Transcript

Julie: I am so excited about this group we have on tonight. We are meeting both Alex and Daph for the very first time, and then John is back for the third or fourth time with us. I’m going to have everybody do introductions first. John, do you want to go first?

John: Sure. My name’s John. I identify as an alcoholic in recovery, and I’m here in Portland, OR.

Julie: Awesome, how long have you been sober now?

John: It is coming up on 17 months.

Julie: Really cool. And next we’ll go with Daph.

Daph: Hey y’all, I am Daph. I like to call myself a sober wino. I have been sober since July 29, 2018, so tomorrow will by 55 months, which is a little over 4.5 years, which is nothing short of a miracle. I’m so grateful that y’all asked us to come on tonight, and thank you for giving me a chance to participate in my recovery today.

Julie: Absolutely, thank you so much for being here. And I will also say, Daph is a nationally certified sober coach and all kinds of other things. I’m going to include some of your information in the show notes so everybody can get in touch with you and follow along with your adventures if they would like to.

Daph: Thank you so much.

Julie: Yeah! And last but not least is Alex.

Alex: Yeah, hi, I’m happy to be here. My name is Alex, I’m 32 years old, I’m from Minnesota, maybe you can tell by my accent I’m from the midwest. My full time job is I work in fitness, and I also help lead sober groups, sober retreats, and I like to create pretty much any opportunity for people to connect through sobriety. I have been sober 8.5 years, so I got sober at 24. And yeah, I love getting to be in spaces like this, connecting with other sober people to hear their stories and experiences and journeys to what got them where they are today. And I think conversations like this are important because it helps other people see a little it of themselves and recognize no one story is the same, but sobriety brings us all together in the end.

Julie: Absolutely, there is so much commonality in all of our stories if we take the time just to see what we have in common. It’s a pretty incredible thing. Really excited to have you here and sharing your stories with us.

So one of the topics that comes up a lot in conversations about recovery is perfectionism. It’s wrapped up in so much of what we used to try to drink away – self worth, people pleasing, lack of self care, just to name a few. So tonight we’re going to talk about perfectionism. What has the looked like in the past, what does it look like now, and how has it played a part in your recovery?

Alex: I can go. So, it’s actually funny, I got coffee today with my sponsee and we were talking about perfectionism today. And I called her up and said, “I forgot to tell you, I’m talking about perfectionism on a podcast tonight.” One of the things that her and I were talking about was how now, in sobriety, there can be this sense of feeling of how – and I felt this early in my sobriety too and she’s feeling this now – where we drank, I drank, I blacked out, I did all of these things that really took me away from the person that I wanted to be, which is why I knew something had to change in my life. And we had this discussion around then we move into sobriety and it’s this beautiful thing, and it’s this new opportunity. So we put this pressure on ourselves that we have to now be perfect because this is our second chance. When we do that, there’s so much pressure of, “I have to people please, I have to get straight A’s if I’m in school, I have to be the best significant other, I have to be all these things.” Because this is our second chance. And when we put those pressures on ourselves, it really takes away the joys of today. What I was talking about and what I felt like I really learned – and I realized I actually learned this in premarital counseling – was we can’t live our lives tit for tat. Just because I used to black out and I used to lie and I used to do these things that to me makes me feel like I was a different person, doesn’t mean that now I have to live a life of perfection. Because if I try to be perfect, it takes me out of the present. I get stuck in my thoughts, it weighs me down, it doesn’t allow me to actually be the person that I’m trying to become every single day as I walk this sober life. I think that’s something that I have really had the opportunity to think more about. We can try to be perfect, but let’s be honest, nobody’s perfect. So learning to give ourselves grace in this process of recovery and recognizing it’s a journey, it’s an evolution. Giving yourself this opportunity to embrace where you’re at right now, trying not to think, “I used to be this person who did X, Y, and Z when I drank, so now I have to be this totally different version.” It’s like, no, you don’t have to be perfect. You’re just turning over a new chapter into your life, it doesn’t mean that because of what you did when you drank doesn’t mean you have to be this perfect version. And I think that’s a really important thing to think about in sobriety.

