36 [Healing Series] Perfectionism
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Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/36
Haley Radke: You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm your host, Haley Radke, and this is a special episode in our Healing Series where I interview therapists who are also adoptees themselves so they know from personal experience what it feels like to be an adoptee.
Today we tackle perfectionism. Let's listen in.
Pamela Cordano is a fellow adoptee and psychotherapist who specializes in helping you to discover meaning in your life. Welcome back to Adoptees On, Pam.
Pam Cordano: Thank you, Haley. I'm so happy to talk with you again and everybody out there.
Haley Radke: Oh, I am so, so happy that you're back. And today we're talking about perfectionism, and I know a lot of adoptees struggle with perfectionism, but so does the general population, right?
It's kind of a human thing, but I've found just talking to adoptees in general, that most of us struggle with this. Have you heard that too?
Pam Cordano: Yes, I have, and I think in a way adoption sets up a perfect storm for perfectionism to be a danger or a trap that we could easily fall into.
Haley Radke: I am thinking of myself. I think the root is I have to be perfect because I don't want them to send me back. So what can you tell us about perfectionism? What is it and why do so many adoptees struggle from it?
Pam Cordano: Just so we can all really get immersed in this conversation, like, what if for a moment we all just pause and think about how it feels in our bodies when we are in a perfectionistic state of mind?
Like when we're either worrying about doing something correctly in the future or about something we think we did not do well enough in the past, you know? What does it feel like in your body? What sensations are there?
Haley Radke: I feel sick to my stomach right now.
Pam Cordano: Okay. Sorry. And what else?
Haley Radke: My heart started beating faster and I am feeling very aware of everything.
Like I just noticed your sound cut out for a second and I'm like, ah, it's ruined. This whole episode is ruined.
Pam Cordano: Right. So, you know, what I'm hearing in that statement is fear. You know, it's like heightened alert and tension and constriction and like a hyper-arousal and like anxiety and worry and fear.
I mean, it feels really awful in our bodies when we are in a perfectionistic state of mind. I mean, it's very stressful and unpleasant and it takes a lot to manage whatever we're trying to do or not do and feel all these terrible feelings in our bodies at the very same time.
Haley Radke: It's like we're at max. capacity.
Pam Cordano: Exactly. Right. It's like lighting up a Christmas tree way too bright or something. Perfectionism is based on insecurity and an avoidance of negative evaluations from the outside. So everybody can have perfectionism, adopted or not, but the difference with people who are adopted is that first of all, we were relinquished as children. Like we talked about before, you know, children are naturally self-centered and think that they're the cause or the blame for everything, right? Whether it's a divorce or a relinquishment or someone dying in the family.
Anything traumatic or tragic, children think they have something to do with it. They don't understand yet that they don't. So it's really easy to think that we are somehow flawed in a profound way. I mean, to lose one's entire lineage, to be banished from the family, in a way it can feel like a punishment in and of itself.
Like, how come I don't get to grow up with my biological family? What's wrong with me? So there's already some kind of flaw to begin with in the minds of a lot of children adoptees. And then, there's what you said. There's the danger that if I do something wrong or make a misstep or alienate somebody, I could be rejected from this new family.
And so it's like having to walk on a tightrope between two very scary realities. You know that a) I lost my first family, and b) I could lose my second family.
Haley Radke: Yeah. Yep. I can see why so many of us could have that in the back of our minds, you know?
Pam Cordano: Yeah. I was talking to my husband, who's not adopted, about perfectionism, and he was saying that anybody can have this and that he, as a child, experienced negative feedback from his parents. So he got really worried about being perfect and he kind of was, in a lot of ways. But I said, Yeah, but at least they were your first parents. You know, like you didn't have that first thing that you had to also grapple with.
Haley Radke: Then there's the adoptees that have had adoptive parents who are narcissistic and, you know, do literally want us to be perfect because we were, I don't want to say this, I don't want to say purchased, you know, but there's that feeling, right, that there's a little bit of ownership over us.
