It's Ok To Make Mistakes. But Does Your Nervous System Believe That?
How A Perfectionist Culture Steals Our Joy Without Us Even Knowing It, And How As Parents We Do This To Our Kids
I made a mistake.
“You made a mistake.”
How does reading or hearing this feel?
What happens in your body?
Do you expand or contract?
Does your mind say one thing and your body another? Are they in resonance?
I wonder might there be a part of you intellectually that understands and knows it is ok to make mistakes AND there may also be another part of you that may disagree?
Perhaps that part of you that disagrees says things like, “no it is not ok to make mistakes” or “I only can or do make mistakes when/if (fill in the blank)” or “yeah, but I try to not make mistakes” or even “I don’t make mistakes”.
Ingrained Perfectionism Is Generational
As a parent, I witness how established perfectionism or doing things the “right way” has been woven into the fabric of our culture. It shows up when parents constantly overcorrect saying “be kind” and “be careful” or “don’t spill” or any other demanding comment to a growing child who is learning.
To be transparent, I catch myself hearing these conditioned sayings in my head too, and sometimes I do say them realizing how it isn’t helpful to my son in the moment.
Really, when I stop to understand my drive for saying comments like this, I pin point to my own fear or stresses, and learn very quickly how I got in the way of connection with him.
What am I afraid of?
Spilt milk on the floor?
Fear he will be unkind? He will.
Aren’t we all at times. We are human.
If he is unkind, it is how he learns what kindness is.
Fear he will fall? He will.
And when he does fall he gets to learn to understand his own body.
Not only more helpful, but also more joy abiding are the release of “how to” and the presence of narrative observation and connection.
Comments like, “oh that is high, how does your body feel?” or “I am noticing that you are balancing. Does your body feel safe or unsafe?” or “I see you pushed your friend. Your friend is crying. Let’s go check on them and see if they are ok and figure out what happened together” or “I saw you carry that full glass to the table all by yourself. Wow. Such focus. It’s ok some spilled. Let’s clean it up”.
There is a Science here.
It’s not just my view point.
Did you know that research has shown that making mistakes is a very important part of the developing mind of a child — that making mistakes and having ample space to explore how our bodies and minds are working in a task actually helps to build self confidence and self worth?
A few things to know…
FIRST THING
Brene Brown, an an American professor, social worker, and author who has spent over two decades studying on shame, vulnerability, and leadership has a definition of what perfectionism is and is not. She says,
Perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of blame, judgement, and shame.
By this definition, the energy input and output is no longer on the task of getting it understood, it becomes about looking right and being right to avoid pain.
Where does the creativity and spark of joy go when the self-destructive thoughts and driven to be perfect enter?
SECOND THING TO KNOW
Perfectionism may be a trauma response that was learned through childhood experiences. Growing up with abusive, critical, and judgmental parents, caregivers, siblings, teachers, coaches and friends can develop a necessity to be perfect, especially if you were punished when making mistakes or not doing things a particular way. The origin of how this cycle came to be will be unique to each person. As a practitioner, I have yet to work with anyone, including myself, who has not had some level of issue with worth and perfectionism.
While we may tell ourselves we are not striving for perfectionism, and a part of us may truly embrace our worth beyond what we do or don’t do, our nervous systems hold the truth serum.
It is how our bodies respond that illuminates our belief systems.
It makes sense how this harmful pattern has become so normalized. Our culture makes little room for mistakes. If we see mistakes or “failure” in our society (on television, movies, news, the mom struggling with her kid in the grocery aisle, etc), we have been taught to respond with ridicule, judgement and even cutting people out, taking “sides”.
While the mind may etch the negative belief system, the body holds the charge of the wound.
Working together the mind and body, in this way, actually limit our potential repeating the pattern. Our fear of making mistakes cycles in our nervous systems, holding us hostage to the exuberant joy innate to each of us. Working with our unresolved shame or blame is an antidote to paving a pathway for change and towards boistering our self worth.
Your Worth Is Not Up For Debate
You are born worthy.
There is an inner peace and calm that we can not only tap into, but reside within regularly when we start to understand our worth is not determined by our mistakes and perfectionism.
Understanding our relationship to our shame, blame and judgement, along with our denial of these feelings, allows change to happen on all levels of our being —physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
Learning that our worth is not tied to our production, our materials, our looks, our cars, our homes, our bodies, our tasks, our “to do” lists, and the list goes on, is clutch in building resiliency to shame, blame and judgement.
We can learn how to foster compassion for ourselves in our humanity through a deeper exploration of our timelines, and the relationship we have knowingly and unknowingly built with perfectionism and worth.
And as parents, the way we do this for ourselves becomes a model for how we can do this for our children.
Inquiry For You
How do you react and respond to yourself when you make a mistake?
What feelings arise when you do something you know you could have done better?
What is the mental chatter in your head, what do you tell yourself?
Does any part of you avoid mistakes or calls yourself names for making them?
I encourage you to explore the disharmony within your nervous system. How may it be effecting your overall quality of life and relationship with others. How might the attachment to perfectionism and worth be impacting your relationship to joy?
We can learn so much from our “mistakes” and our failures, our what I call human experiences. When blame, shame and judgement fill our being, room for joy gets pushed out, and joy has a great deal to teach us on every level of our being.
One More Thing!
If you want to join a bigger conversation and keep exploring and cultivating more self acceptance, inner joy and self compassion, the Summer Sessions of SACRED JOURNEY starts mid July. This summer in honor of the element of fire we will deepen our understanding and relationship to Mudita, which means Joy.
I am hosting a free webinar and guided meditation on the upcoming seasonal offering of SACRED JOURNEY.
Click here to enroll in the free webinar
And Finally
Let us remember, we were all a beginner at anything at some point. Our re-learning to make mistakes and find the joy in our humanity is a necessity for a growth mindset, healing generational wounds (t/Trauma) and curating a deeper well of fierce compassion in the world.
A Little Personal Share
I remember purposely making my room messy in high school. I grew up in a very clean home with weekly chores. One day, I realized I had everything so neat and tidy all the time, and it didn’t feel like “me”. I felt I needed to break it up.
The first time I left a dirty shirt on the floor, it took everything in me to not pick it up and put it in the hamper. I could hear my mom’s voice in my head telling me to clean up. I didn’t listen to it. When I got into high school, I had been told it was my room and I could do with it what I wanted, so I began to do just that. Over time, my body relaxed a little more into not picking things up right away and allowing myself to plop on my bed and read or listen to music, knowing the dirty shirt on the floor will get picked up later by me.
There was a lot more to unpack about this inner voice of perfectionism and my self worth, but it was the start of an observation that developed into a profound endeavor of self healing and onto my path of service today.
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