Julie: That’s interesting to me because I did the same thing with perfectionism where I tried to use it to ‘make up for’… but I did it all at the same time. So I would drink two bottles of wine at night, wake up hungover, barely be able to function as a mom, and then try to be perfect all the way through the day. I’d beat myself up and try to do the perfect mom thing to try to make up for who I was starting at 5:00 every night. So it was this constant cycle from 5:00 until I passed out of thinking I’m this failure. So then wake up in the morning and try to be perfect. I’d put on this big show for everybody on the outside to see. To make myself feel better? For knowing who I was, but trying to pretend that I wasn’t. So kind of similar, I used the perfectionism to make up for failures or shortcomings, but I just tried to pack it all into the same thing. Which was exhausting and miserable.

John: Yeah, my experience of perfectionism started even before my drinking, my alcoholism. My perfectionism started way back. Thinking about how I internalized expectations for my parents and having to be – everything – perfect. And I think part of the destructiveness with drinking was just, “Forget it. Burn everything down. I can’t be perfect.” And I was clearly not. And not to be horrible, but there’s no point in being good enough, you can just be terrible. And now it’s like, we talk about getting back to who we were before we drank, and that’s not good either. Right? I need yet something new. And that’s hard. It’s one of those things I find cropping up in unusual places. There are some places where I’m getting better about cutting myself some slack, but there’s weird little corners where it’s like, why can’t you just let that go? It’s every day finding what’s the latest thing I’m bad at? And learning to let that go. It’s an ongoing challenge. There’s so many corners to perfectionism I didn’t really expect.

Steve: See, I was the opposite. I got to the point where not good enough was just fine. Screw trying to be perfect. I was never a straight A student growing up. I would get to the point where the last 75%, where the last 25% got really freaking difficult. So it got too hard and I would give up. I would just get by. I was the ‘get by’ person on whatever, just natural ability, call it whatever you want. I got to the point where my self worth was so garbage it wasn’t even worth trying. I wasn’t going to put in the effort because it wasn’t good enough anyway. So why bother? For me, in sobriety, it was like, what was even “good”? A success to me was… I still don’t know what perfect is. I don’t have that, “I’m not good enough” drive to push me. The I need it to fit in this certain box, that vision. That vision just goes wherever. I can chase it until I run out of energy, does that make sense? Chase that vision, if it’s done it’s done. Generally speaking it’s not perfect at all. And one of the things I’m learning is that is okay, but I have to learn to try and get closer to it but not achieve it. Does that make sense? Because I need that for motivation.

Julie: I think that outside pressure that we all feel, we either respond to it with, “I’m going to keep trying and trying and trying,” until we make ourselves miserable. Or we’re like, “F— it, I can’t do it anyway.” It seems like, and we were just saying before we started recording, alcoholics are kind of all-or-nothing, right? So maybe you fall a little bit toward the ‘nothing’ where you’re like, “I’m not even going to try,” where I was like, “Gosh darn it, I’m going to win.”

Steve: Which is interesting though because I quit drinking, and I’ve only quit drinking once. I’ve only quit drinking this time. So I’m coming up on two years sober, and there has been no giving up in this. There has been 100% drive and passion in this sobriety. And I don’t want to go back to where I was before, and it’s something that I live and breathe and I don’t even know what perfect sobriety is, but I love this whole journey. Which is interesting because this is the one thing that there’s just no giving up at all. All in, 100%, this entire way, it’s the only thing I’ve put absolutely everything in my entire life is this. It’s been the best thing I’ve ever done. 12:05

