The Perfection Trap

How good is “good enough”? Isn’t this a question that plagues us all?

If you grew up with a narcissistic parent, this is probably something that has crossed your mind numerous times, but have you ever tried to really answer it?

Have you ever tried to define perfection? “That which is without flaw,” seems to fill the bill but for one thing…without flaw in whose eyes? That makes perfection a very subjective thing and, because it is so subjective, virtually unattainable.

Perfection is a pernicious, amorphous, unachievable goal that locks you into a struggle that is impossible to win. Seeking perfection can be your entire life, with no feeling achievement whatsoever. Pursuing perfection (as opposed to excellence) is a guaranteed way to live your life feeling like a failure.

My NM was a fault finder…really a fault finder…so much so, if she couldn’t see a flaw in something, she would invent one. But that was seldom necessary because she set standards (always for others, not for herself) that were impossible to achieve. It took me years to figure it out, but the reality was, nobody was supposed to succeed…if you succeeded, the bar was too low, so she simply raised it and discounted the previous achievement in light of the new bar. It wasn’t enough to get some As on the report card, they had to be all As…and when they were all As, then it was discounted because not all of the subjects were difficult and academic…what value is an A in PE, even if PE is a required course and a kid can’t get out of it and take astrophysics in its place? Of course, advanced academic courses or subjects she didn’t know anything about were discounted as useless, so an A in French…even awards for French…were of no consequence. There was always…always…a way to discount an achievement and make it fall short of perfection.

When your parent is a perfectionist, mistakes are never allowed. Never mind that mistakes are the most valuable learning tool you can ever have, the perfectionist parent pooh-poohs that and expects perfect performance from you the first time, every time, whether it is hitting a baseball, mopping a floor, or learning the multiplication tables. If you don’t have it and have it 100% by the time that parent expects it, regardless of such things as eyesight, inexperience, physical strength, or intellectual affinity, then you are deficient in some way: lazy, inattentive, stupid, wilful, obstinate, careless…there are a whole litany of adjectives to describe the NParent’s perception of a child as inadequate and disappointing because the child failed to measure up to that parent’s expectation…and that is what it is all about: expectation.

When you grow up with the idea that nothing is acceptable but perfection and you have never been able to achieve that perfection, you grow up with a perception of yourself as being fatally flawed: you can never do anything right, no matter how hard you try. Perfectionists think that is supposed to be an incentive to you to try even harder…approval is out there, dangling just out of reach, just waiting for you to achieve that perfection. But for a lot of people, it just doesn’t work that way.

If I walked you to the edge of a steep cliff and said to you “Fly!” you would look at me like I was crazy. If I then started calling you names and berated you for being cowardly, unwilling to make an honest effort, and a shirker, you would be certain I was crazy because you would know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that what I was expecting of you was not possible. You not only wouldn’t try it, you wouldn’t even feel bad about not trying it, would you?

And yet when our parents set impossible tasks before us, we tried and, rather than be rewarded for our efforts, we were castigated for our failures. As a child, I was afraid to put my face in the water, which severely inhibited my ability to learn how to swim. The moment the littlest bit of water got in my nose, I totally panicked, complete with screaming and windmill arms. It wasn’t pretty.

When my grandmother learned why I failed Red Cross swimming lessons at the age of 12, she went out and bought me a nose clip type of nose plug…and when I took the lessons again, the problem was solved and I learned to swim. My mother, by contrast, derided my need for the nose clip, saying she would never have bought me one, and then derided me further by jibing that it took me until 12 years of age and taking the swimming lessons twice to learn how to “dog paddle.” My sainted little brother had taught himself to swim in a bay near our house, without a nose clip, and he could swim underwater better than I could swim on top.

In retrospect, I realize that if I had made the Olympic swimming team, my mother would have found a way to minimize it, to find fault with me or my performance, and cloak the whole thing in the guise of it being for my own good because if I don’t know where the faults in my performance are, I cannot fix them and be perfect.

