This is the first episode of season 3, which I am dedicating to my father. It's about my relationship with him, or my lack of a relationship with him at this point.
Perfectionism is a big thread in my growing up years, so that's where I'm going to start.
When I originally decided to do this episode on perfectionism, I thought of it as a neurotic trait that causes a lot of harm, but then, as is my custom, I went and did some more reading on perfectionism. Turns out, not all perfectionism is bad.
There are three kinds of perfectionism that have been studied by psychologists: self-oriented perfectionism, other-oriented perfectionism, and socially-prescribed perfectionism.
I'm going to start by talking about self-oriented perfectionism, because that's what most people think about when they think of perfectionism. It’s this idea that your bed has to be made perfectly straight with hospital corners and your books need to be in alphabetical order, your spices in the spice rack need to be in alphabetical order, all the cups at the same height need to be together in the kitchen cupboard.
I have a co-worker who has monogrammed towels. She has to fold them all exactly the same way so when they're stacked in the linen closet, they all have the same appearance: that would be self-oriented perfectionism.
My boyfriend is a lot like this too. Everything has a compartment where it belongs. He has rubber bands for his cords and everything he owns has a home. This kind of perfectionism, this self-oriented perfectionism, is not necessarily bad.
Many people who are self-oriented perfectionists are very professional. They do a good job polishing their work, and it's because they are intrinsically motivated to do things right almost to the point of perfection that they succeed.
It can get in your way if it keeps you from turning your work in. However, most self-oriented perfectionists aren’t like that. They just take a little longer to make sure everything is right. It’s not a bad thing.
Then there’s socially-prescribed perfectionism.
Socially-prescribed perfectionists believe that others expect them to be perfect and that these others will be highly critical of them if they fail to meet these expectations. Unfortunately, this describes me to a T.
When I was little, my mother did this thing called White Glove Inspections. This is where we’d be expected to clean our bedrooms. Then she would put on these white gloves and go through our room to make sure there wasn't any dust anywhere, that the floor was vacuumed and the bed was made. If any dust appeared on her white glove, then you had failed the White Glove Inspection.
It was a lot of pressure for a kid.
Additionally, when my mother taught me how to make a bed, she spent a lot of time showing me how to tuck the sheets in using proper hospital corners. But I could never figure it out despite it being important to her. So when she came in to look at how I made my bed, I never had these proper hospital corners and she was very critical of me.
I grew up believing others expected me to be perfect based on these kinds of experiences.
My mother was very into these details and expected them from her children. She was more reasonable on herself, though. Meaning, she didn't seem to beat herself up as much as she did us kids. So instead of developing a healthy self-oriented perfectionism, I learned I wasn't going to be able to meet Mom’s expectations and that others were going to be judgmental of me for not being perfect.
I stopped trying so hard.
This is why I qualify as a socially-prescribed perfectionist.
The third kind of perfectionism is other-oriented perfectionism.
The other-oriented perfectionist uses an aggressive style of humor to criticize or show disapproval of others not being perfect. I would very firmly put my father into this category. He used humor to mock us when we did things he did not approve of.
Other-oriented perfectionists seek to dominate others. They don't have a lot of empathy for those they're seeking to dominate nor do they have much interest in helping or supporting those around them to meet their expectations. Basically, they expect a lot and then they're very disapproving and mocking when others don't live up to their desires.
Now to shine a little light onto how my father got to be this kind of person, I want to backtrack to the home he grew up in.
He's an interesting character.
My father grew up in a home with eight siblings. There were nine children and he was the oldest. His father was a teacher. His mother was a nurse. They were hard-working people and devoutly Mormon.
Grandpa was king of the castle. He disciplined the kids.
Grandma didn't discipline them. They would get into trouble during the day when grandpa was gone. Grandma would save up the things they had done wrong that they needed to be punished for and when grandpa got home from work, he would hit the kids with a belt. He told his children that “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” before meeting out the blows.
Which wasn’t true.
But isn't that just what parents say when they're abusing their children?
My dad saw a lot of pain and suffering that his own siblings went through from being beaten with a belt. The brother he was closest to, we’ll call him Matthew, though it's not his real name, was the scapegoat of the family.
He got hit more than anyone else.
When my father talks about Matthew, he doesn't show any empathy for him. I've never heard my dad say anything to the effect of, “Poor Matthew, he really got the brunt of my dad's wrath. It's not right that he was beaten so badly. It's not right that nothing he did was good enough.” I've never heard my dad say anything like that, because my dad was the golden child growing up.
