A TLC client told me he would "get down" on himself because he was always trying to do everything perfectly. He said when he would build something if he didn't measure the pieces exactly, he would be depressed all day. And if he would see the work the next day he would be aware there was an slight miscalculation in his measurement. He would sometimes awake in the middle of the night obsessing about the imperfection.
Living this way was making him crazy. He knew logically that a slight miscalculation didn't make a "hill of beans" in the real world. But this feeling that he had failed would color his whole day to the point that he would sink into a depression. Even though it didn't make sense it affected his self-esteem.
To help him understand the situation I shared my own experience with him. At one time when things weren't perfect it really made me crazy. I would address an envelope 10 or 12 times if the address wasn't exactly right. But one day I got over this by telling myself that my behavior was crazy. I realized the recipient of the letter probably didn't pay any attention at all to a slight mistake, let alone a minor misspelling or punctuation error. I overcame this by forcing myself to address an envelope only one time. If I made a mistake so be it. I would cross out the error with a pen and write the correction beneath it. And I think that probably most of the time the recipient of the letter probably just threw it in the trash anyway - and maybe didn't even look at it. Before I took this attitude my ego said that anything that had to do with me had to be perfect – a fallacy that kept me depressed much of the time. I was on this tightrope of self-evaluation that nobody really cared about.
My counsel to our client was to lighten up on himself. We alcoholics and addicts have enough trouble dealing with real problems in life. There are plenty to go around without manufacturing them in our own head.
No comments:
Post a Comment