I went to a great meeting this morning. The topic was perfectionism.

-I After I shared, I was filled with dread because I did not think my pitch was perfectly delivered.

-I hate seeing that I have not perfectly dealt with my perfectionism.

-My humanity is included in the love covenant I have with my Higher Power. To my surprise, She only wants me to be fully human. In other words, my Higher power only wants me to be exactly the person I actually am,  She wants me to thoroughly accept and love myself.

-Maybe the perfect solution to perfectionism is believing, ” I’m not OK, you are not OK, but that”s OK.”

-At my funeral, no one will say, “What a wonderful man George was. He was always right.”

-My strategy as a boy was to figure out what it was my mother wanted from me. I would say to myself, “She is very angry. If I can figure out what I did to make her so angry, I would never do it again. Conversely, sometimes I said, “She’s  being nice now. If I could figure out what I did to make her happy I would always do it.” That was definitely my onramp to perfectionism.

-Unfortunately, if I had found a way to always do it right, that would have been a major problem for my Mom. That’s because what she wanted from me was not for me to be the perfect son, she wanted me to be available so I could be the target for her anger.

-One of the ways she managed to keep me available, was to keep changing the rules. The boy she wanted me to be at noon today, was not going to be the boy she was going to want me to be that evening.

-She was nice to me often enough to keep me hooked.’

-Sometimes I have said,”I am only an expert in one area. I am an expert at knowing what does not work. Maybe saying that is one more expression of my perfectionism.

-I have learned that falling into the mud is not my problem. Everybody does that. My problem is staying for a swim.

-When I first came into the program an experienced program member watched for the times I would beat myself up with a verbal baseball bat. Then she would hand me a silver dollar and say, ” I have purchased that bat. Now it is mine and you can’t ever use  it again”. I made a lot of money.

-My really good friend Nicole and I have an agreement. If she hears me make a derogatory joke or statement about myself, she has the right to demand I make three affirmations about myself. It works the other way too. if she speaks in a derogatory way about herself, she owes me three affirmations. This little game has brought us some fun moments.

-I have become persuaded that all my character defects are driven by shame. Therefore shaming myself when I do I do something wrong only serves to make repeating the shame producing activities a certainty.

-Shame is the gasoline that keeps the car of my character defects running. I can’t get rid of that car, but I can keep the fool thing out of gas.

-In other words, if I stubbornly hang on to my serenity by using my program tools, I can gradually escape the prison of shame in which I have lived most of my life.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 at 11:20 am and is filed under Recovery Talks, String of Pearls. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.