Daph: Alright, speaking of all or thing, I’ll go. Everything I can ditto so much of what you said, Steve, because that was me. In school, I just barely got by. In high school, I was too high for school. I just floated by. A 60? I was happy with that because that was passing. I never really excelled in anything. I never put too much into it, so I wasn’t expecting to get much out of it. But just like you said, this is my life today. And I put as much into my recovery as I did into my drinking. Which is a lot. The only difference I can say is that I don’t wake up in the middle of the night to read the Big Book, like I would wake up in the middle of the night to drink. But perfectionism beforehand – before I was drinking and all the years prior – it really wasn’t a thing for me. But the people pleasing – I guess I made up for the perfectionism with the people pleasing. Because I was the biggest people pleaser that I had ever met. When I got into treatment, that was something my counselors really tried to drive home with me. They asked, “Why do you care so much?” I said, “You should care! You should care what everybody thinks!” And let me just tell you something. Four and a half years later, I do not care. And it took me a long time to get to that point. Because God forbid – you’d ask me to do something, I would say yet, and then that was my excuse to drink, because you pissed me off because I had to do it. You know, you don’t have to do it. But I didn’t want to offend anybody. And so for the last decade of my drinking, before I got sober, that is pretty much how I lived. I would always go out of my way for everybody. And to do things that, maybe it was a big deal, maybe it wasn’t. But it was the point that I felt like, “I don’t want you to get mad at me, so I’m never going to say no.” And people would let me down, because I would always do it, and other people wouldn’t do X, Y, and Z. And my therapist would always say, “Daph, you get so upset because you expect people to have the same heart as you.” And not everybody does! And now that I’m on this side, I’m like, “Yeah, that’s because they’re not a pushover.” That’s exactly what I was. I didn’t want anybody to get mad at me. And it took probably two years of being sober before I finally have been able to say, “No.” And I’m not going to explain why. I still feel like I need to a little bit, because if you tell me now, I want to know why! (laughter.) But I think that’s the reason why I always feel like I need to explain. But like I said, it probably took about two years after the meetings I was telling you guys about, and just doing them and getting so burned out. But I didn’t want to stop because I didn’t want to let anybody down. Meetings are a big deal in recovery, and God forbid that I was the reason that somebody didn’t get a meeting in. If I heard they relapsed, and it’s because of me, you know what I mean? It took so long to… “Alright, you can delegate. Let’s start letting other people help. And let’s start filling in the gaps.” And it was about two years into it. I have a really good friend that I met through Instagram. My husband and I have flown out to see him in Phoenix. And he started helping with the meetings when he saw I was getting overwhelmed. So long story short, I would always think, “Oh, I’m so stupid, I’m so dumb.” I was always putting myself down. And he would always say, “Daph, you’ve got to stop that. Quit explaining!” It was the best free therapy I’ve ever gotten. But it was so true! And it took a long time, but today, I’m okay with that. I can say no, although I am kind of stressing about having to go back home and trying to split our time up between the in-laws and my mother, I’m like, “Oh, God.” I was starting to agonize over that. And then I though, I’ll put that on my husband, because you know what? Nothing today is worth me drinking over. But that was my whole thing as far as the people pleasing. But as far as being a perfectionist today? It’s all or nothing. And just like Julie had mentioned, I got sober, and like Steve, I’ve got to do it all. I’ve got to do these meetings, so I started the meetings. And then I wanted to learn, like what else can I learn? I’ve been to treatment for 90 days. I learned a lot. But there’s a lot more that I don’t know. So that’s when I was attending online zoom classes. I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna be a recovery coach.” And then I went and did Sober Companion. And then I was like, “Okay, what else can I do?” And then I went to Relapse Prevention. And then I went to Sober Transport. And then I thought, okay, I’ve got a little too much going, so I had to pull the reins back. I’m finally at the point, four and a half years later, that I’m learning about balance, which is another very good topic. Anyway, I’m sorry, I could ramble on all night, I know it’s not speaker night. (laughter)

Steve: The interesting part there, Daph when I was listening to you talk. Here I am talking about the opposite of perfection. And the opposite of perfection – you talk about balance, that’s right where that is. But then I started to think, what were the things that I thought? Because perfectionism always what everyone else thinks, it’s what I think, too. My own version of what perfect is. And one of the first things – perfectionism, people pleaser, that’s just straight to doormat. That’s just getting walked all over. And I definitely did that. That’s where the “not good enough” came from. And where did that come from? My version of the perfect husband was to never say no. If I never said no, and I always said yes, then I was always giving. You got whatever you wanted, and because you got whatever you wanted, that’s perfect. I’m giving you everything you want, I don’t say no, you can go buy whatever you want. That was my version of just giving. And I never said no. I never said “sorry”. My version of being the perfect husband was that. I just took on all of that and gave all of that, and I was left with nothing. I wasn’t left with very much, by the time all was said and done, because I didn’t say no. And I said sorry for everything. So the two things that I probably shouldn’t have done – shouldn’t is a bad word, but anyways – were the two things that made me perfect in those aspects, which is completely wrong. It’s just really interesting what came up when I listened to you talk.