Even though him and Matthew were close, my dad always was most loyal to his father and saw things from his father's point-of-view. Plus, my dad always would pat himself on the back for being the obedient golden child. Even today, my dad believes the reason he was punished less and beaten less than Matthew is because he was a better child. Dad says he was more perfect. He was better at being religious, better at being musical. In my dad’s mind, because he was better at keeping his father happy, he deserved to be hit less.
The biggest unwritten rule in my father's family growing up was to always make grandpa happy. You must kowtow to the king of the castle.
Even now, when my dad talks about those dynamics growing up, yeah he's not happy that his father beat all those children with a belt, but he's much more critical of Matthew. He’ll say, “Obviously Matthew never figured it out. He was never very smart. He never learned his lesson.” I've yet to hear Dad say anything compassionate or empathetic about Matthew’s situation even now. And my dad is a grown-ass man with a wife and five kids and grandchildren. So the fact that he still has no empathy for his brother is really kind of a failure. It shows he's not an empathetic person and it's really where his other-oriented perfectionism comes out.
Enter my mother.
My dad was brought up to be loyal to a man who was violent and controlling and to view that as the most perfect thing he could do. When he met my mother, who is also very controlling, he shifted that loyalty from his father to her.
My mother is a lot like a mob boss. She calls the shots, but she doesn't want to get her hands dirty.
My father is like the crony that breaks fingers for my mother. His role in the family isn't JUST that he enables her by looking the other way. He will actually hurt people for her, he will bully people and push boundaries, even intimidate someone to get his way if he thinks it will make my mother happy. When my father married my mother, he had to break away from his family.
In particular, he had to break away from doing everything possible to make his own father happy. His father and my mother never really got along that well. Grandpa didn't like my mother and he didn't want my dad marrying her, but my dad was very loyal to my mom.
He had shifted his loyalty from his father to my mother, so by marrying her against grandpa’s wishes he gave up his place as the golden child.
From the outside, looking in, that looks really courageous.
I spent years thinking it meant my dad had integrity and courage, until I realized he was just repeating a pattern of picking one person to be loyal to. I don't think that my father knows who he is. I don't think he's ever taken the time to sit down and figure out the person that he is. I think he's operated his entire life based on a script of what he's told is right.
So in short, I don't think that he lives. I think that he exists.
And it's sad when I take the time to have some compassion for him, but it doesn't change that he can't be in my life due to his habit of using scorn and humiliation and gossip as a way to control the narrative. Plus, he doesn't respect boundaries, and that makes him not safe.
In my home growing up, the ultimate goal, the ultimate form of perfection was to make my mother happy. Just as the white glove inspections and making the bed with hospital corners seemed really important to my mom, they were other things that weren't as important to her that she didn't care that much about: like if we dressed fashionably, for instance. So while she wasn't the most organized herself, there were these certain things that were very important to her, that you had to be perfect in.
Being obedient was the first thing.
Valuing music was another thing.
And the third thing, which I probably should have put first, because it was the most important thing above everything else, was that you believed in Mormonism.
You had to be a devoted follower of the prophet.
The perfectionism I grew up with was in no way consistent. The rules were not easy to understand. They were arbitrary, and so you could step out of line at any moment and not know it. Then you would be punished.
As a result of this upbringing, I grew into a person with a self-deprecating humor, someone with self-esteem issues who still, to this day, feels like she has to be perfect in order to be loved, that she cannot live up to the expectations of others, that it's impossible. And so, therefore, she may never truly be loved.
It's this kind of perfectionism that can lead a person to give up easily and to self-sabotage, because if you're not going to be good enough anyway, why put so much effort into it?
This is the kind of neurotic perfectionism that is unhealthy. I would love to say I'm a poster child for healing from that, but I'm not.
I took a test last night.
You can take this test if you want to. Go online to IDRlabs.com. They have a test called the Multidimensional Perfectionism Test that can measure you on the three kinds of perfectionism: self-oriented, other-oriented, and socially-prescribed. I don't think they call it socially-prescribed on the site. They call it something else. But it's socially-prescribed perfectionism they're measuring regardless.
I took this test last night. Here are my results.
In other oriented perfectionism, where you're trying to have high expectations of everyone around you and you're basically being a judgmental prick, I rate at 11% which is very low. It means I don't have super high expectations for those around me. For self-oriented perfectionism, I rated at 61% which is a little bit below average for the general population. So I'm not really a self-oriented perfectionist. I don't even make my bed in the morning at this point and that's fine, a lot of people don’t. But then for the socially-prescribed perfectionism, I scored at 92%, which is insanely high and much higher than average. I have a long way to go in eradicating this harmful trait from my mindset. I definitely still have issues feeling like I have to be perfect to be loved and with believing nothing I do is ever good enough.
