Hello, you Zinti at Balls of Star Dust.
Welcome to Struggle Care.
I'm your host, Casey Davis.
Today I'm going to talk about moral perfectionism.
In the spirit of not being a perfectionist, you might hear some clanging in the background
because we are trying to patch some holes so that the squirrels don't get into our attic
again.
I'm sorry about that.
It just is what it is.
Sometimes you have to embrace the not perfection.
So what do I mean by moral perfection?
Well, I've never been someone who has ever considered myself a perfectionist.
I've never cared if my bed was made or if my handwriting was neat or if a picture was
hanging on the wall a little bit crooked.
I've never needed a project to be done exactly perfect.
I don't care if I get A-plus's.
I'm not bothered by things being a little out of place.
So it was a surprise to me when I finally realized that my whole life was being run
by perfectionism.
It was a different type of perfectionism.
It's something that I call moral perfectionism.
And I think there's a lot of reasons why this happened, but I'll just tell you a little
bit of the story.
When I was 15, 16 years old, I was in a really bad spot.
I had a lot of mental health problems.
I had a pretty severe drug addiction and I ended up going to a psych hospital and then
a long-term rehab.
And while I was there in the midst of learning how to live sober, there were a lot of things
that I learned from that facility that were really helpful.
I learned how to be honest.
I learned how to connect with people.
I learned how to build myself worth up from the ground.
But there were a lot of things that I experienced there that became extra baggage for me.
A lot of their approach to sobriety was about being an upstanding citizen, about being a
God-fearing person, about being a good person.
That if we could just learn how to be good, loving people who were not run by selfishness,
but were run by altruism and giving and serving, that that would keep the monster of addiction
up at bay.
And I was there for 18 months.
And when I left, I went to a 12-step group.
And I am in general a big fan of 12-step groups.
They are as varied and different as any other organization where these groups have no connection
to each other.
I happened to fall into a group that was very militaristic and required very weird things
like, you know, call me every single day and tell me every time you were selfish that day.
Tell me everything that you were dishonest about, whether you were dishonest by telling
a lie or you were dishonest by omission or you were dishonest by just not being, you
know, but what you're thinking.
I also joined an evangelical church and had that same thing pushed on me where every single
decision you make needs to be as the intentions, the motives, the effects, the impact and
the execution needs to be as pure as the driven snow.
And if any of it isn't, you need to do anything you can to root that out.
And so my type of perfectionism was about being a good person.
But it wasn't even really about being a good person because it wasn't about being kind
to people or trying to live a meaningful life.
It was about all of this minutia that I thought told on me, that I thought had to do with
being good enough to be loved, being good enough to be accepted.
And I would approach self improvement in this way.
Self improvement wasn't about making my life more full of joy and meaning for me because
I matter and I deserve those things.
It was about making me a better person so that I could be lovable, so that I wouldn't
be alone, so that I wouldn't be rejected.
And in that way, when I had a selfish thought, when I was rude to someone, it would eat me
up for days and I had to go through this almost obsessive ritual to feel as though I had sort
of made up for it, that I had rebalanced this sort of like karmic scale.
I would say something rude out of frustration to someone and I would immediately get in
my car and I would race down to a homeless shelter to volunteer because I had to even
up the scales.
I was convinced that if I didn't stay on top of having pure motives, pure intentions,
never thinking something selfish or judgmental, never doing anything morally wrong, that
I wouldn't use again.
I wouldn't drink again.
I would be loved.
And it's impossible to live that way because you get up and you go to your closet and you
think, what am I going to wear today?
Well, am I thinking, well, I'm going to wear this.
I'll look cute in it, but is that selfish?
Am I just drawing attention to myself?
Is it modest enough?
Is it fashionable enough?
Is being fashionable wrong?
Well, but I want people to look at me and like me, but is that just selfish?
Should I not be dressing?
Should I be dressing for attention?
And if I am dressing, you know, can I buy something?
Was it ethically made?
And is it wrong?
Am I bad?
If I wear this, it wasn't ethically made.
And I can buy this, but it cost us expensive and I feel guilty about that because I blew
my budget and it was so impulsive of me that so irresponsible of me.
I mean, every decision was like this.
Every decision had to be morally perfect.
And if I bought that thing and it had too much wrapping on it, I mean, it was just nuts.
It was insanity.
And so recognizing that my life was being run by moral perfectionism was the first stop
for me, was realizing I am not trying to be a good person because being a good person
is a reward in it of itself because the world needs more people like that because there's
some sort of recognition that that's how we're all going to get through this together.
I'm being a good person because that pushes off the crippling anxiety that I am worthless
and I am trying to earn my worth through altruism.
And that informed a lot of the work that I do on this podcast and in the mental health
sphere about, you know, most things in life being morally neutral and about learning how
to get off the self-improvement rat race where, you know, because I was in this self, this
moral perfectionism, I would read the self-improvement books and whether they were how to have
boundaries, whether it was how to organize your kitchen, how to tidy up your life, how
to get new habits, how to do these things.
I was approaching all of those things from the same place, which was I need to improve
so that I can be doing good.
And I don't mean doing good in the world.
I mean, like, I'm good.
I'm doing good.
I'm not doing bad.
And again, I don't mean by what I'm doing.