Sounds rational and logical right up to the point that you acknowledge that, by and large, perfection is not an attainable goal for humans and aspiring to perfection is a guaranteed way to make yourself neurotic…or worse.

The absolute worst part of this is, if we were raised by a parent like this, we internalize it and take it into adulthood with us and we become the insatiable beast expecting perfection of ourselves. It affects different people different ways, but I have seen a lot of people who respond to it with paralysis…and I am sure you know some who have done the same thing: bright, talented, capable people who don’t even come close to their potential because they are afraid of failing…and they avoid failing by not really trying. Some self-sabotage, others simply never set their sights above easily attainable goals, and other simply don’t make any effort at all and just drift through life.

How different might their lives have been if their parents viewed mistakes as learning tools, expected them, and focussed on the effort and what was achieved rather than that which was not? There are an awful lot of us who would rather not try than risk failure or even partial success: it is guaranteed success or nothing at all.

Harbouring the belief that you must succeed wildly on your first effort can paralyze a person. It can put you in the perpetual planning stage or it can put you into a kind of limbo where you procrastinate until you forget, and when you are reminded, you punish yourself with guilt until you can forget again. (I am sure you can guess how I know this…) Writing this blog has helped me to silence the voice of my NM, that internalized voice that doesn’t want me to write drafts or proof read or change anything because it “should have been done perfectly the first damned time.” (And fast, too…taking time for research is proof, to that perfectionist ghost in my head, that I don’t know what I am talking about…if I need to research it, I must not know it already.)

Some of us, instead of succumbing to the nagging voice of doom in our psyches, rebel. To hell with perfection, I’ll do it my way. Ok…maybe good in concept, but if your way turns out to be truly slap-dash and half-assed, you’ve accomplished nothing of value except, perhaps, a rather childish bit of rebellion and acting out. There is a right way to do some things (generally measured by the outcome) and nobody wants to eat off inadequately washed dishes or sleep on sheets that haven’t been changed since the end of Desert Storm. Not trying, not making a sincere effort to do a good job of something is a form of rebellion and it doesn’t serve you any better than paralysis.

To get out of being stuck between paralysis and rebellion, I had to completely re-think my attitudes and beliefs about achievement, effort, accomplishment and come to some real-world assessments of my skills, abilities, interests and talents. I had to learn to create realistic expectations of myself because that, when you drill down to the core of the issue, is what it is all about: expectations. The Ns in your life have expectations of you and you did not meet them…and once you have internalized their voices, you have expectations of yourself that you will never, ever be able to meet, expectations of perfection, the definition of which get adjusted with every success so that it does not include that success.

I had to remind myself that being good at something doesn’t happen overnight. It took me time and many failures to learn to ride a bicycle, roller skate, swim, and do a whole host of other things…I didn’t just get up and do them perfectly the first time. It also took me an entire winter of bruised tail bones and sore ankles to come to the realization that, pretty as it looked when others did it, pirouetting on the ice in pretty little ice skating dresses was probably not going to be a part of my future. You also have to know your limits…and when to quit.

It was not easy to look at my mistakes as learning experiences. Due to my conditioning as a child, I felt humiliated by them, believed others were secretly snickering behind my back, and saw failure in my future. But for some odd reason, I was able to help others to not see their errors as harbingers of doom but as clues to heed in fine tuning whatever it was they were trying to achieve “Ok, you now know that that doesn’t work, so next time, don’t do that, try something different…” And somewhere along the line, I began hearing that voice in my head, overlaying the one that kept haranguing me for my ineptitude.

