YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

This is the caveat about forgoing the caveat about trying not to make my post about perfectionism perfect. Now that that's over with, I'm just going to transcribe my meditation on my condition. Having it exposed to all of you, even without it being replied to (much less contemplated), will help me realize my condition even further and will bring my shame into the light of day.

I have been paralyzed by complexity and how to reconcile the variables of that complexity into perfect solutions. Solutions that don't have consequences. Solutions that evidence my intelligence and my competency. Solutions that account for innumerable expanses of the domain beyond the immediate and apparent circumstances. And it is killing me. Every time I am presented with a scenario or a decision needs to be made or an action needs to be taken, my consciousness is awash in a deluge of what-ifs and possibilities, and I feel that I need to comprehensively apprehend, assess, analyze, and execute these predictions in order to "get it right" or prove to myself that I have what it takes to be successful in more important areas of life. But there is never a solution that isn't accompanied by counterpoints and criticism:

I have to wash this chef's knife. It cost a lot of money, and I can't afford to buy another one. Well, maybe I could, but what if I don't have money for another one in the future? It doesn't matter whether I have money for another one or not--it would be incredibly lazy and wasteful of me to purchase another one because I let my current one degrade due to irresponsibility and incompetency. OK then, back to figuring out how to get it clean. What did I cut with it? How long has whatever residue is on it sit there?And how does this affect the efficacy of whatever cleaning method I am going to employ? How do I not know this? Should I have kept tabs on how long my knife has sat here with food residue on it? Do smart, responsible people do that? No, they probably clean it right away. But won't that waste resources and incur needless environmental damage by introducing additional amounts of cleaning chemical into the water supply? And what of the material of the knife? The packaging said stainless steel, but I don't know anything about stainless steel. I could just follow the care instructions that came with the knife, but won't that be taking the easy way out? And who wrote those anyway? How well-researched were they? What if the knife company is making things and shipping them out without precisely knowing their composition? I need to figure this out on my own. But how will I do this? Will I send out a chemical sample? No, that's clearly beyond the realm of cleaning this knife, but is that what it takes to do things successfully in life? I am slacking because I don't want to send this out for chemical analysis? No, because people don't do that. Or do they? I haven't met every person in the world, and my perspective is only informed as much as the encounters that I have had, so do I need to conduct an assay of others' behavior to feel secure in my choice? Well, back to cleaning it. Do I just use dish soap? What is it going to do to the metal? Won't water suffice if the residue is water-soluble? But then what about any bacteria that may have inhabited the area of the residue and are harmful and will make me sick? Is taking a purely visual assessment of the cleanliness of the knife sufficient to know that it is clean? Did I scrape too hard and remove some of the chromium oxide that makes the stainless steel stainless? Then I should dry it right away to prevent the water from oxidizing the material. But then I would have to interrupt the workflow of the dish washing in its entirety just to make sure I dried the knife right away. Is that thinking about it too much? Or is it being lazy if I don't? If I extrapolate out X amount of dish-washing sessions over the next X, Y, Z amounts of years, what compromise yields the best results overall? And why is that important to me? Shouldn't I realize that this is just dish-washing and it's not important? But if I can't even smartly design and perfect dish-washing, how would I be expected to smartly design and execute anything?

I took maybe 10 minutes to write out the above, but in my head it happens in a split-second. And there is 10 times the content as narrated above. And it's not in a linear form (that's one issue I have with talking or writing about my afflictions: The cognition arising from them exists in a network [fitting, as the thoughts come from the brain, a neural network], and communication, written or verbal, doesn't capture the complex, teeming, networked feel of it). And the constant rumination manifests itself physically as a burning; my brain is ablaze with cognition, and the cognition turns to distress because the computation never finishes its calculation--the answer is never arrived at.

I have a very good idea of what it feels like, yet as evidenced above, it's hard to articulate it. But overall, I have enough examples and stream-of-consciousness rants I can produce in the presence of a professional to feel like I am communicating my affliction sufficiently enough for accurate diagnosis and treatment (though, this isn't a conviction but is about as close as I can get).