I mean, like, my status, like I'm doing poorly or I'm doing well.
That was the life that I lived.
And so I wanted to leave you guys today with just a note that if you feel that way, you're
not the only one that feels that way.
And I want to leave you with an excerpt from a chapter of my book, chapter three, which
is called the self-help rejects, which describes some of the same stuff.
The audio excerpt is courtesy of Simon and Schuster audio from How to Keep House While
Drowning by Casey Davis, read by the author, copyright 2020 by Casey Davis, 2022 by Katherine
Davis, and used with permission of Simon and Schuster Inc.
So without further ado, here's chapter three of my book, How to Keep House While Drowning.
You can get it on Barnes and Noble.
You can get it on Amazon.
You can get it at local bookstores as well.
And if you want to look that up if you're in other countries, you can go to www.strugglecare.com
and click on the book tab.
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Chapter 3 For all the self-help rejects.
Marie Kondo says to try Folger Underwear.
The admiral swears making your bed will change your life.
Rachel Hollis thinks the key to success is washing your face and believing in yourself.
Capsule wardrobes, rainbow-colored organization, bullet journals.
How many of these have we tried?
How many did we stick with?
If you're like me, the answer is probably none.
Why is it we rarely stick with them?
I've already talked about the role of shame in first motivating and then ultimately demotivating
us, but there's more.
First, any task or habit requiring extreme force of will depletes your ability to exert
that type of energy over time.
The truth is that human beings can only exert high energy for short periods.
As someone in the addiction recovery world, I often think of a phrase we use when someone
is attempting to maintain sobriety through sheer force of will.
We call it white-knuckling sobriety, because it brings to mind a person whose only solution
for restraining themselves from drinking is to grip the edge of their chair so tightly
their knuckles turn white.
And those of us who have been around a while know that no one stays sober long that way.
In addiction recovery as in most of life, success depends not on having strong willpower, but
in developing mental and emotional tools to help you experience the world differently.
Second, many self-help gurus over attribute their success to their own hard work without
any regard to the physical, mental, or economic privileges they hold.
You can see this when a 20-year-old fitness influencer says, we all have the same 24
hours to a single mom of three.
The fitness influencer only needed to add effort to see drastic changes in her health,
and so assumes that's all anyone is missing.
The single mom of three, however, is experiencing very different demands and limitations on her
time.
For her, she needs not only effort, but also childcare, money for exercise classes, an
extra time and energy at the end of the day when she has worked nine hours and then spent
an additional five caring for kids and cleaning house.
You can see this when a thin, white, rich, self-help influencer posts choose joy on her
Instagram with a caption that tells us that all joy is a choice.
Her belief that the decision to be a positive person was the key to her joyful life reveals
she really does not grasp just how much of her success is due to privileges beyond her
control.
Anyone who is affected by serious mental illness or systemic oppression has a lot more standing
in the way of a happy life than a simple attitude adjustment.
And third, different people struggle differently and privilege isn't the only difference.
Someone might find a way to meal plan or exercise or organize their pantry that revolutionizes
their life, but the solutions that work for them are highly dependent not only on their
unique barriers, but also their strengths, personality and interests.
For example, when it comes to my home, I've never been able to just clean as you go.
When I try to, I find myself stressed, overwhelmed and unable to be present with my family.
Instead, I rely on dozens of systems I've created that help me keep my home functional.
And I still usually have dishes in the sink and clutter on the floor.
However, when I sit down to write or to work on my business, everything flows naturally.
Sometimes I have to push myself slightly to get over a hurdle, but the hurdles always
feel surmountable.
I actually have to set a timer to remind me to look at the clock because I get carried
away and lose track of time.
I feel creative, energized and rewarded at the end of the day.
I have a dear friend who runs a similar business and we often use each other as a sounding
board and support each other.
She often calls feeling stuck because she knows what she needs to do to grow her business,
but struggles to get it done.
It seems like you can crank out seven videos for your social media and the time it takes
me to do one.
It takes me so long to figure out what to say and to get over myself consciousness,
she tells me.
She also keeps the cleanest house I have ever seen.
One day she said to me, you know, Casey, the way you feel about your business is the
way I feel about my home.
I can virtually float through my home tidying here, putting something away there, doing
a little housework as I see it all while enjoying my life and keeping a very clean home.
It feels natural and it only takes a bit of effort.
But when I sit down to run my business, certain aspects of what needs to be done make me feel
paralyzed, unmotivated and overwhelmed.
It takes extreme effort for me to power through and I usually have to set up lots of external
systems and accountability to get it done.
Main point, my friend and I are simply strength oriented and stuck in different ways, with
no discernible reason to which we can point.
Because of this, my advice for getting things done at work won't help her at all, mostly
because it amounts to drink a big coffee and just make yourself do it and then wait around
to be inspired about what to do next.
And her advice for getting things done around the house is useless to me.
She once told me, light a candle and think about how good it will feel to get some things
done around the house.
What?
I suspect many people doling out productivity advice focus on areas where they're naturally
gifted, areas where all they needed was a little push or a couple of tips to get themselves
unstuck.
Unlike coffee and candles and believing in yourself, the principles in this book can
be customized to your unique barriers, strengths and interests.
Thank you.