Pam Cordano: Yeah. And we have a role to make them happy and complete their lives, or fulfill their dreams or, you know, be part of the picture they're hoping to create. That we, you know, are coming in on later, after the dream's been established.
So, it's like a minefield, really. I think for an adoptee, it's like a minefield, like kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of a thing. There's a lot to worry about doing things in a way that will keep a person safe.
And that goes back to the trauma of adoption, like fear and trauma and anxiety live underneath this perfectionism. And, like you were saying, it feels terrible in our bodies.
Haley Radke: Okay, so I have struggled with perfectionism forever, and now I've come to the point where I think I'm a reformed perfectionist. That's what I call myself.
But I had this thing happen at university where I had a group project and I was supposed to meet someone on a Sunday, and I just literally totally forgot about it, so I didn't show up. And that had never happened to me before because I have a stellar record, okay.
And it was no big deal, like we rescheduled for the next week. She was kind of surprised that I wasn't there, but it was just no big deal and she was totally over it. But that incident, I still think about that, and like, I think maybe even as often as weekly I still remember that I feel sick to my stomach when I think about it.
And if I ever have another moment where I'm like, Oh, whoops, I almost forgot that thing. I'm like, Oh, see? See, I forgot at university this one group project thing, and see, I'm still doing it.
Pam Cordano: Yeah. So that sounds like trauma to me. Like it sounds like it's like a PTSD sort of reaction. Like there was something so frightening about having made that mistake and there was something so dangerous about having made that mistake, even though the feedback you were getting did not indicate any danger at all.
But inside of you it felt very dangerous. And so you're still being, you know, hypervigilant to not ever do that again, right? And how many years has it been?
Haley Radke: Oh, over 10.
Pam Cordano: And you say you think of it weekly.
So what it makes me think of is that I often think that the stronger the emotional reaction, the older the issue, the original issue. And so, I wonder, how old do you think you were when you became a perfectionist in the first place?
Haley Radke: That's, I mean, of course that's hard to pinpoint. What I often tell people actually is that I feel like I grew up just a mini-adult because I was an only child and really most of the time I was spending with adults.
So I kind of felt like I needed to behave like them. And I was a high-achieving student. I remember I would always have marks like in the nineties. And so if I got in the eighties, then I was like, Oh, that's a fail. You know?
Pam Cordano: Ah-huh. That's a fail. And even that expression describes something about perfectionists.
Or perfectionism that's like all-or-nothing thinking, like if it's not this, then it's totally that, you know. It's one or the other. It's not a gray area kind of thing.
You know, I guess something that comes to mind when I think about you before this forgetting the meeting, is that, and for all of us, is that we would never want to become a perfectionist unless we were really, really afraid of something.
Like it's fear that drives the formation of a perfectionist. Like why else would we put ourselves through such a difficult way of being in the world?
Haley Radke: I, my mouth is open cause I'm like, wow, that's really interesting. I've never thought about it that way.
Pam Cordano: I mean, if you think about an example of, let's say there's a woman named Mary and she is really interested in science and she wants to become a brain surgeon, so she studies really hard and she dots her i’s and she crosses her t’s and she does it all out of her own passion because she just loves the subject so much. I wouldn't call that perfectionism even if she gets straight A's or and does things perfectly. I would call that ambition and passion. But perfectionism is like an affliction.
Like it's, you know, she would be more in a state of excitement and curiosity, and if she failed at something, she might be like, Whoa, why didn't that work? I need to figure out another way. This is exciting. You know, it wouldn't be stressful. It would be more like passionate and exciting.
So we're talking about a whole other animal that's like based in fear and probably something pretty darn scary that drives us to use so much mental energy to check ourselves and hate on ourselves for mistakes and so much mental energy, hypervigilance.
