Self-Care & Self Love: Bill’s Journey
Quite some time ago, a client told me something that broke my heart a little.
Let’s call him “Bill”. Bill told me a story of when he was 5, and his father had gone out and purchased oil paints, brushes, and canvas. He told him they would paint. He was so excited to paint with his daddy!
He doesn’t remember what his father painted, just that it looked nice. Little Billy made a stickman and a stick dog. Bill remembers that the figures only took up a little bit of the canvas, and he didn’t know what else to paint.
“Keep painting, keep painting,” his father told him.
He waited, and watched his father finished his painting. Then Billy’s dad looked at Billy’s painting, “This isn’t what I spent all that money for you to do! Look at this crap, Billy!”
Billy was afraid, and ran into his room. Later, he heard his parents talking. His father was still very angry, and his mother was trying to explain to his father how Billy had done his best.
“How hard can it be to paint a freaking picture,” the father yelled. Billy started to feel bad that he didn’t paint something else and make it pretty like his daddy’s painting.
As Billy grew, he made other things, pictures, and figures. He made things out of boxes, yarn, and glue. His grandmother told him that the things he made were nice, but he never believed her. There was always something wrong with what he made: it didn’t look how he saw it in his mind, no one knew what it was, or it broke.
Even if someone else, like a grownup, offered to make the project for him, and he gave all the directions on what to do, it never was what he envisioned. He was always disappointed and thought he could have done better.
In school, he was labeled a procrastinator because he had problems finishing his work, sometimes. When he was under a lot of stress, his room got messier and messier. When his parents told him to clean it up, he cried with frustration because he didn’t know what to do first, and it all looked so overwhelming.
His father would call Billy lazy and threaten him with punishment, which made Billy worry even more, and made it even harder for him to make decisions about his room. Sometimes, his mom would sneak in, and clean it up for him or tell him how to do it.
After years, and years, of mostly feeling disappointed with his artistic creations, he decided he wouldn’t do any art. As an adult, he was invited to those shops where you paint and drink with your friends, but he never went.
“I’m just not good with creative expression,” he told them, and then would change the subject.
He began to have problems at work. They told him it took him too long to do the most simple task, and that he was at risk of not being promoted. He really wanted a promotion. His wife was expecting, and they needed the money. His wife noticed that her husband was struggling, and suggested he seek counseling to see how he could motivate himself to do better at work and get the promotion.
That’s how he ended up in my office.
Bill told me that some things were very hard for him to do, and he had “attacks” sometimes when he felt overwhelmed. As his therapy progressed, Billy began to realize that he was a perfectionist. He rarely felt he did things right, and he struggled trying to ignore his father’s voice inside his head telling him that he was lazy and not good enough. He felt that his father never valued him, or the efforts he put into doing things.
As an adult, when criticized, he worried that if he didn’t do something the way it, “should be done,” that he would make someone angry. He would become paralyzed at the thought of not doing something perfectly. He began to realize that he had panic attacks when he felt he was being judged, and was able to see the connection between this and his relationship with his father who was still judgmental.
He said he rarely believed that he was good enough and that he frequently judged others as harshly as he judged himself. He lived in fear of being, “found out” and worried that people would realize he was, “incompetent.” He had quite a lot of negative self-talk which plummeted his self-esteem. He had trouble believing that he could change the negative way he thought of himself. He was terrified of making the same mistakes with his own child, as his father had done with him.
I requested that he listen to Brene Brown, a scholar on perfectionism and how to stop it. He agreed to listen to self-care and self love exercises and to read the works of Kristin Neff, a self-compassion scholar. He practiced self-care affirmations to build up his self love. These affirmations reinforced the belief that it was ok not to be perfect. He started challenging those negative thoughts when they would come into his head, and replaced them with positive, realistic thoughts. He began to address his anxiety through meditation, starting slowly with two minutes a day and working up until he felt more in control of his mind.
Eventually, he could feel his anxiety decreasing.
Our sessions lasted for several years, as he began processing traumas from his childhood and understanding why he felt the way he did about himself. He noticed that his anxiety wasn’t as bad. He now enjoyed being with other people because he no longer feared being judged as “unworthy” by them, and he felt comfortable in his skin.
He said that the change from perfectionist to “regular guy,” wasn’t easy, but he never regretted a step once he was pointed in the right direction.
Feel like you may not be going in the direction of growth? Are barely whispered memories keeping your from transforming into the person you thought you would grow up to be? We can work together to start your self-care & self love journey.
Wishing you serenity and much happiness,
Mechele