At one point it dawned on me that I was judging myself by the standards of another person, not by my own. I was ok with other people making mistakes and learning from them, but I wasn’t ok with me doing the same, which finally struck me as absurd. From then on, I began a conscious dialog with myself, even sometimes saying aloud “ok, that didn’t work…wonder if this will…” so that I could consciously imprint the idea of mistakes, errors, failures, as learning tools. When I first moved to Johannesburg I couldn’t understand why I had suddenly become so inept in the kitchen. At first I suspected it was a subconscious rebellion on my part because I had come to Joburg kicking and screaming in protest (my husband was transferred and I did not want to leave Cape Town). There were some problems with the stovetop and the oven, but even after those were fixed, the food problems continued, mostly the food being undercooked…there was more than once that a roast had to be plunked, raw in the middle, into the microwave to be finished and the potatoes came off the stove hard as little rocks. This went on for months…gradually I increased the cooking time of everything except microwaved foods, using the errors—the degree of unacceptable rawness—as a guideline to fine tuning the cooking and finally, after about a year of continual adjustments, the food started coming to the table properly. The failures were the clues that helped me get it right. (And a couple of years later I discovered that Johannesburg is higher above sea level than Denver, Colorado, which was the underlying problem: high altitudes require longer cooking times!)

The human psyche is an amazing thing. My NexH was also inculcated with the expectation of perfection but how he dealt with that was like my NM…the problem was never, ever him. He learned to drive a manual in the military and the shift point on those old trucks was 2000 rpm; his first car with a manual was a Ford Pinto, and the shift point on that thing was also 2000 rpm. But I had a Triumph TR-6…and eventually I had to take the spare set of keys away from him because he was ruining my clutch and transmission…in insisted that cars had to be shifted at 2000 rpm, even though the TR required 3000 rpm for a smooth shift. HE was perfect, it was the car that was at fault. Since he believed he was making no mistake, he could not learn from the ones he was making. When I had the stove replaced (it really was defective…it shut down just as water reached the boiling point) but the food didn’t improve, the only thing I could look to was myself…what was I doing wrong and how do I use my mistakes as a way to guide me to getting it right? The Ex, unfortunately, ended up losing access to my car because he would not acknowledge that the car worked fine for me, so there must be something wrong in the way he was driving it, seek out and acknowledge his errors, then adjust.

While my learning to accept mistakes as learning tools rather than devastating pronouncements on my competence was a useful, healthy thing, it got me to thinking about the whole subject of mistakes and expectations. And one morning, while reading an article about people who whose adult lives were negatively affected by their narcissistic parents, a thought came to me…what about our expectations of our parents?

It was a bit of an earth shaker for me because I have long operated on the premise that my mother was a poor parent and her poor parenting had set me up for a lot a difficulty in my life, both as a child and as an adult. And while I still do not step back from that assessment, I now had a new insight: a lot of the suffering I endured as a result of her parenting came from within…it came from my expectations of her!

ACoNs may have expectations of their parents that, because they did not have functional childhoods, they have no idea if those expectations are reasonable or not. Their expectations, in fact, are based on what they wanted in a parent and actually have nothing to do with the reality of who and what their parents are. For each of us there is an individual definition of “perfect,” and each of us wanted a perfect parent, based on our own definition of the word. Our parents did not meet up with our expectations. Whether or not the expectations were reasonable, whether or not the level of our parents’ dysfunction was mild or severe, we set the expectations…sometimes in retrospect…and our parents did not measure up.

Are we, then, then guilty of the same sin our dysfunctional parents perpetrated upon us? They set up expectations of perfection that had nothing to do with the reality of us, our abilities, talents, interests…they set up expectations of perfection for us that were based on their desires, not ours. But are we not doing the same in having expectations of our parents that are based on our desires rather than the reality of their abilities, talents, interests? You can say, on the one hand, that people should not have children if they aren’t willing to sacrifice all to be a good parent, but it just isn’t as simple as that…and we all, deep in our hearts, know that.

I had a heated discussion with my daughter once, a discussion in which she called me out on some of the things I did to discipline and control her when she was acting out in her teens. She was angry, she was blaming…and I was listening. When she took a breath I asked her “If what I did was wrong, then tell me what I should have done? What would have worked? What would have gotten you to stop cutting school and sneaking out of the house? You tell me…if I was wrong, then what was the right thing to do?” She had no answer.

