The Wound of Perfection
This wound is created around a false belief that the self is broken, fragmented, made incomplete. Were your parents extremely critical of you as a child? Or treated you as though there was something fundamentally wrong with you? Some have perfectly loving parents who are no more critical than necessary, but the person with this wound often sees their parents as critical, even when it’s not the case. You can be hypersensitive to slights, so even the most subtle judgments coming from your parents could have crushed you. As you grow up with this wound, the self-fulfilling prophecy is often cemented when you see others peoples’ or society’s judgments towards you reinforcing your negative belief about yourself. It’s important to honor the feelings of the child you were, without diminishing those feelings as unimportant. Today you may try to achieve perfection because you want to fix whatever you feel is wrong with you. It can be your physical appearance, but also your personality, whatever you feel is wrong or bad about yourself. Maybe you over prepare, horrified to show up wearing the wrong thing or not having the right thing to say, or with your hair messy. Or it may apply to the way you speak to people; you study easy conversation lines, social graces. But if you mess up even once it can feel like the whole world has crashed down around you. OCD is common with this wound, as well as extreme messiness. Some swing back and forth between these two, in different areas of life or at different times in their lives. This wound makes the individual critical – of others, but mostly of the self. Sometimes criticism of others is a self-defense mechanism when you’re afraid someone might be judging you. The thinking here can be black and white, good and bad, instead of the nuanced grey of reality. It can feel like a continuous feeling of displeasure. What it comes down to is that you are always trying to control something in your life; your home, relationships, schedule, the way you look, etc. But you’ll realize that control is just a façade and a coping mechanism.
Your superpower is that you’re advanced. With so much time and awareness of every area of your life, you’ve fine tuned who you are to become the best version of yourself. You probably do better than most, even if you don’t give yourself credit for it.
