Perfectionism tends to involve the belief that no matter what your problems are, you will always continue to do so the problem.
There has been a lot of discussion over the past week cutting avoiding people and whether or not we should be more tolerant of people with different cultural and political beliefs. So those who specifically struggle with perfectionism and social anxiety more broadly, they are caught between competing perspectives, both based on a strong sense of responsibility.
Yet we hardly ask ourselves: but what do we do? You want to?
And just as rarely do we ask ourselves whether we are demanding too much from those who have already given much. In cognitive behavioral therapyWe notice the cognitive distortions, the pattern conclusions distorted by poor reasoning, that people often engage in. One of these is personalization, or taking too much responsibility for the outcomes. Sometimes we think our decisions are more influential than they are. At other times we believe that a certain outcome is inevitable because of some essential characteristic of us, such as when we think we failed a test because we were stupid, rather than because external factors contributed to it. This entails a high degree of self-interest. So the recent stories surrounding the elections have only stirred up dormant tendencies in many of us.
In difficult relationships, perfectionists tend to fluctuate between the strong desire to improve the other person, believing that they can save him if he works hard enough, and the equally intense desire to improve himself, to become more tolerant, even like a Buddha. Now there is the perspective that cutting people off is the only moral solution. Being pulled in different directions by competing loyalties, tension tends to cherish shame because you are indecisive and then avoid.
Are you too soft to end a relationship, too indifferent or cruel? Or are you an enabler by persevering? The problem isn’t choosing the wrong choice; it’s about using current circumstances to justify a deep-seated tendency. So if you’re used to cutting people off, this will just be a reason to do so, and the same can be said for people pleasers. Not much thought goes into it. During the treatment I often ask my questions perfectionist patients to think about what they hope to achieve with their decisions, exploring the likelihood of fantasized outcomes. It’s probably unsustainable to stay in relationships, mainly because you think your hearts, even your own, will change; none of us are that important. And make them believe that you serve a greater good with it punishment probably won’t change much either.
Personally, like many other perfectionists, I maintained relationships with incompatible others because I clung to my own perfectionism youth and childish fantasy to be liked by everyone. Above all, I wanted to feel safe in a broad community. Essentially, my motivation for tolerance was selfish, because I couldn’t tolerate conflict or much discomfort. So while my intentions may have seemed good at first, in reality I was avoiding pain because of a misconception about love.
Likewise, many people abruptly cut off from living their own lives debt and maintain a sense of self-righteousness, showing loyalty to their own party. To be clear, it’s not that any of these reasons are bad or wrong; it is that everything we do, even when we think we are acting out of duty, is partly self-preserving. When we automatically moralize our decisions, we often fail to take into account what is practical due to blinding vanity.
Knowing myself, I decided to cut people off because I knew how much I could handle. After repeated attempts to convince them, the individuals I no longer spoke to continued to cling to their regressive views, even fooling me when they did not outright deny them. As I minimized my self-interest, I asked myself: How much love do I really want to give, knowing how little there was for me? For those who want to go further than that: you can. And for those who are ready to give up, I get it.
There are no concrete answers about how to approach difficult friends and family members, but I can tell you with a fairly high degree of certainty that personalization, ego, self-importance, whatever you want to call it, leads us to falsely believe that we are special as we are not. Those who rigidly advocate a specific position tend to lack humility and rarely change the world because they are essentially like the rest of us: confused and insecure. We play our part, we make mistakes, we adapt and we try again. That is all our country can ask of us; that’s all we have to ask of ourselves.