Haley Radke: I was just gonna say, that's what you had said before: the hypervigilance. Cuz if you can't drop any balls, right? Because then you're just the worst and it's the all-or-nothing thinking.
Pam Cordano: It really does feel to me like living in a minefield, like every step is important and a bomb could go off anywhere, anytime, and there's no way to really let down too much or else disaster could happen.
Haley Radke: Yeah, maybe I'm not as reformed perfectionist as I think.
Pam Cordano: Oh boy. Okay, so this example of Mary, the doctor who has a passion for studying and does a fantastic job. She has an inner orientation, like she's doing what she does and she's working as hard as she does because of her own inherent, natural, passionate interest.
And with perfectionism, there's an outer orientation, like we are afraid of a negative evaluation from the outside. So we're screening, we're efforting, we're monitoring our behavior for someone and for something that has to do with the outside.
So I was going to share an example of something that I've done with clients before. Which is when people are just really worried about what others think of them.
And this goes along with feeling a lot of shame, that something about them is that they're bad somehow, or that their badness or their defect or flaw is going to be discovered by others pretty easily. And they work really hard to not have it be so.
I've had them walk around the block before, it's like an experiment, but looking at each person that they see as they walk around the block and imagining what these people are thinking of them.
And usually if the person has low self-esteem and feels like there's something really wrong with them, it can be a really kind of difficult thing to do because it can be like, Oh, they probably don't like me and they probably think I'm whatever. And, you know, Oh I've seen that person before. They don't like me or if they really knew me, they wouldn't like me. But it can be really uncomfortable to have this external focus.
And then I have them walk around the same block again where they're actually, if this makes sense, they're actually inhabiting their own eyes. They're not thinking about what others are seeing. They're only thinking about and experiencing what they're seeing.
Then it's completely an internal experience. It's like, Oh, I love that tree and oh, there's a coffee shop. I wanna get coffee later on today. Oh, I like the color of that woman's sweater. And that's a place where we feel much more safe and comfortable when we're in our own inner orientation.
Haley Radke: I've often heard people aren't really thinking about you as much as you think they are. And we're so busy thinking about that, then we're not thinking, Ugh. Yeah. Wow, that sounds really interesting. I'm curious to try it.
Pam Cordano: Yeah. You know, a therapist actually taught me that, and it was quite profound to do it because often we change most easily when we are having an experience, a new experience. That's what changes us more than thinking in a new way. It's more like experiencing something differently.
So like with this example from your college, the university story, what was so horrible about missing this plan was that it was witnessed by somebody else, right? Like if you had just said, Oh, I'm gonna go to the gym at two o'clock, and then you got caught up in a TV show and you didn't go to the gym. That's not really a big deal because no one sees it. You know what I mean?
That's easier to get over. But when it's witnessed by someone else, then there's room for them to say, Oh boy, she is so irresponsible. Or she's a flake or something like this. So getting into our own system is very, very powerful, and it's a way of combating the power of these thoughts that just go on in circles in our minds about what others are thinking of us.
In a way, the eyes are a metaphor. The eye story is a metaphor for something much larger, and that is that when we are in a perfectionistic state of mind, we're hostage to some standard that we've set for ourselves or that we believe others have set for us, and we're kind of imprisoned in this state.
And the opposite, that's like walking around the block wondering what everyone's thinking and am I doing okay or not? But when we get into our own eyes, in a bigger way, it would be comparable to getting into our own hearts and souls and liveliness. To me, one of the opposites of a mental trap like perfectionism is the question of what really brings you alive?
Like, what makes you feel energetic and enlivened and present, and what do you wish you could do every single day? If you had time or ability? What are your dreams? These kinds of questions are like being in your own eyes. It's like your own self having its say about how it wants to spend its energy and time.
And that just can't happen very much when we are taken hostage by the perfectionistic torture. Really, it's like mental torture.
Haley Radke: And what you said about it being this impossible standard that we set for ourselves, right? I mean, now that we're adults, no one is holding us to an impossible standard. There's standards at work or home, like, just normal people standards.