John: Well, I think it’s the topic of balance. Because if we were never to say sorry, that would be like, sociopathic. Right? There’s also that end of it. And where we’re all at, is right there in the middle ground. I never saw myself as a people pleaser, because I internalize so much of the expectations. And a lot of it, especially in my house growing up, was academic. And I did it. I was like, “Sweet! I can actually be kind of perfect in these settings.” So it actually kind of reinforces, “Great, you can actually do this.” But you go through life… you can be kind of perfect in school. But in the third grade, that doesn’t mean through every level, you can do that forever. It gets harder. And when I couldn’t be perfect, and I didn’t have an alternate plan. Even internally, it wasn’t even that I was going to disappoint my parents. There was some of that. But it was like, I literally had no other conception of myself. It was a very adrift feeling.

Alex: Something that was coming up for me when you were talking Steve, about people pleasing and the idea of perfection is different for everybody. Going back to the idea of, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” And so if you don’t know that you always saying yes to someone is considered people pleasing, you just think you’re being a really considerate and sincere friend or husband, or whatever it may be. Until you know boundaries are, that might feel like perfection to you. “I am the perfect husband.” And then you start to learn about boundaries and you start to learn about people pleasing, and you start to learn about the masks that we put on to start to fit into this mold of our expectations. That’s when we start to realize, wait, is this actually perfection? Or is this the perfection that I’m sold, told to believe. I think in my sobriety, what I’ve learned is I did people please a lot. I didn’t realize before I got sober that I was people pleasing. I ever thought I was just being a good daughter. I was saying yes even when I wanted to say no. But it felt like saying yes was showing up the way I was supposed to. And getting sober has pushed me and challenged me in ways to do the work. To set boundaries and say no and protect my time. To go on a healing journey of discovering who I am and who I want to be in this life, versus who others want me to be. And it’s challenged me to set aside this idea of showing up perfect, and instead showing up as my favorite version of me. Because perfection is unreachable, it’s unattainable. Progress over perfection. And that’s a huge part of the sobriety journey. When we can focus on showing up 1% better, great. Knowing also that there are going to be days that we can’t show up 1% better. Maybe we got in a fight with someone we love. Maybe we are just having a crappy day, and that’s okay too. And giving yourself grace in those moments. Because when we’re always striving for perfection, we’re always “Not good enough.” Like we’re never going to get there. So I have to remind myself, I’m working to be my favorite version of me. That’s going to evolve, that’s going to look different. And that’s also going to look different than maybe somebody else’s expectations of me or society’s expectations of me. But for me, this is how I choose to show up, this is what feels best for me. And it’s continuing down this path and allowing myself to have grace in that journey.

Julie: Something that comes up when I hear you talk about expectations that I had to figure out fairly early on. I realized I lived my whole life by expectations. Not usually my own. My husband’s expectations, my parents expectations, society’s expectations. And then I started realizing that if I didn’t know what someone’s expectations of me were, I would just make it up. And usually, it was ridiculous. And then I would strive to meet those made up expectations. And so a big part of my earlier authenticity journey was dropping all the expectations from anybody. Any perceived expectations, and real expectations, whatever. The first 6 or 8 months of recovery for me was anti-perfectionism. I let everything go. It was the dead opposite of everything I had ever been. But had to do that, because then I had to then take a thousand steps back and start asking myself, “What do I expect of my self in this situation.” Or, “What do I expect of myself as a mom?” Because I had my parents and what they thought that a mom should be, and my husband and what he thought that a mom should be. And then you go to homeschool groups and all those parents tell you what they think a mom should look like. And everywhere. So when I actually stepped back and asked myself, what do I think a good mom looks like? And then I could start feeling my way into that. But that was a really difficult process for me to kind of peel away all of the expectations and figure out what I actually expected.