So what could your parents have done differently and would those things be true to their inner selves. Oscar Wilde once said “Selfishness is not living your life as you wish, it is asking others to live their lives as you wish.” So how many of us are finding fault in our parents not because they lived their lives as they wished, but because they failed to live their lives as WE wished? They were not the kinds of parents we wanted…or even needed…but is our continued angst based on that fact or on the fact that they failed to live up to the ideal we have each constructed in our minds as the “perfect” parent. Just how much of our pain comes from our expectations of our parents rather than those parents themselves?

At this point, someone is bound to think “but we have a right to expect certain things of our parents!” Do we? What do we have a right to expect? Food, shelter, clothing…certainly. We have a right to have our human rights respected, although many people (and even whole cultures) deny that children have human rights. Do we have a right to expect fairness? Do we even have a right to expect love? Do we have a right to expect any person to give us that which they do not have or even that which they do not wish to give? How righteous is our anger and pain if it is based on unrealistic expectations? When you expect a snake to dance a jig, is your disappointment caused by your expectation or the snake’s failure to perform?

Lest you think otherwise, this is not about letting your Ns off the hook. This is about examining your expectations, particularly your expectations of perfection, and determining what is unreasonable and letting that go. Whether it is an expectation of yourself, your parent(s), your spouse, your kids, boss, friends, government…your disappointments are all rooted in your expectations, both reasonable and unreasonable. And you can reduce the amount of pain and disappointment in your life by the simple expedient of examining what you are expecting, what you have expected, and letting go of the expectations that were unreasonable in the first place and the disappointments the caused.

The easiest way to determine if a disappointment is reasonable or not is to simply ask if it is attainable, taking into consideration the limitations of the person(s) involved. Would you be disappointed if your toddler couldn’t hit a home run in regulation baseball? Would you be disappointed in your teen, who is more interested in chess than baseball, couldn’t do it? Is the toddler or the teen at the root of your disappointment? Or are your expectations out-of-whack with reality? Can you command love? Can you tell yourself “I should love this person” and then, magically, you do? You can’t? Whose fault is that? Are you defective because you can’t? Is everybody else on the planet defective because you can’t make yourself love them? Of course not…so why do you believe someone who does not love you is defective and your expectation of being loved by them is therefore a reasonable expectation?

We live in a society in which we tend to think that there is an answer for everything. If science can’t give us an answer, rather than simply say “we don’t know that yet,” we feel we must have an answer so we subscribe it to God or the supernatural or aliens or even conspiracy theories. Somebody has to be at fault, somewhere there has to be an answer, somehow there has to be an explanation. But the truth is, there isn’t always an answer, we don’t always have an explanation, and there isn’t always any blame to place. Sometimes things just are what they are, with no malice or failure or conspiracy behind them. Sometimes, when we let go of expectations, there is just nothing to put in their place.

And so it is with perfection…you can’t achieve it, no matter how you try, because you are human. My father once told me that no matter how good you are at something, no matter how smart or accomplished, eventually somebody is going to come along and be better, smarter, more accomplished…and you have to live with that knowledge, that you are not and cannot be ever perfect (and therefore unbeatable), and keep on doing the best you can anyway.

Perfection is not a goal, it is a trap, a trap that you set for yourself and you spring on yourself, and you then set on yourself again. It is a trap you set for others, when you have expectations of them that do not take into account anything of them and everything of you. The pursuit of perfection is to dedicate your life to futility and disappointment, it requires that you have impossible expectations (of yourself and/or others), it guarantees disappointment and pain. It profits you not.

Loving the Imperfect

Many years ago I got very self-indulgent and bought myself a sports car. It was glorious, a little green Triumph TR-6 two-seater convertible. I loved loved loved that car! For 15 years I zipped through the highways and byways of Silicon Valley, top down whenever possible, totally loving the way the car drove, the way it felt, the way I felt driving it.

Of course, there was a down side. Being an English car, the electrical system was crap, and England is a lot cooler place than California, so the car tended to run hot. In fact, it averaged at least one trip per month to the mechanic, sometimes more…and some of those trips could be horrendously expensive. But I loved the car and in all the years I owned it, in all the years my pocket haemorrhaged money to keep it on the road, I never begrudged it a penny. It was the most fun I ever had on four wheels and it was worth every cent I spent on it.