Pam Cordano: Right. Yeah, of course. And they're negotiable, right? Like when we're sick, we can't do as much. When we're tired, we can't do as much. There's the possibility sometimes of delegating things to someone who may not do as good of a job, but at least it lightens one's load.
So, yeah, the bar is something to be questioned. Who has set this standard and what's driving it, what's keeping it going in me. I mean, to me that's kind of an interesting question. It could be a question that we come to with curiosity, like, what is this?
Why am I not allowed to miss a meeting once in a while? Why am I not allowed to screw up? What's so bad about screwing up? I mean, we all do it.
Haley Radke: Am I having free therapy again? Stop it.
It's funny. Oh my goodness. I mean, when you think about it, really, we don't hold other people to the same standard that we hold ourselves.
Pam Cordano: Sometimes some people don't. Like you may not, you know, you're probably right. Probably most people don't. There are some perfectionists that are more externally oriented, that are really, really hard on others. I've seen adoptive and non-adoptive mothers and fathers be really, really hard on their kids in a way that they're hard on nobody else. You know?
Haley Radke: Because it's a reflection of them?
Pam Cordano: Right. Wow. So I guess in a way it loops back to them. But yeah, you're right, most of us don’t and what you said is true.
Most of us don't hold others to the same standards. I mean, when people forget something with me, I might be slightly annoyed or I might feel a little insecure, like maybe they don't care about me or value me very much. But when I forget to do something and if I do anything that hurts anybody else, I really freak out.
I feel like the whole relationship is in jeopardy. And that I've done some kind of irreversible, I've committed an irreversible crime somehow that I'm going to pay for forever, like a black mark, like a mark I can just never get rid of. That's how I think it can feel. It's extreme.
I mean, it's extreme and it's actually terrifying. You feel that way too?
Haley Radke: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I'm thinking of reunion now, so there's often things. Like, this still happens: I'm six years into reunion and we're in a good place, but there's still some things that I'm like, if I say this, is this gonna be it? Like, is this the indelible mark that will break everything?
Pam Cordano: Right? And I mean, do you think that most adoptees feel that way?
Haley Radke: Well, I know when we are searching, in those first contacts, seemingly, from everyone I've spoken to, when they're preparing the words that they may write in their first letter, their first initial contact, they're so afraid of scaring the other party that their letter has to be perfect. Like, I've heard from multiple people. I worked on it for months. Over and over I redid it, because as if this letter is going to make the difference,
Pam Cordano: Yes. That is just so sad to me. I did the same thing. I agonized over the letter to my father.
It was a six-page letter and I made sure in the letter I let him know, I'm not asking for money, I'm not asking for this. I'm, you know, I was trying to reassure him that I'm not dangerous.
Haley Radke: Yeah. I think there's probably a lot of letters that have said that I don't want your money. You don't have to have me for Christmas dinner. I just wanna know where I came from, right? Just anything to not scare.
Pam Cordano: But then, you know, the deeper truth is for me, I want it all. I wanna move into your house. I wanna be your child. You know, I wanna do-over, I wanna be there for Christmas dinner and the whole thing.
But, you know, you can't.
Haley Radke: Oh my goodness, this is true confessions, hey? Me too. Except my dad, usually my dad and my sister listen regularly, so.
Pam Cordano: I know when my biological dad said he heard the Anger podcast, the first thing I texted back to him was, Do you still like me? And I really meant it, like, I was afraid that was it.
And I was quite civilized in that podcast.
Haley Radke: Actually, whenever my dad, when we text, we usually text once a week on Sunday mornings. And he'll often mention, Oh, the Friday show was so great, or whatever. And then I think, Okay, what was in that show? Is there anything I need to make up for, or, you know, it's like when I'm producing it, I don't necessarily think about that because I'm just so focused on the content and having it be perfect for my listeners.
