Perfectionism and Healing can’t co-exist
Are you waiting on healing?
Maybe you’re feeling like you need to wait to do or have or be {insert your thing here} until you’ve reached some future plateau in your healing journey?
If you’re applying a perfectionistic ideal to your healing journey, it’s time to heal the mindset and energetic beneath your perfectionism. Healing happens in messy, imperfect, everyday moments. Please don’t put your life on hold because you feel like you aren’t healed enough yet.
Because that’s just a form of perfectionism- a way to externalize your own process. And don’t forget, healing is an inside job. It happens from the inside-out.
Healing isn’t a future destination that looks and feels perfectly perfect.
In fact, it’s not a destination at all. The truth is, you are simultaneously healed and healing all the time. You’ll never get to the mountaintop of healing {NOT a thing, by the way} and say, “Whew! I made it! I’m glad that’s finally done!”
It’s just the nature of healing- as you evolve, you naturally open more and more to further evolution. As the road opens up to you even more, you don’t even mind because you experience the true essence of growth as you progress. You learn that there’s no cap on your healing or understanding or growing.
Potential is not limited- except by your own mind.
Being healed isn’t an award you’ll win or a room you’ll finally earn the right to be in. Real healing is happening right now, no matter where you think you are and what you believe that means. It happens when you make better decisions right in the middle of your messy, imperfect life. And better decisions doesn’t mean perfect decisions- it means decisions that are more and more aligned with who you are, who you’re becoming, and what you truly believe.
Perfectionism is just a patterned way of thinking and behaving.
It’s a tool wielded to protect yourself from judgment or rejection or vulnerability. But make no mistake: it’s a form of control, of manipulation. It’s reflective of a closed, fear-based energetic and a mindset that tells you not to trust life {or others} to meet you and co-create with you.
The real problem? Perfectionism blocks you from receiving- or even seeing- the many ways life rises to meet you in unexpected- and often, better- ways than you could ever dream up. There’s nowhere for serendipity, magic, or miracles to exist where perfectionism lives. So while it seems like trying to control things through perfectionism will minimize the likelihood of things going “wrong,” it also energetically repels things going differently, or even better, than you expect. Energetically, you’re only willing to receive the little sliver of possibility that you’ve identified, while you block the arrival of anything else.
And it’s exhausting. Deeply, profoundly exhausting. Because there’s no end in sight with perfectionism. Sure, you tell yourself that as soon as things look a certain way, you’ll then be able to feel better and take a break from all the endless perfecting. But think about it- you never actually get there, right?
Perfectionism is a way of being that begins and ends with you, not whatever it is you want to achieve.
The only way out is through- through healing the deeper reasons you feel insecure in the experience of living life as it actually is.
Thinking you aren’t healed until you look or feel perfect- or until some person, test, or metric tells you it’s okay to think of yourself as healed- prevents you from being present in your own life. It creates anxiety as you constantly compare your ideal vision with where you are. Or depression as you focus on comparing where you once where with where you think you are now.
The good news? That anxiety or depression is self-created. Which means you have the power to take dominion over it.
Healing your past requires you to be truly open to the present without comparing it to a made-up future that doesn’t actually exist right here and now.
And that means there’s no place for perfectionistic thinking on your healing journey. Take every step messy, scared, or still hurting. Do and be the things you want and don’t believe your mind when it tells you that you aren’t perfect enough to do or have them.
Find support and resources from people who see value in where and who you are right now. Because where you are right now is meant to be part of the journey.
If it’s happening, it can be no other way.