Steve: It’s like the great reset. I can relate to that one big time too. And then you decide that instead of the perfection it’s just evolution.

Daph: What I was going to say, I was thinking once I got sober, that’s when I started getting all these – now I’ve got to be perfect. I wasn’t before because I didn’t care. I was young and didn’t care, I was a drunk and didn’t care. And now I’m sober and I don’t have any excuses. And you just know there are people sitting there, just waiting on you to fall. They all thought I was the one that would be back. I am one or two of 16 that – praise God – am still alive, haven’t been back, and haven’t relapsed. I mean, if you count like the 48 hours that I quit on my own, when my husband detoxed me at home and I celebrated by having a glass of wine. I didn’t know – whoever it was that said it – you truly don’t know what you don’t know. I try today to do my best. And it may not be the best, but it’s my best. And I have to be happy with that. I cannot fuel myself for unrealistic expectations. I don’t want to feel the pain of imperfection today. And that’s really all I can do. And I no longer beat myself up over petty things. I felt enough shame in my active addiction to last me a lifetime, and I refuse to go back there. It took me a few years to get over, but that book is closed. I cannot feel shame about my past anymore, because from what I’ve learned, guilt and shame will get you drunk. I remember my last drunk, part of it. It was a black out and a brown out and then I woke up in detox. But that was a good thing. But I remember that day up until I don’t remember it. And that’s something that keeps me sober. Remembering wanting to end my life. So I know that I think it was Alex that said – I know that what I’m doing right now is better than what I was doing yesterday. So I can lay my head down at night knowing that I tried my best. And that’s what’s got to be the best. We will never be perfect. There is only one perfect person, and he’s not in here right now with us! I have to keep it real.

John: I think one challenge for me then is when I say, okay, when I get better at accepting myself as imperfect, then there’s a little question of like, how much do I still bother? For me it comes up a lot at work. So Steve and Julie know this, I’m a physician in practice, so it’s not a place that encourages just doing your best. I mean, yes, that’s the rational human thing. But it not the kind of feel it lends to it. And part of me is like, “Okay, I’m going to accept that I’m not perfect, I’m human, I’ve been doing my best.” And that’s great. Then the slide becomes, am I really cut out for this? Should I just leave? Should I do something else? And then I start finding myself where I can’t be perfect. Not just work, but hobbies too. You can’t do this perfectly, maybe you shouldn’t do it. And that’s better in some sense in terms of there’s a little bit less pressure, I’m not beating myself up. But what I haven’t graduated to next is actually, maybe it’s okay. So I’m making a little progress. But now I have to have these very real talks with people. It actually comes up a lot, I had one with my boss. I said, “I actually can’t do this. You think I can continue this leadership job, but I cannot. And here’s why. And you’re going to have to make a plan about it, because you’re going to have to get someone else.” There’s not a rush, not this week. And I hear his voice – which is mind reading, which we shouldn’t do (laughter) – asking “Who is this guy? And why are we having conversations like this?” And it’s very candid, very helpful, but it’s not normal. But I have to do a reality test with people. I have to ask, “Am I off? Am I completely making this up?” And sometimes have them say, “No, you’re doing a fine job, we’re happy with what you’re doing.” And I’m like, “That’s great. I’m not arguing that. I’m no longer saying I’m bad at this. I’m not satisfied, even if you are, and I’m not going to live in that stress anymore.” I’ve got to walk away before I completely have a breakdown and go back and drink. And he knows I’m sober so that’s great. And I can sometimes say, “This is my limit.” And sometimes with limits too though, not only do I have these expectations, but I just let myself go and I can’t put myself in them any longer. Hobbies at home are easy to walk away from. Career not so much. So I’ve got to figure out how I’m going to make this work. And I guess one of the biggest things for me is how much it actually works out. People are like, “Okay. Sure, we can try to do something else.” When you just talk to them. I think for me a lot of the expectations came from my parents. And my parents’ style, while loving and caring was also lots of expectation and not a lot of tolerance for being challenged. So I was just like, “Okay, I’ll do that.” And I’m finding out now that some people in the world are okay with you objecting and saying, “I’m not sure that I can do this.” That’s a fine conversation to have and we can have it. So it’s amazing what you find when you explore and actually take that step to bring it up with people.

