You are a high achiever. You call yourself a perfectionist. Your brain expects you to do things in a faster and smoother fashion.
Your desire for perfection develops harsh self-analysis and toxic talk inside you ( poison parrot link) .
You never get peace no matter how much you achieve and win.
Why is being a perfectionist can lead to failure?
The high expectations you give yourself can give you the feeling of failure, which feels bad.
It creates a negative pattern of; wanting to be perfect, failing on the way, feeling bad, and doing it all over again. It keeps you in a pattern of never feeling satisfied.
This is the right place to start your healing journey. You need to understand what the problem is before coming to your solution.
How EMDR Therapy Can Help Perfectionists
When it comes to the treatment of your suffering from anxiety, EMDR therapy can help you cope with this overachieving nature. It helps you to control your emotions to process the distressing past experiences and bad memories. It drives you to live a true life.
The main advantage of EMDR in comparison to talking therapies, where you are not involved in talking about distressing experiences. The EMDR therapy relaxes the brain to get full control over its natural healing process rather than focusing on upcoming emotions, thoughts, and behavior of disappointing events.
EMDR for PTSD is designed to remove these trauma memories from your brain, unlearning the worst pattern that hurts you the most.
First and foremost, the reason behind this behavior is identified to work on the mind to become adaptive. Then, both internal and external factors that trigger such behavior are unveiled to dig deeper.
Lastly, you are taught coping skills so that you can handle future actions with a positive response. This gives you a speedy recovery.
Once the above mechanism is followed, the habit of being a perfectionist gets certainly reduced. In some complex situations, EMDR is also followed by associated therapies like CBT and hypnotherapy. These all help in lessening the drive for perfection.
You might not believe but EMDR has magical effects. EMDR identifies the root behind your behavior and helps in working on it.
A story of a perfectionist that was ridden of her anxiety after EMDR
A doctor consultant was in floods of tears feeling that she would be constantly judged by her colleges who potentially could think that she was stupid.
She would drive herself to absolute perfection in everything, but could never get rid of that feeling of people are saying behind her back that she is stupid and she can not do her job properly.
She would undertake the training after the training with no ability to rest or relax. She would even push herself far to the urge in her favorite sports activity and instead of enjoying it she would always feel the sense of not being good enough.
When we started a process of Bilateral Stimulation ( a part of EMDR) memory of her being very small came up to the surface. She saw her father telling her off a lot and constantly criticizing her.
She spent all her life to prove herself and others that she is intelligent and can achieve a lot, but the self-negative belief of that little girl has never gone.
When we experience trauma in our childhood it locks itself in the amygdala, the primitive part of the brain which doesn’t have a time tag and keeps recurring.
We had 8 sessions in total talking through it, installing her with positive resources, addressing her self-limiting beliefs ( my link), restructuring and changing them into positive ones ( I am intelligent!)
We used the empty chair technique to allow her to speak to her father and resolve the conflict in her mind while she was in a deep state of relaxation.
Eventually, she could feel the relief of the negative emotions and no need to prove anything to the world. She could enjoy more her professional life and her favorite sports activities.
She started believing that she is intelligent and good enough.
Conclusion
Do you want to move forward and enjoy your life?
You want to lessen your anxiety and self-negative talk which drives to the feeling of failure.
This is the right time to step forward to specialized treatment. It is vital to address the issue at the earliest.
EMDR therapy will reduce the symptoms and help you in healing.
It would look at your unresolved trauma related to your need to be perfect.
You deserve full control of your emotions and thinking and I am here to guide you to the path.
I’m here to help you to work through your traumas, understand your reactions and behaviors and manage your perfectionist nature. We can develop the exact specialized treatment suited to your conditions.
Feel free to contact me at junabrookes@gmail.com to discuss further.