Dancing with the Devil
I told you I was okay
Thanks for joining me here at Say Yes to the Mess! This is my weekly note of encouragement for those who are tired of pleasing, performing, and pretending to be perfect. It’s exhausting and I hope you enjoy leaning into the messiness of life here. I’m Amber Keating—licensed psychotherapist, healing coach, and recovering perfectionist. I love guiding people into greater connection with themselves, their loved ones, and the incredible world around us. Today’s post is inspired by Demi Lovato’s Dancing with the Devil. While she sings about substance addiction, the addiction to praise is just as real and dangerous.
Dear Perfectionist
Are you feeling tired, frustrated, and resentful of those around you who don’t work as hard as you? Let’s talk some more about that! Those of us who have spent our lives keeping ourselves in line often have thoughts towards both ourselves and others of…
Stop being a baby
Suck it up
Do better.
This is an attempt to keep yourself in check so you get the praise that you need to feel safe. Toward others, it’s often related to an observation that they aren’t working nearly as hard as you and resenting that.
How come they get off scott free?!
Why am I doing all the work here?!
This pattern typically develops from growing up with a critical caretaker, teachers, or peers. It’s also a pervasive energy in U.S. culture. So of course we struggle with the question, “How can I be kind to myself when the world around me is telling me I’m bad?” Another contributor to this pattern is observation of family, friends, or other authority figures. Even when you are not the target of another’s derision, you may indirectly learn that judgment will arise if you do anything wrong because that’s what others are demonstrating. Again, both of these result in the belief that “If I beat myself up I can keep myself safe from the judgment and punishment of others. I’ll take it over so others don’t do it to me.” Strangely, that self-criticism feels easier than waiting for others to criticize us (because they most certainly will, amirite?!). Like, I see your probable criticism and I’m not only going to do it for you, but I’m gonna double down on it! Are we winning yet?!
Drawn and Quartered
Perhaps this longstanding pattern of self-flagellation is why you are deeply bone weary. It’s like someone took your wildly beautiful, untamed spark and broke it into a million pieces, scattering those fragments to the four winds. Then, you decided the job wasn’t finished and made damn sure those aimless bits of you would never be reunited. No wonder you feel bewildered, disorganized, conflicted, untethered. The self-judgment and push energy required to keep up this kind of inner fragmentation is exhausting. Not only do I see you, but I also know that change is possible because I’ve lived it. One difficulty in the healing process is how even when you know compassion is the way, you may continue to be harsh with yourself first so other people won’t do that. This keeps you “perfect” and then you get praised for it. What a shitshow! Even when you know compassion yields genuine progress, we keep hurting ourselves first so other people won’t.
What if…
What if I told you SHOWING UP AUTHENTICALLY ISN’T DANGEROUS ANYMORE?! Does that feel like a stretch? Trust me, I get it. There is so much deeply ingrained conditioning to unlearn there. Those messages are repeated ad nauseum until they become hardwired. We don’t even know we’ve drunk the proverbial Kool-Aid. That’s just the way it is, some things will never change. But wait! Things can change, people can change. Maybe even YOU can change. That may sound like crazy talk, but this concept is really the whole basis for the mental health field: people. can. change. Why continue to trudge onward, repeating the same old patterns, when you know those are no longer yielding viable, sustainable results? That sounds an awful lot like the definition of insanity. Famously misattributed to Albert Einstein, there is some argument about whether it was penned by Rita Mae Brown in her 1983 book Sudden Death or simply paraphrased by her from Narcotics Anonymous Basic Text. I looked it up because I really dislike being wrong. See, I still have my own perfectionism I’m working with.
Change is HARD
Rooting out old patterns is quite a bit easier said than done. Can I get an “amen”? Especially in dominant U.S. culture, we tend to be praised for egotism, for success at any cost. But like, what if I don’t want to crush other people’s souls – or my own for that matter – in my climb up this invisible ladder?! Even when we no longer want the results of the old pattern (exhaustion, irritability, resentment), we can have difficulty shifting gears. Our body-mind system confuses the familiar for the safe or beneficial. Just because something is familiar doesn’t mean it’s good for us at this particular moment. For example, I didn’t get nearly enough positive, warm, kind attention from my “adult” housemates as a child, so I learned how to get it from teachers at school. That created in me an intensely competitive spirit and difficulty acknowledging when I was wrong. Straight A’s served me brilliantly throughout school, as did beating myself up the few times I got anything less than perfect marks. Fast forward to adulthood and it just so happens that others don’t necessarily love a know-it-all who thinks she has all the answers. In fact, I never really did have ALL the answers, just the ones that worked for me at a particular stage of life.
What patterns have been useful in your past, but are starting to lose their shine? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Let me know in the comments or shoot me an email: info@amberkeating.net. I will read and respond to every comment/email.
Until next time, wishing you soft places to land and all the safe connection you can find, because connection matters most!
If you saw yourself or someone else in this essay, please share it. Forwarding this to your favorite overachiever may be exactly the thing they need to drop their own perfectionist ways. Talk it over with your therapist, counselor, or coach. Use it to help a loved one understand you better.
Are you tired of pleasing, performing, or pretending to be perfect? Are you considering making a change? I’m forming a group to help burnt out perfectionists rediscover their joy and passion. Click here to book a consultation. This will be a 45 minute phone call in which I listen deeply to your challenges and share my insights as an experienced therapist and coach. If you feel at the end of the call that we’d be a good fit to work together, I’ll share with you the program I created that helps perfectionists find lasting relief from burnout, resentment, and stress.
I always love reading what you've been meditating on. Keep writing!
And I know those perfectionist, Straight A student ways. School was so much easier than life for me. Do the reading, participate in class, and then the teacher adores you. Their adoration felt like love. Love I knew the rules for and could achieve.