Alex: I think too, in sobriety, listening to your story I can relate a lot because it sounds like you’re rediscovering who you are in a sense. At least that’s what I’m hearing as you’re talking. Discovering shifts within yourself, that’s what I did. Like I discovered what I really did want to do. Maybe at one point when I drank, working hours away and burnout was just part of who I was. As I started to get sober, I realized I love this job but I can’t keep working. Burnout is not a part of my story anymore. I can’t do it. I love this career, but something has to change because I myself am changing. And I feel like I’m constantly changing and learning things about myself. And Julie when you were talking – I’m a firm believer in “We should not should our life away.” If we ‘should’ our life away, and we’re living for the ‘shoulds’ of others, you are going to get to the end of your life and be like, “What did I do with this one precious life that I had to live?” And it’s really hard to recognize how you are shoulding, and how you are showing up for the expectations of others. You have to get still. For me it was journaling, going to yoga, trying different things that allowed me to reconnect with myself and quiet the outside world, and figure out what I want to do. A common thing I experience right now is – I’m 32. I work in fitness, which is not what any of my friends are doing. I have a best friend that’s a doctor. I have a best friend that’s climbing the corporate ladder. I have a friend that’s a lawyer. I get stuck in this, “What am I doing? Should I be working at a corporate office? Should I be working in medicine?” But no, I’m working in something that I am so passionate about. And even though there are times that the should creep in, I’m able to pause and have the self awareness that if I was to go and do that, I would get to the end of my life and realize I shoulded my life away because of the expectations of others and of society. Sobriety has given me that gift, to really feel grounded in who I am and the life that I live. And I think one other thing that’s cool too, is connecting back with who you were as a kid, doing inner child work, figuring out who you were before the world told you who you were supposed to be. Who were you before your parents told you that you should go climb a corporate ladder or that you should live in the suburbs or that you should never move. We get really stuck in this parallel of “This is how I’m supposed to do it.” And it’s like coming back to who I was as a little kid. I like to have a picture, I’ll see if I can find it… I have it right here…. of myself as a kid at my desk. And I ask myself how I would talk to her. If you are in your sobriety journey and you’re listening to this, go get a photo of yourself as a kid. How would you talk to him/her/they/them. What would you say if that little girl was telling you her dream was to work in fitness, but didn’t because of the shoulds of other people? You wouldn’t. I think since becoming a mom, my whole sobriety shifted in a whole new way where it was really expansive. I get to be this person for her to look up to, and my son to look up to. And I want to show them the life that is possible, and that I lived a life that was true to me versus that was true to my mom or my dad or my grandma or whoever.

John: I agree, parenting has changed in sobriety enormously as well. Whichever order you do it in, parenting or sobriety first, it’s a huge shift. I also like the idea of shopping around for what works. Because even in sobriety, what people recommend and what I’ve had recommended to me in meetings, podcast, various things. You’ve got to find what works for you. That’s something that I never remember growing up, but I do try to bring up in my parenting now. Tell us what works. As much as a long of the shoulds come up in things like work, marriage, parenting, they come up in sobriety too, in recovery. It’s very easy to internalize this message that I have to do this one way, when there’s a lot of ways. Whatever I do has to be authentic to me, has to be what’s right for me.

Steve: Yeah, I call it “The Box.” The box life is supposed to be lived in. The one of expectations and perfection. The societal parental box that you’re going to live this good life if you do these things. Well I can do those things authentic to myself, but I was doing them authentic to other people. That’s where the breakdown is. You can’t even be close to your own version of perfection if you’re trying to live up to someone else’s. I’m going to wrap this up here. We talked about perfection in sobriety; perfectionism to doormat, people pleasing. We talked about a lot of things. Perfection is external and internal. And perfection is an expectation that’s never really attained. I want to thank you Alex, thank you John, and thank you Daph, for spending time with us tonight and joining us in the conversation, we really appreciate you.