Shortly before I finally sold the TR, I bought a registered Arabian mare. She was 12 years old and at some point in her life, she had been very well trained. But somehow she ended up as a brood mare and, after many years in pasture, she was purchased as the mount for a six-year-old child who had little riding skill. Unable to control the horse, the child was thrown and her angry mother put the animal up for sale at an auction where I got her, pedigree, papers and all, for a mere $125, the “meat price.”

Tia was a beautiful bay mare, with a soft, loving temperament…and she was afraid of everything. She had a lovely gait and was easy to ride (if you knew direct reining), but if you took her to the park, you had to avoid the picnic areas because the crowds freaked her out; bicycles on the trail freaked her out; mailboxes along the road freaked her out—and the entrance to the horse trailer really freaked her out. She hated water unless it was in a trough: a narrow, shallow stream, a rivulet of water running across the road, the horse washing station with a garden hose hanging from a pivoting beam—those freaked her out as well. She would stand passively for grooming and shoeing, never walk away from the saddle, never refuse to take the bit, and stood patiently for mounting. It took minimal direction either from my legs or hands to direct her…until something frightened her and which time she would slam it in reverse. I am telling you, that horse could back up the length of a football field! And if she didn’t back up, she bolted…and on any given ride, you could be guaranteed that something was going to scare her.

But I loved her, and I loved riding her. I got a trainer to help me learn how to get her to load up into the trailer without fuss; I learned to anticipate her antics with water and her reverse gear; I learned to bathe her with a sponge and bucket instead of the wash rack. I spent money on good shoes, I learned how to give her the quarterly worming treatment and immunization shots myself, and I drove up to the ranch to comfort her when the infrequent thunderstorm came along and the lighting and noise frightened her. And never did I think of her as a burden, but was proud to own and ride and care for such a beautiful, majestic creature.

My husband and I own a house in South Africa, an old, rambling brick dwelling with a gorgeously landscaped garden, a sparkling blue pool, and a leaky roof—and you would blanch at the list of other things we have had to fix in the last 2.5 years. The previous owner lived here seven years and did no maintenance at all, so we have inherited his deferred maintenance along with all the stuff that normally goes wrong with houses, like leaky pipes, burst hot water heaters, appliances that mysteriously stop working, and plumbing woes. Our first month in the house we spent enough for emergency repairs to cover two month’s worth of house payments and it escalated from there. And every time we think we have everything fixed, something new crops up. Fortunately we have two rental units on the property that provide enough income to make repairs without landing us up in financial hot water, but there is no denying that the house has sucked up a lot of cash resources that we would have rather put elsewhere.

One could easily hate a house that causes you say to yourself, at least weekly, “Oh, no! Now what??” From a broken suction line on the pool pump to water cascading down an inside wall from a roof leak, from a hot water heater pumping water into the attic and ruining ceiling boards to a kitchen stove that won’t get hot enough to boil water to a double oven that can’t maintain temperature, from an air conditioner that won’t cool to a motorized driveway gate that won’t function to leaking showers to five toilets that constantly run, this house has had its share of malfunctions, and not one of them cheap to fix! And yet, I love the house. It is rambling and spacious with big sliding glass doors onto a terrace and beautiful views of the garden from my bedroom and study, it has an airy, gracious sunroom and a sunken TV room that has become my husband’s lair, leaving the formal living room (lounge) a pretty and uncluttered room to entertain guests. It is brilliantly located, only 4 kms from his office and within 5 kms of virtually all of the shopping we need to do on a regular basis, the mature trees shade the house, the lush green garden cools the air and the breezes come through those sliding doors to provide natural ventilation. Yes, it has cost us time and money and aggravation, but I can’t think of a better place to live in this town and the house itself is the nicest I have ever owned.

By now, you should have picked up on the theme, the common thread that runs through all of these vignettes: things do not have to be perfect to be worthy of love. Cars, houses, horses…even people…do not have to be perfect in order to be entitled to, worthy of, love…but for some of us, this is a novel concept.