But yeah. Oh, that's interesting. There you go. So he still likes you?
Pam Cordano: He was so sweet. He did an emoji of the face with the two hearts in the eyes and I was just like, Oh, thank God, I didn't destroy everything by an hour-long conversation, you know? But you know, there's something that's sort of intangible about the quality of this perfectionism with adoptees that we're talking about.
It's really like terror, you know, like the terror that one is either flawed enough or powerful enough that they could just kind of ruin everything. Really easily.
Okay. So I think one of the biggest costs of perfectionism is the amount of mental energy and physiological stress and the amount of space it takes that interferes with interfacing with life that's going on all around us.
Like, when we're in a perfectionistic frame of mind, we're not really present for ourselves or for the people around us, or even for the world around us. You know, we're really caught in a private cycle that's hurting us and drawing us away from the world as it is. So that, I think, is the biggest cost and it's time consuming.
My biggest wish for everybody, including myself, is to get really interested and excited about finding ways to pull out of that and into what's right in front of us. Sometimes that's most compelling. You know, looking at nature that's right in front of us, or really bringing our full attention to a conversation we're having, or really enjoying that first cup of coffee in the morning, or putting music on so we don't have to hear ourselves think if we're caught up in something.
But we miss out on precious life when we are in a perfectionistic frame of mind. And that makes me really sad. For me and for everybody.
Haley Radke: I'm really glad that you pulled out that root for us. The fear root, because when I was preparing for the show, and I was trying to, you know, define perfectionism, and I was finding it very hard to put my finger on.
It's so paralyzing. It's so all-encompassing. It affects kind of every part of my life, you know, and I can't be perfect in every part of my life. It's literally impossible. I don't know. I'm really happy you pulled out that fear root because I think that makes it a little easier for me to think about.
Please, will you tell us, what do we do when we're paralyzed with perfectionism?
Pam Cordano: Here's the problem. We can try with every bit of energy we have to be perfect and we can have lots of successes at pulling it off, but there's always the next thing to be perfect about. And the next thing and the next thing, like it's never ending.
So the truth is we're not really going to find our security, our inner security, in perfectionism. It's just this moving target that just keeps shifting to other subjects. If we're afraid, if fear, even now I've changed from fear to terror. If terror is at the basis of adoptee perfectionism, I guess what I'm saying is perfection is not going to quell the fear.
It's not going to help. It's actually just going to keep feeding the monster. You know, more food and more things to think about and worry about and more balls in the air. I actually think that we need to reexamine where we're actually going to find security inside of ourselves. Have you ever read that article called “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying”?
Haley Radke: Yeah. I vaguely remember, and I remember people commenting about it, like, why are we working on this and this when it doesn't matter. Like, Oh, I really wish I spent more time at work, you know, right. Like, no one has that. But yeah, go on.
Pam Cordano: I mean, I think that the dying actually have a lot to teach us, just us as humans.
So here's one. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. That's the number one regret of dying.
And this is exactly what we're talking about. We're talking about trying to shift our paradigm from living a life that we think others expect of us, for us to stay safe and loved, and instead trying to move more toward authenticity. Living from a place we really want to live from, whether that's similar to our adoptive families or not.
And number two is, I wish I hadn't worked so hard, like you said.
And number three is, I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. And that's one of the ways we protect the world from our flaws and our power to destroy everything in one fell swoop.
I wish I'd let myself be happier. I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends. So those are the five regrets of dying. And I guess the reason I bring that up is because I think that we really find our security in living a life that is authentic and meaningful to us. Whatever that might mean.
So that might be a whole other conversation, but this whole perfectionism trap is like a mental hamster wheel that just goes on and on, and eats away time and energy and health and resources that could be put in places now that we're adults that are more meaningful and more satisfying.
Haley Radke: Okay. So you have some practical things we could do?
Pam Cordano: Yeah. There's probably all kinds of things people can do, but I just have three things to highlight that are practical. And the thing I'm most excited about is just how we shift our focus to what actually really enlivens and engages us and brings us joy and pleasure and meaning.
