Are you a ‘Recovering Perfectionist’, or simply can't face the shame of not being good enough?

Keep reading to discover 4 tools that will help.

Shame is hard to feel, to experience, to acknowledge — especially in oneself. Easy to see in someone else’s behavior. Deny in our own. Much easier to justify. Push back. Judge.

Perfectionism isn’t about feeling shameful, you may be thinking, so ask yourself why isn't what you do good enough?

Why do things have to be tinkered and fiddled with until the darn thing is broken?

While your conscious mind tells you it's because you can do better, your subconscious mind knows it's wiser not to put whatever you do out there because you'll feel ashamed of it, and then by extension, you'll feel shame for not being good enough to get it right.

It's warped isn't it?

According to Brene Brown, there's an antidote to all this.

Its empathy.

“Empathy says: You and I are made of the same lovely, heartbroken, and screwed-up stuff.” Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

Brown says that achieving excellence (in anything we do) remains elusive until looking inward and naming up our hesitancy to move forward.

It’s not ‘what I do’ that isn’t good enough. It’s the ‘who I am’ that’s not acceptable. Brown says that in not naming up the emotion and dealing with it, we soften the blow by seeking perfectionism instead.

Sounds like we’re caught in a never-ending story of shaming and naming, covering our insecurities with the ‘It’s not perfect yet’ cover of perfectionism for our own insecurities.

Yep, that would be about right.

It takes courage and gumption to go against the naysayers and stand up to the bullies in our lives that try to tell us our place — whether at work, in the family or in our relationships with those we love.

Surviving Shame Has More To Do With Courage Than Weakness

I’ve survived the bullies in my past who kept me playing small through shame. And this took courage that took years to build.

As we go through life, most of us get to hear similar messages from media/friends/family or colleagues:

Be attractive. Be smart. Be popular.
Seek wealth. Do what it takes. Never stop pushing yourself.
Bust your gut. Deny tiredness. Bury stress.
Don’t let your emotions get the better of you.
And always … always pursue success — regardless of the cost.

It’s all part of the push for acceptance that feeds our core need to belong.

It’s easy to polish the image media culture wants us to buy into — the one splashed across magazine covers promoting the rich, famous and beautiful. The one promoted by upwardly mobile families. The one expected by companies if you want to get ahead.

And as a result, we’re a society trading bloated credit card debt, time poverty and overwhelm for reality.

Unwittingly we’re buying into the bigger, better, best scenario that ignores the person and chooses the darker shadow of unmet hope, disillusionment and outright shame of not being good enough if we don’t “have it all”.

Shame is a globalized phenomenon that’s promoting the pseudo crown of ‘success’, while hiding its true cost.

And just like Covid, shame asks us to hide away and protect ourselves from what may just be terminal pain and rejection.

If you’re a man caught between two worlds — one being the harsh critic of bloke-culture prioritizing success symbols and power — the other being the relational sharing-caring connection your partner or family expects — you know how tricky straddling the divide is, and how few manage to survive.

If you’re a woman — shame may partner with envy, self-loathing and perfectionism. A never-ending whip of comparison checking, self-rating and self-shaming.

Brene Brown says it takes courage to be vulnerable and to admit feeling shame.

Courage??? Where do we find enough of that to put our hand up to feeling shame, when it’s easier to put up the pretty brolly of “I’m a perfectionist” — so therefore “I’m still working on it — you can’t call me out on that because I’m trying!”

How do we find the courage to call out the enemy lurking within? The one hinting that we’ll never be truly accepted, never really belong, never really be good enough for someone to love or accept?

Let’s see if we can unpack this.

Denying the power of judgement racked up through generations of patriarchal power pushing the ‘success banner’ at any cost can feel too overwhelming.

It’s easier to see shameful behavior in others than to admit shame’s Trojan horse living within.

Yet, from how I see it, our shaming culture perpetuates the myth to hide from ourselves, convincing us to strive for things we didn’t even know we wanted, simply to keep pace, leaving us to pick at ourselves and point at our external measures of success.

Ashamed of showing our bodies if they’re less than buff. (Others will see excess kilos of cake, biscuits, sugar and alcohol along with the under-toned muscles of laziness and judge me for saying I want to get fit.)
Ashamed of not being more successful. (Others may judge me for putting career and money ahead of caring for a family.)
Ashamed of aging and the effects of gravity (it’s only those who can’t be shamed into wearing their wrinkles (or bat-wing arms) with pride that don’t buy into this — otherwise the anti-aging cosmetics market wouldn’t be worth 58.5 billion U.S. dollars and expected to climb at 6% per annum.
Ashamed of failing in our relationships and waiting for friends to judge us as they choose sides of who was right and who was wrong.

Ashamed of not measuring up to an invisible standard we’ve created in response to the cultural myths we’ve unknowingly bought into.

Empathy is the Kryptonite of Shame

“What a liberating thing to realize that our problems are probably our richest sources for rising to the ultimate virtue of compassion.” Krista Tippett

Empathy is not a marketable quality advertisers can sell. Empathy can only grow from within and radiate outward.

We cannot show true empathy to others unless we offer that same empathy and compassion to ourselves.

When we see ourselves in another’s dilemma, we can offer empathy for their pain, knowing that in our own private world we too struggle to offer ourselves the empathy needed to accept ourselves just as we are.

Shame will plunder morals and decay self-worth unless the compassion of empathy gets let in.

With empathy, true humility has the power to restore a values-based life. Through it we can balance self-acceptance with an awareness that we’re enough — just as we are. Without the need to be exceptionally beautiful/wealthy/talented/smart or successful that the marketing hype spends billions on, convincing us to buy into.

Our cultural symbols of expensive cars, large homes, latest-fashion clothing and wealth are covers for the pervasive power of shame-based not-good-enoughness.

Brene Brown Describes Four Ways to Move Through Shame

1. Understand Shame’s Triggers

Check in with your body and feel where in your body shame grips you most. For many people it’s in the chest or gut areas of their body. Pause for a moment to describe the feeling — the shape of it, whether it’s heavy or light, colour, density, movement. This is to help you associate with the feeling rather than push it down. Ask yourself (or the feeling that you’ve just described) what’s triggered it. Why is it there? What’s it trying to tell you. I encourage you to journal on this as journaling gives you the chance to discover more of what’s happening on a subconscious level.

2. Develop Critical Awareness

Name it, don’t shame it. Feel it, don’t bury it.

Journal to find out what triggers it. Shame and perfectionism don’t survive well when being investigated. Are you meeting your own expectations or someone else’s?

3. Seek Connection

While shameful feelings thrive in isolation, they reduce when sharing them with someone you trust. Shining a light on that which feels uncomfortable shrinks the internal story we can spin — sometimes until it’s out of control.

4. Listen For Empathy

Empathy isn’t ‘oh, you poor thing’. Empathy is a friend or partner with compassion and experience to relate closely to what you’re describing. Empathy thrives with awareness and the language to express yourself.

If you’ve found this article helpful, please share it. At times we all need a good dose of empathy and support.

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Barbara Grace is a relationship consultant helping couples rebuild emotional connection.