If you were raised by a narcissist, like I was, you quickly realized that just “being” was not good enough…you had to “do.” And whatever passed for love from your narcissist was given out based on your performance in whatever it was you were supposed to do. Now, before you say “she didn’t give me anything, no matter how I performed…” consider the phrase “whatever passed for love.” For some of us, that meant getting stuff—a doll, a lollipop, a quarter; for others it might have meant getting permission for something, like a trip to the beach or going to a friend’s house or calling Grandma; for others of us, it meant not getting negativity—no lectures, beatings, insults, maybe even getting blessedly ignored for a period of time. Whatever your NM did with/for/to you when she was not perturbed with you, that was what you, as a child, learned to accept as tokens of affection from her—or at least, a sign that you were not in imminent danger. Even if you didn’t get outright approval, the lack of overt disapproval was a sign in itself.

As children, right and wrong come from outside us: we learn it from others around us and we are controlled with external consequences meted out to us by those others. Goof off on a test, we fail; defy our parents, we get punished; steal from the corner store, we get the law involved. As we mature, however, normal people internalize those messages of right and wrong and we punish ourselves with guilt when we do wrong. Unfortunately, normal people who had narcissistic parents internalize the toxic message that we are imperfect, flawed, and unworthy of love unless we do something to earn it…and just as our efforts were never sufficient for the narcissistic parent, once the parent is internalized, our efforts are never good enough, not even for ourselves.

Have you ever loved something that is imperfect? I adore my Yorkies, and they are as imperfect as they come. As I sit here typing, one is barking to get my attention, another one is laying quietly on the rug by my feet…she is the one who poops on the dining room carpet when she is displeased by something. The little boy still pees on the bed, so he can’t be in the bedroom unless he is on my lap, under my direct supervision. But rather than disdain them for their faults, rather than withhold my love or approval from them because of their imperfections, I make adjustments to accommodate their flaws: I have a squirt bottle full of water for the barker when she won’t obey my command to stop; Puddin’ isn’t allowed in the dining room; Boykie can’t go into my bedroom unless he is being carried in arms. Is this more work? Is this more effort? Of course it is…but I love them and they are worth an extra effort to accommodate their little flaws.

And there you have it: I love them just as they are. I make allowances for their flaws rather than withhold my love and approval until and unless they conform to my rigid expectations. Yes, I continue to expect them to improve, but I don’t withhold positive feedback, petting, and loving until they improve because my love for them is not based on their performance: it is based on their being.

How are you doing with loving yourself? Are you waiting until you are perfect and therefore worthy of being loved before you love yourself? Are you withholding positive affirmations, kindness, patience, and love because you aren’t perfect? Who set that standard for perfection you aspire to (or despair of ever reaching)? Did you set it or did you just adopt—internalize—your NM’s expectations and standards? Has your NM set up housekeeping in your head and you continue to dance to her tune, even when you aren’t even speaking to her?

We must have expectations of ourselves. Humans do not thrive when they are directionless, and our expectations give us direction, something to live up to. But there is nothing in the book of life that says you must live up to the expectations of others if you don’t want to. In fact, you have every right—you have a true entitlement—to create your own set of expectations to live up to, and they don’t have to bear even the slightest resemblance to the expectations of your NM or FOO. They only have to work for you. And to work for you, they must be attainable.

And you know what? They don’t have to be cast in concrete, either! You can change those expectations if you want to. If they were too tall for you, or you achieved them already, or they just don’t fit you, you can fine-tune or even completely throw them out and start all over again. But there is one thing they all absolutely must contain: they must not demand perfection of you in anything. Excellence, yes…perfection, no. Perfection is unattainable and to set that as a goal is to set yourself up for failure…and a reason to keep on withholding love from yourself.