It might be interesting, listeners, to go to that website IDRlabs.com and take that test for yourself to see where you fall.
If I find a way to rid myself of this particular neuroses, I will let you know, but I am not there yet.
Much of this has to do with my parents, in particular my father. I have had to be in therapy for so many years because of the arbitrary rules in my home and never knowing when I was going to break one, never knowing when I was going to be punished.
I'm sure many of you can relate.
Turns out, the ultimate goal in my home growing up was to keep my mother happy at all costs. Us children had to keep her happy. My father had to keep her happy, and that’s what being perfect meant. In the Bible there's a very famous story about God commanding an Old Testament prophet to sacrifice his son on an altar. Abraham brings Isaac up to this altar on a mountain, and he straps him down. He lifts the knife up in his hand and just as he's about to murder his own son at the behest of God, an angel comes down and stops him.
I think this is a good story for this podcast episode because in the story, Abraham was willing to sacrifice anything on that altar for God. Even his own child.
My father has an altar of his own. An altar of perfectionism, and he is willing to sacrifice anything on that altar for my mother. As a child, he was willing to sacrifice anything on that altar for his own father. He was willing, and continues to be willing, to sacrifice my Uncle Matthew on that altar of perfectionism. For in my dad’s eyes, the problem isn't that Matthew was abused as a child. The problem is that Matthew was unable to keep his father happy. Therefore he deserved to be beaten. He deserved to be treated like shit in my father's mind because he has that altar of perfectionism that he has used as a measuring stick his whole life.
My dad has sacrificed all five of his children on that altar of perfection at some point. He has done this by taking us aside in confidence and building relationships with us only to betray our trust at our mother’s behest. He has done this by scorning us when we have behaved in a way he finds unacceptable, by laughing at us and by humiliating us.
For me personally, he has imitated what I sound like when I cry. He sees crying as weakness. And through humiliation, he has made me feel ashamed of natural emotions that make him uncomfortable. This has worked to keep me from expressing those emotions. When he did this, he sacrificed me and my feelings on his altar of perfectionism. He sacrificed any healthy relationship we may have had.
He has sacrificed others through gossip, by talking about them behind their back in a way that's very mean. My dad is two faced. He's good at being nice to you to your face, but you never know what he's going to be saying behind your back. He has used intimidation to sacrifice others on his altar of perfectionism and then bragged about his actions.
When I was a kid, there was this thing in the Mormon church called the Do Not Contact List or the No Contact List. People who were still technically members of the church but didn't want to be contacted by church representatives were on this list. It was a boundary. If you don't want to leave the church, but you want to be left alone, your name would be on the No Contact List.
I think that's reasonable, listeners. Don't you think that's reasonable?
Okay, so my dad was privy to who was on this list, but he felt the people on this list needed to come back to church. He felt that they were wrong, that they needed to soften their hearts and come back to full fellowship in the LDS Church. Therefore, he ignored the fact that these people wanted no contact and instead knocked on their doors unannounced.
“Well,” he’d say, while bragging about his actions after the fact. “They may say they want no contact, but they're still members of the church. So clearly they really want contact.” Then he would talk about how everyone was so afraid to cross their boundaries. How everyone else was so afraid to knock on their doors or call, but he was willing to do it. After all, he was brave and faithful. That's how he saw it.
His altar of perfectionism in this case was church membership. In order for those people to measure up to his expectation of perfection, they should be going to church, they should be doing the right thing. In his mind, their privacy didn’t matter. Nothing mattered more than The Church. Therefore, he was going to trespass on their property. He was going to repeatedly call them even though they had specifically asked to be left alone.
He saw his behavior as valiant. Virtuous.
Sacrificing these otherwise good people on his altar perfectionism was totally fine.
He even had a story he told where he went over to this one guy's house on the no contact list that had a dog, a fierce dog. And this guy almost sicked his dogs on my dad, warning him never to come back. Instead of feeling embarrassed, my dad was proud. He felt like he’d accomplished this great thing because he had been so persistent, someone actually threatened to sick dogs on him.
He bragged about it.
Pushing boundaries is my dad’s specialty. When my grandfather got sick and had dementia, one of my aunts was taking care of him. And my dad actually snuck into her house when she wasn't home. Him and my mom, they did a breaking-and-entering thing. They snuck into my aunt’s house when the family wasn’t home and they looked around to make sure the place was clean, because they felt like they needed to make sure grandpa was being taken care of properly.
Then, because they had no shame, they came back home and bragged about it to me and my other siblings. This is the kind of other-oriented perfectionism that I grew up with. It's the kind of perfectionism that messes with your head, and it takes a long time to recover from.
I'm still working on that.
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