As I have gotten older, I find that I must rest more. A friend commented that St. Paul said, "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." While St. Paul was talking about temptation and I am not, I related immediately. My mind and spirit have boundless energy, but my body needs to rest sometimes. The rest feels like a disruption that I resent, but need to accept. I do so, but not graciously. In order to be my best at doing the things I really want to do, I need to respect self-care, and this takes time. I like to help people and to write, but I acknowledge that self-care is necessary, not just an option.

While allowing time for self-care is not easy, I ask myself, if this self-care is so hard for me, how would a perfectionist feel about perhaps not doing everything on their to-do list to be able to lie down for an hour? For them it would not just be an issue of needing to do it, but of perhaps feeling like a failure for not completing everything on their to-do list, for not incorporating that hour of self-care into the list in the first place, for not being a good person, or worse, calling this laziness. Self-care is hard, but crucial. For a perfectionist, there is a kind of inner judge saying terrible things about the person, making everything more difficult and painful. Like other things, self-care is harder for the perfectionist. If you set a standard that is too high or too ambitious, and you think that to be a responsible person you "should" be able to do everything, you will judge yourself when you cannot.

The frustration and acceptance I struggle with are still there, but the pain of those with the self-judging component is much worse. Part of what I do is to help people with perfectionistic personalities remove the self-judging part. I have listened to many clients beat themselves up because there are not enough hours in a day to do self-care and what they wish they could do. The frustration of that we all live with, but the self-critical part is typical of the perfectionist and creates much more emotional pain.

This is why I love to work with perfectionists and issues of shame. As I say in my book, Fear of the Abyss, these are good, decent people who suffer so much in so many situations, their inner judge always ready to cause emotional pain. Accepting that self-care must be done can be hard enough, but it is much harder with the element of self-judging. Don't let shame and perfectionism take self-care away from you! You matter!

​People are often curious about what goes through their therapist’s mind, how they feel about them, what emotions they have.  While I do not work only with PCS (Perfectionism, Control issues, Shame) issues, most of my clients are of this type.  First, I have to say that I believe the way I feel toward my clients is a special kind of love.  These clients -- and I say this after over thirty years of practice -- are kind, good people, extremely considerate, and very ethical.  They wish no harm to anyone, and if they only treated themselves as well as they treat others they would have no problem at all.  Interestingly, people in this group tend to be very, very bright.
 
People often call for an appointment and describe themselves as highly accomplished, which they are; they go on to tell me that they are in a lot of pain, with anxiety and self-depreciation.  They almost always sound like they think they are very unusual, excelling in what they do yet feeling this way, but actually it is common.  People who drive themselves hard do not just do it for a goal or to do a good job, but to keep overriding feelings of being unworthy.  The monster must be fed, and accomplishments follow each other at a rapid rate to keep the real feeling, of being inadequate or bad in some way, out of awareness.  People call to get help, because they are exhausted and do not want to suffer anymore.  They don’t realize that with insight-oriented therapy, such as a psychoanalytically or psychodynamically-oriented therapy, bringing the real, underlying feelings into awareness is what they need to do.  They know they have very sad feelings; that’s why they keep pushing them back with all their achievements.
 
One thing that has been very hard for me is to see such talented people -- intellectually, artistically, businesswise, etc. -- think so little of themselves.  After thirty years I do not feel so enraged for what happened to them, but I still feel anger.  I often think of people who raise, with caring and love, children with cognitive limitations, and when they grow up, they are confident in themselves and kind to others.  That’s an amazing achievement and certainly not an easy one in our competitive society.  Then I think, “But it takes a real talent to have a gifted child, and to convince that child that he or she is totally inadequate and just not good enough.”  To make someone believe what flies in the face of reality is quite an achievement, a terrible one.  While some parents are quite disturbed and just out-and-out mean, others are well intentioned, and because of how they themselves were raised, impart the message that, if something is not perfect, it is nothing.  We have all heard the saying, “Better to not do it at all if it is not done right.”  That may be true if we are talking about something important and work-related, but in everyday life, is it not how we learn?  And is it then surprising how many adults are terrified to try anything new, because they might not excel at it?  The degree to which people are stifled at times seems to me a kind of soul death, and it is truly heartbreaking.

​Today I went to the dentist to have my teeth cleaned.  My dental hygienist is a very nice young and insightful woman.  She was telling me how she worked in my dentist’s office and previously in another, and a coworker at the other clinic was a troublemaker.  She tried to diffuse the situation with the coworker, but to no avail.  She told me that she finally left that job, that she told the dentist the truth about what had been going on, and that she left on very good terms, even though he hated to lose her.  She went on to tell me that she started thinking about her life, how she loved coming to work and helping people, and wanted to keep that, and that if she needed to, she could get more hours with another dentist.  She said that the quality of her life and her feelings about her job mattered more to her than staying in a place she had come to hate.  She said that the troublemaker was young and healthy, and asked why, if she didn’t like her job, she didn’t do something about it.  She added, “But people don’t know what they want.  We learn to want what we are told to want.”
 
This was a very sad statement, especially from someone so young, but it is unfortunately true.  We are taught what to want and keep trying to get at it whether we like it or not.  We are told that the school, the job, the money, the prestige--all meaningless without some satisfaction or contentment--are what matter.  Having more than others, being the best--the list of what we are told to want goes on and on.  People go broke getting the car they are told to want, or will perhaps attend a school they feel is really not training them well.  I can’t begin to count the number of people I have worked with who felt stuck in a job they were miserable in because it was a “good” job that paid well, and a lot of people would love to have it.  This has been a theme I have seen over and over for thirty years, and it is very sad every time.  We are told to want to chase after certain things and, if it is soul-numbing, too bad; we are supposed to keep on.

I haven’t posted on my page for a long time.  I have been very busy discussing my book with followers on the internet, where I’ve met many wonderful people all over the world, especially now that the book is in French.  Even so, I want to post more again and will try to be more active here.
 
Today I am thinking about Dr. Seuss, a man who wrote brilliant poems for children, witty, funny, rhythmic, that also teach life lessons, good for “big kids” as well.  One I particularly like is Oh, The Places You’ll Go. Here’s an excerpt I’d like to focus on for now:

As Valentine’s Day approaches, I am thinking about love, what it is and what it is not.  “Approximately 150 million Valentine’s Day cards are exchanged annually, making Valentine’s Day the second most popular card-sending holiday after Christmas.”[1]  Although this holiday was not even meant to be about romantic love, it has evolved that way, and a great many single people once more find themselves suffering through a holiday they believe identifies some part of their lives, as defined by Hallmark.  I do not object to a sincerely selected and sent card or present, but what the problem is, is that we keep allowing business and profit to define for us what the holidays mean, what our lives should be like, or whether we are even happy or not.

[1] http://www.history.com/topics/valentines-day

I have been trying for the last several months to get better at using social media.  I have to say that I have learned a great deal com-pared to what I knew before, but there is still so much to learn and I’m having a harder time than I wish I were, although the victories feel tremendous.

I have a social media instructor named Jennifer.  She is only 30 and she does social media for a living and knows all of this.  She is a very patient person and is very enthu-siastic when I master something.  Not only do I have to master it, but remember it, and part of my difficulty lies in there being so many key strokes to each activity.  I feel like the idea is to develop the intuitions enough to be able to do things not by remembering each stroke, but by having a close enough idea to use the menus.