You set the stage for how others treat you by how you treat yourself. If you think of yourself as unworthy of love, others will believe you and will think of you the same way. When you love yourself unconditionally, you accept that you are flawed, human, and deserving of love for who you are, not for what you do. People who value you for what you do are not people who love you…at least no more than they love their car, dishwasher, or mobile phone: and to these people, you are just as disposable as these items when you stop functioning the way they want you to.

You don’t need to be perfect to deserve love, yours or anyone else’s. You don’t need to be perfect to deserve appreciation or approval or to feel good about yourself. You are entitled to it, no matter how flawed you may think you are. All you really need is permission—your own.

Isn’t it time you gave it?

Be perfect: 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families Pt 9

From The 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families
by Thomas F. Fischer, M.Div., M.S.A.

9. Thou shalt be perfect

Sample Situation: “Just because you got all ‘A’s on your report card doesn’t mean that you couldn’t have done better. You’re lazy. Now get to work and let’s see you get some more ‘A+s’!”

Lesson Learned: If it’s not perfect, people won’t love you. No matter how good it is, it’s never good enough...but keep trying!

Motto: You’re only as good as your performance and that’s still not good enough!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In a dysfunctional family, the standards of performance set by the parents often have no bearing on reality—or the performance of the parents, themselves, either. Narcissists are the masters of unreality—what they say is the last word, even if that last word should be “impossible.”

I recall a terrifying incident when I was somewhere between the ages of 8 and 10 in which my NM dragged me into the bathroom by my hair, slammed me against a wall, and turned on the tap full blast. She was furious with me for not completing some task I can no longer recall and she was enraged with me for attempting to excuse my failure by saying “I tried…” Screaming almost incoherently, she turned to that tap and told me that in the future I was never to “just try.” I was to do whatever it was she demanded of me, without failure. And then she pointed to the tap and said “If I tell you to tie a ribbon around that stream of water I don’t want to hear ‘I can’t’ or ‘I tried,’ I just want you to do it and no whining, do you understand me?” or something to that effect. I recall nodding my head and feeling utterly petrified, like I had stepped into an episode of the Twilight Zone.

I think I remember this so clearly because this was the incident in which I became truly, viscerally afraid of her because I finally understood that she was, beyond a doubt, out of touch with reality and in my child’s mind, that made her extraordinarily dangerous. She wasn’t just mean, she was crazy and mean, too—a combination I was to often fear might become a lethal one, at least where I was concerned. We both knew what she was demanding of me was an impossibility and yet she had every expectation that I would fulfil that or any impossible task that she might set me to, or I would suffer dire consequences. To say the realization was disheartening would be to understate it by several magnitudes.

I recall that at about the age of 10 I became responsible for mopping the kitchen floor every Saturday morning. The floor was a dull brown asphalt tile, literally impossible to shine (at least with the products available in the stores in the mid 1950s), and rather like the colour of mud. To my child’s eyes, the only way you could tell the floor was dirty was if you walked over it and your shoes stuck to the floor. NM didn’t bother to show me or tell me how to properly wash that floor. There was a string mop in the laundry room and a tin bucket, and a box of Spic n Span under the kitchen sink. It was from the back of that box I got my only lessons in mopping a floor—that, and the “hard knocks” I got for everything wrong she found once I announced I was finished.

Do you really expect a 10-year-old to know you have to move all the chairs away from the table and sweep the room first? Do you really expect a 10 year old to know what constitutes a “clean” floor when the floor is the colour of dirt? I could barely wield the mop, I was so scrawny, and was hopeless at trying to wring it out…my little arms simply did not have the physical strength to do so. And, since the floor looked the same to me, dirty or clean, I couldn’t even tell if I was getting it clean or not! But NM apparently could tell and each failure, from failing to remove the chairs to failing to sweep to failing to wring out the mop sufficiently to leaving dirty marks on the skirting boards, warranted a separate physical punishment, each one accompanied by angry, impatient, screeching insults to my intelligence, eyesight, and ability to reason. Nothing short of perfection was acceptable and, perfection being an undefined, unstated goal, the goalpost moved unpredictably and often.