Where it comes from, however, is still lost on me. I had an extremely critical, angry, and raging father, and often those attributes were directed at me in the form of very negative treatment. My mother was an alcoholic at the time, and he was always verbally and emotional abusive to her. I also received a less-than-perfect report card when I was very young, and he screamed me into a corner only to have me burst into tears and apologize profusely, but this enraged him even further and he berated me for being weak. He said that I would never amount to anything. This decreased my motivation for my schoolwork as I developed an avoidance of my studies because they invariably made me feel incompetent (even though I was in the advanced math of 6th grade when I was in 5th). I think the self-concept that I took away from the intensely negative treatment (and a complete lack of positive treatment--love was never expressed or implied, and he was my "dad not [my] friend") was that of someone incapable and worthless and deserving of ridicule. I feel like I've lived my entire life trying to get away from that feeling. If people say that I am intelligent, I dismiss them as someone who is unintelligent themselves and therefore has no authority on the subject. I feel like I am an impostor. Unless I am the absolute master at something, I am good for absolutely nothing.

It's no surprise, then, that my symptoms become substantially more pronounced when I am presented with the opportunity to form an intimate, romantic relationship with a man (I am a homosexual). The phenomenon of transference is activated, and I seek the love from a male companion that I have had a yearning for my entire life. Accordingly, all of the attendant anxiety of my relationship with my father comes online, and I don't feel worthy enough or generally good enough for the potential mate, and then I have to prove my worthiness by exhibiting my intelligence and competency in overly complicated ways. Every task has to take into account five degrees of expansion of causal outcomes, and all of these outcomes have to be reconciled to form the perfect course of action. And since this can't be achieved, I do nothing. I have done nothing with my life, but I determined to make a change.

Hello, John B, welcome to our little forum. Make yourself at home in the threads and topics here.

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I used to be very tortured by perfectionism, now I am less so. Perfectionism is a thief that steals meaningful accomplishments from a life.

Please take care, know you are not alone, keep the lines of communication open, we here are cheering for you and for your greatest today and tomorrow.

Great first post John B!

The short version is. that I relate like you wont believe.

The long version, well... is long.

For every piece of knowledge I ever acquire, I seem to get dumber and dumber or at least more and more incapable of making decisions or getting things done. I use everything I know, against myself. However I've begun changing the weight of my thoughts and it helps.

Two weeks ago someone offered to pay for coffee, I would usually have declined, but I didn't have my wallet at hand. I'm had to contemplate, whether I wanted to be indebted to this person, worry that I forgot to give this person a cup of coffee in the future or worry that I always had to keep spare change for an extra cup, until I paid it back. The person ordered two cups of coffee, but when I went to the counter to pick it up, the server had made a black coffee, but also remembered that I usually always order a latte. The server then said sorry and asked if I wanted a latte instead, I stuttered and then froze. After a moment the sever asked again, adding: "I can't tell you what to chose" and I finally said: "Yes, I'd like a latte instead." It might have appeared that I just blanked out for 10-20 seconds, but inside me, I was generating thoughts like the Large Hadron Collider in Cern. I really wanted a cup of latte, instead of a black cup of coffee, but I was trying to figure out, what the server wanted me to say. I was also sorry about being an inconvenience and for having just wasted his time and the cup of coffee, if I decided to ask him to make a new. I also worried, that I'd have to pay for the new cup, I only accepted the offering, because I had locked my wallet in a locker... and... and... if... if...

This is the story of my life, being paralyzed by how much a teaspoon of salt is or what's good enough ect. I'm fairly intelligent, but I'm using my intellect to instantaneously run multiple worst case scenarios or to over-analyze everything do I and everything I say out loud. I feel like my life is a Reality TV program and I constantly have to worry about the seven cameras, that are always pointed at me and make absolutely sure I make an positive and convincing appearance at all times.

I grew up in a family like your's. A stern, but meek dad and a hysterical and raging alcoholic mom. As my brother said a few years back: "You were always getting yelled at every day." I imagine that in order to attempt to guard yourself from being decimated by a parent, you have to constantly run all these crazy what-if-scenarios and you're living in a constant state of controlled panic(my own term) and whenever you let your intellectual guard down and become a carefree little boy, you're shocked back into reality by the unstoppable raging parent.

My turning point came January this year.

