Woman meditating
Listen to your body. It knows….

This is quite often another stage I’ll add into working with clients trying to heal. Listening to our body is so incredibly important.

Now that doesn’t mean as soon as you feel pain you run for the Panadol. That’s the complete opposite of listening.

What I’m saying is that your body’s pain is more often than not the final stage. It’s the pimple that’s ready to burst. It’s core or roots are buried somewhere deep inside. Because emotions don’t simply dissipate.

However, what I see time and time again is that if you do this work enough and you talk to your body and REALLY tune in and listen when it’s in pain, you’ll eventually not need EFT to move it. Once you’ve mastered the technique of listening to what your body and pain is trying to tell you, all you have to do is say “ok thanks. I hear you and I’m on it”, and it will literally vanish of it’s own accord.

It’s very, very powerful stuff.

Back to your anxiety:

Lets says that this ‘green, heavy brick of anxiety’ says to you “I’m scared to let go”. You can tap on that statement just as it is, as another layer, or you can ask it another question: “What specifically are you scared to let go of?”.

The answer to that is what you’ll add into your tapping sequence and will likely blow the whole thing wide open for you and give you that ‘ah-ha!’ moment.

Just to help you out with the example, lets say the green brick of anxiety is scared to let go because, if it does, it believes you’ll be attacked in some way – that is what you’ll tap on:

“Even though this green brick of anxiety in my chest is scared to let go, because it feels I’ll be attacked if it does, I deeply and completely love and accept myself. (Again, you can do many variations of that sentence but always use the information you’ve been given).

The core of your pain

What are some key questions you can use to find the core of your pain?

The example above does leave room for further exploration. If a part of you feels like it has to be on-guard because it fears being attacked – you have to find where that came from and when it started in order to really help let go of this anxiety wrapped belief you’re holding onto within your body. (The belief being you’ll be attacked in some way).

You may of heard of the basic information gathering questions: ‘who, when, what, why, where and how’?

My preference in 99.9% of cases is to leave out the ‘why’. I can go into more detail in another blog but lets just, for now, say that it’s too ‘open’ a question when you’re trying to get down to specifics. And, if used in the wrong way, asking ‘why’ can actually put you into a victim state i.e. “why is this happening to me?” – which is not going to help you to heal.

Here are some examples of questions you could potentially ask yourself in order to go deeper:

  • What specifically is causing this pain?
  • What is this related to?

    A fluffly dandelion
    You can’t heal by being fluffy round the edges
  • What was I doing when the symptoms or issue started?
  • What do I need to do to heal from this?
  • When did this start? (age, year, how long ago?)
  • When did I first start feeling like this?
  • Where is this pain be coming from?
  • Where was I when the problem showed up?
  • Who does this remind me of?
  • Who taught me this/caused me to believe this?
  • How many times did it happen?

Now those are only the tip of the iceberg and depending on what it is you need to clear will depend on the specifics of the question.

These are simply to give you an idea of what you can use in order to help yourself go deeper with EFT.

You need to get to the specifics of what it is you’re feeling if you’re going to release it. We can’t heal if we’re being fluffy round the edges….

In doing this work you are giving your body a voice!

A sign that says all of me loves all of you
Give your body a voice

Questions, questions, questions

The only way we can get to the core of our issues is to dig.

So be curious. Be open to it not always making sense. The brain can make links with the most random of events and items. (I’m speaking from my own personal experience!).

And always follow and trust what comes up for you when you’re working on yourself. It might seem ridiculous. It might not make a scrap of sense in the beginning, but the more you explore it and dig down, the more the shadows are easier to clear and release.

If you’d still prefer to have someone help you though. Someone to guide you and hold your hand whilst you go through this healing process – please reach out. Asking for help is a huge step which is to be celebrated. You’ll feel better just with that simple first step.

You are braver and stronger than you think.

 

 

Interested in getting to the heart of your pain?

I’d love to connect.

Contact me here