When I was seven I was skipped, mid-year, from second to third grade. Nobody bothered to assess what educational fundamentals I had missed and give me some make up classes—I assume everyone thought I would do just fine. But I missed multiplication and when I entered the new class, the kids were doing long division and this was way, way over my head. I was afraid to ask for help—the one time I approached my teacher with my dilemma, she suggested I might want to go back to the second grade, but that would turn my already frightening home life into a war zone, with me at the centre of it. So, instead of helping me with learning multiplication, the teacher intimidated me (I met up with her again in the 7th grade and she rather snidely asked me “so, did you ever learn to multiply?” in front of the Home Ec class she was teaching—I had to pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about) and I went away to struggle by myself.

This led to a lifelong problem with math—I became math phobic, silently weeping over homework I did not comprehend, unable to bear the humiliation of asking for help and having it thrown in my face. My grades fell…in the 4th grade I was assigned homework (not done in my school district for students below 7th grade unless they were having difficulty) and it plunged me into suicidal thoughts—if NM found out about the homework she would know I was failing math but if I didn’t do the homework, the teacher would call NM—either way, I was screwed and, at the tender age of 9, I began closing my bedtime prayers with a request to die in my sleep so I would not have to face NM when she found out. As this tender age I was brought nose-first up against my limitations and even my mortality, tragic when you consider that children this young should be looking forward to a limitless future rather than praying for deliverance through death.

Perfectionism on the part of parents puts an unwarranted burden on children, a burden that many children internalize and then grow to up put impossible pressures on themselves. If nothing less than perfect is acceptable, then the child learns to feel she is unacceptable because every day she finds evidence that she is not. This is devastating to a child’s self-esteem and just gets worse as she grows up and turns that pressure on herself. Media sets impossible standards of beauty, thinness, wittiness, coolness, setting before us role models who are genetically unlike us and who have access to unlimited resources to force themselves into conformation to the desired “norm.” If you are not thin enough, fair enough, blond enough, rich enough, blingy enough or whatever the current trend dictates, you are worthless.

At home, at school, at work, even at church, we are bombarded with messages of perfection, the barely disguised sneers for those of us who don’t measure up to standards of dress or style or grooming or knowledge or deportment; the fleeting approval when we hit the mark, only to have to do it again in an hour, the next class, the next day, the next Sunday. We are not OK just as we are, love and approval are earned, and we must earn them over and over again.

When we grow up and move out of our dysfunctional homes, we carry this message within us. We internalize it and now begin to beat up on ourselves, to relentlessly punish ourselves for our failures to achieve those impossible “norms” we have been trained to. When we cannot achieve something, it is not because it is impossible or unhealthy or beyond our grasp, it is because we are flawed. We are constantly assailed with more messages, from admonitions that pretend to be affirmations, to well meaning friends who urge us towards success, to our own inner voices who tell us “if you wanted it bad enough, you would make it happen,” whether it is realistic or not.

We learn to count ourselves by our failures, not our successes, and to judge ourselves not on what we accomplished but on what we didn’t achieve. Some of us learn to not try because if we never make an effort, we cannot fail…yes, if we don’t try, we cannot succeed, either, but if we try there is a possibility of failure and we will avoid that bitter taste at all costs. Some become compulsive, relentless, obsessed with their pursuit of success, never having enough because no matter how great the success, that brass ring eludes them…there is no love waiting at the end of each race, each merger, each buy-out, only the expectation that the next one will be bigger, better, more spectacular the last one.

Dysfunctional parents use the reward for performance concept dysfunctionally—they turn it into a carrot-and-stick affair in which the stick is constantly applied and the carrot never gained. Perfection is the key that opens the padlock holding that carrot just out of reach, but you never, ever seem to be just quite perfect enough. Internalized, you cannot love yourself, approve of yourself, feel good about yourself until you achieve that perfection and no matter how hard you try, there is always something you are not perfect about, something that makes you undeserving, something that keeps you from being worthy of love, either your own or someone else’s.


Next: Ten Commandments of Dysfunctional Families:
10. Thou shalt not forgive yourself or others.