During cognitive behavioral therapy, I read a page about the purpose of feelings and something made sense. You use feelings to express yourself and feelings also force you to act. But when you suppress your feelings into a tiny ball inside you, it suddenly make sense, that you're very uncomfortable with expressing yourself and you're constantly frozen in situations, where you're unable to act. My intellect runs wild, but since I can't access my feelings and intuition, I can't actually use my thought to do anything, I'm just stuck in a loop of scenarios.

My loop:
I get a feeling or want to do something.
Then I start to think.
Then I naturally start to worry.
Then I think my worries are irrational.
Then I become angry at myself.
Then I become more worried.
Then I become more angry.
Then I get nothing done.

Right now, I'm trying to give more weight to my feelings and less weight to my thoughts, simply because of my new knowledge about feelings serving an actual purpose. So I'm trying(trying) to accept whatever I feel and not judge myself too hard for feeling it. With the aggressive and hostile childhood home, I really have do deduct, that being a nervous tiny wreck is actually very logical.

Since I've stopped yelling at myself and my incapability to act, I've actually become much kinder to myself and I'm becoming increasingly better at getting stuff done. I'm still not where I want to be, I don't know, if I can ever let go of that terrified child inside me, but I can actually see progress, just in these last two-three months of 2015. My patterns are still there, but I'm slowly developing new patterns too.

I hope you too can move past your raging thoughts, because great knowledge and a vivid imagination is terrible combined with anxiety and self-doubt.



P.S. Whenever I post here, I read and re-read my posts and always have to force myself not to delete them, because I worry that they are not perfect.

John B and Fargin, I wish for you the gift of self-compassion and the gift of permission not to be perfect. It will go a long way toward you living the life you deserve to live.

Wow, John B--what an extraordinarily well conveyed account of the oppressiveness of OCD/relentless doubt and questioning. You're clearly a brilliant guy, and it's also quite clear from what goes on with you how the tool of a sharp mind can turn against oneself. I really relate--though can't claim to be as well informed on the shit I obsess about. Now you've got me carefully re-considering how I maintain my cutlery Seriously, I have similar inner workings and it's exhausting. And you're right--the thoughts aren't linear as they are on the page. They crystallize into a complex network instantaneously and evolve and re-form moment by moment. Sometimes I like to turn on podcasts or NPR or some such to displace some of my own voices. I also like to take pictures and will pull out my phone or something and try to crop and edit pics just to relax. Aesthetic choices somehow seem like quick yes-no decisions that provide relief from ... the other type of decision. Not sure what the word is for that. Then again, if I'm really fucked up that'll also turn into endless obsessing. Perhaps an aspect of existence within our culture? So many choices, so many products, different types of products, different ways to take care of them. Endless ways to edit photos, writing that can be re-done endlessly in a manner we simply didn't back in typewriter days, etc., etc. Ah, I bet folks wondered how best to chop and stack the wood, thatch the hut, etc. back in "simpler" times.

Fargin--I really related to what you wrote as well and often find myself frozen in such situations. "What type of dressing would you like with that?" has left me stumped and paralyzed, mentally formulating a matrix outlining the pros and cons of all the choices that have been offered, before feeling all eyes on me and having something kick in that allows me to just blurt out "vinaigrette" which I've learned to do when I'm caught in the headlights. Can't go wrong with vinaigrette (and a thank-you on that one to spell check). I also review menus online and try to choose what I'm going to have before going out as much as possible because I've literally been unable to decide and have embarrassed myself. Makes a great impression on a first date--the waiter and my date looking at each other both thinking "What the fuck is wrong with this guy?" And actually that's a pretty harmless and not-so-everyday example. Took me 45 minutes to choose toothpaste in the store the other day ... and I am still mulling my decision (Arm & Hammer with whitener and enamel protector--isn't that a contradiction? Should I research this? Should I perhaps place my faith in their implied claim that they've solved this critical question? ). And endless other mundane examples.

Well--just wanted to say that I feel ya's both and holy-shit your accounts of obsessive thinking were so vivid. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to decide whether or not to floss as well as brush before bed. This is a tough decision, and an utterly momentous one, of course, and so could take a while. Not as long as it took to buy the floss, though. That was another adventure in retail. I'll let you know how this turns out...

Peace,
gt