Ever known a person who gets hung up on perfectionism?
Are you this person?
As clients, perfectionistic people can be really difficult to work with because of the unrealistic expectations they create around their birth experience.
As a doula, this can be really challenging to navigate as well, because you may also have unrealistic expectations on yourself and your contribution to your client's experience.
Let's take a look at the traits of perfectionism and see what you might find familiar.
Perfectionist Traits
● All-or-None Thinking: According to a perfectionist, everything can be categorized as either perfect or a failure. Hence, if they notice any mistakes—no matter how minuscule—they tend to see the whole thing as a letdown.
● Unrealistic Standards: Perfectionists may have extremely high standards. As a result, they might judge everything through these standards and label almost everything imperfect.
● Worry About Failure: Perfectionists strive for excellence and worry that they will fail to reach their goals. Moreover, due to their all-or-none thinking and unrealistic standards, it is often difficult for them to achieve perfection.
● Tunnel Vision: When perfectionists are worried about failing at something, everything else may become insignificant.
● Focus on Outcomes: Perfectionists are focused on results, they may disregard every aspect of the journey if they fail to reach their goals.
● Excessive Criticism: Perfectionists tend to be highly critical of themselves and others due to their unreasonably high standards.
● Inability to Deal With Criticism: Perfectionists may struggle when criticized and become defensive instead of seeing it as an opportunity to improve.
● Procrastination and Avoidance: Perfectionists may procrastinate if they don’t feel entirely ready to produce the perfect result they would be satisfied with. Similarly, learning new skills or improving existing ones may be frustrating if they don’t achieve mastery and perfection quickly. Hence, they may give up such pursuits early on and avoid specific tasks due to excessive fear of failure.
After reading through these traits, can you see yourself or how it could affect your clients?
How Does Perfectionism Affect Well-Being?
Adaptive perfectionism can help people feel successful and fulfilled. However, maladaptive perfectionism may do more harm than good. Why? Because excessive perfectionism involves holding yourself to unreasonably high standards at all times. This constant effort for excellence can lead to chronic stress and anxiety. Unfortunately, chronic stress is associated with adverse health outcomes, including high blood pressure, increased resting heart rate, digestive problems, appetite changes, and a weakened immune system (McEven, 1998).
It can also cause other problems such as irritability, fatigue, insomnia, emotional outbursts, and loss of libido (McEven, 1998). In addition to these effects, excessive perfection may also cause people to feel unsatisfied with how their lives have turned out. These perfectionists may even feel depressed after repeatedly failing to meet their own expectations.
Perfectionistic expectations of birth experiences can also be the starting point for trauma.
Overcoming Perfectionism
Adaptive perfectionism can indeed make us high achievers. Unfortunately, maladaptive perfectionism can take over our lives and make us anxious and miserable. Luckily, it is something we can overcome. Here are some suggestions that may help you.
● Setting attainable standards. You might want to question whether your standards are attainable. If your standards are too high, it may be impossible to reach them.
● Setting realistic goals. Aiming high is great as long as your goals are achievable.
● Be flexible. Learning to be more flexible allows you to adapt to whatever life throws at
you and adjust your goals and expectations accordingly.
● Reframe the way you perceive mistakes. Mistakes and mishaps can happen no
matter how careful and well-prepared you are or how hard you work. Thus, it may help to reframe them as learning or growth opportunities. And just because you hit a bump in the road doesn't mean you can't carry on to achieve the ultimate outcome you desire.
● Get help. Sometimes we just can’t change our behaviors alone and need help. For instance, you might benefit from cognitive-behavioral therapy, which may help you identify and change any negative behaviors or thought patterns associated with perfectionism. It can also help you regulate any negative or destructive thoughts and emotions caused by maladaptive perfectionism.
Let’s face it; we can’t always be perfect. Adaptive perfectionism can give us the push to achieve the best we can. Yet, when we set unattainable goals and overly high standards that we can’t achieve, we might become trapped in a vicious cycle of maladaptive perfectionism and start to feel anxious and lose our self-confidence.
Luckily, there are ways to overcome perfectionism. Thus, we can all prevent excessive perfectionism from taking the joy out of our achievements and let us be content with who we are, imperfections and all.
And you need to remember, the outcome of a birth is not up to you. You're there to support a family on their path. This is THEIR path, not yours. When you let go of your desire to "get it all right, all the time" and help your client have what you (or she) would consider a "perfect birth" then you can finally relax into the supportive, loving, caring, nonjudgmental, nurturing, boundary-respecting role that you're meant to be in.
Good Luck, Doulas!!! You can do this!!