Okay, so the first thing is kind of like an exposure therapy sort of thing. Like, it's kind of fun.
Haley Radke: I don't like this. No.
Pam Cordano: It could be kind of fun to practice failing, or to practice not working as hard as one could, or whatever form one's perfectionism takes. So I have an anecdote that there's this conference that happens in Portland every year, and they had a class or a workshop for people who have a fear of rejection.
And what everybody did in the workshop was they made a pact that for 100 days they would go out and ask somebody for something sort of outrageous that the answer would definitely be no. So that they could for 100 days in a row, experience rejection, just to get used to it. Just to take away its power.
I mean, I remember one time having a client. I said, Can you just dump out my trash on the rug? She's like, What? I said, You know, it might be liberating. Just what if you dumped out the trash on the rug? And so she was into it. She's like, Okay. So she did it and, you know, the world didn't end.
She just dumped out the trash on the rug. And later I picked it up, you know, it wasn't a big deal. So that's exposure therapy.
Haley Radke: Okay, that I can't.
Pam Cordano: You could practice on your private Facebook page, you know, where you could assume everyone loves and trusts you and that everything's solid, and you could just throw some typos in.
Haley Radke: No. I cannot. I also cannot do that.
Pam Cordano: Okay. So whenever there's an exposure therapy idea that's too much, we have to scale it back.
So then you could do a pretend Facebook post with typos. And not post it.
Haley Radke: Okay. I could possibly do that. I was thinking, okay, I can't dump your garbage over, but I could throw a tissue on the floor, like just one.
Pam Cordano: I would totally celebrate that. That would be great. That would be huge.
It's really important for perfectionists to celebrate every little victory because a lot of times perfectionists are always about, always, listen to my language, always about the end game. You know, they want the results and so they miss parts of the journey that can be really fun.
So throwing a tissue on the ground could be a great thing to do tonight. When we stop this, you could go do that if you wanted.
And, you know, I grew up in Silicon Valley and one of the famous mottos in Silicon Valley is “Fail, fail, fail often.” And there's this idea that, you know, it's through failure that we grow and learn and develop and, you know, to people who are not perfectionists failure is quite interesting. Like, huh, this failed. I wonder what I could do differently? I wonder why it failed and all the pieces I could learn from this. Right? That's a whole different way of thinking.
Haley Radke: That's a long ways away for me.
Pam Cordano: Yeah, no, I'm just making a giant map.
I took an improv class yesterday, my very first one, and they had a ritual that when people made a mistake and it was their turn and they messed something up. Everybody threw their arms in the air and went “Woo.” And so it was almost kind of fun to fail because everybody celebrated every failure, and that was just a way to make everybody feel safe.
Like, hey, your failure is not gonna hurt you in the least in this group. We expect it. We're all gonna fail. Let's all celebrate every failure. So it was kind of cool.
Okay, so the second idea is it's kind of a new thing called Tiny Habits. Have you heard of that?
Let's say you want to develop a new habit, like let's say you get up compulsively at four o'clock in the morning to start your perfectionistic schedule or rituals or whatever. A tiny habit would be making a little minuscule change in the direction of healing. So that might be, instead of getting up at four o'clock, you get up at 4:01. And so it's the tiniest little thing, but it moves in the direction of healing.
I'm trying to think of perfection ideas. Like another one would be if you obsessively check your emails or your social media five times an hour, you could say from the four to five o'clock hour, I'm only going to check it four times. So it's not any change that's going to, like, capsize the ship.
It's just a tiny little change in a certain direction. And that's kind of a fun new thing to do because at least it raises awareness of how you're living and it challenges it, but in a subtle way that's not too overwhelming.
Haley Radke: Yes. And I'm like, okay, that doesn't sound scary. That's fine. Yeah, I could do that.
Pam Cordano: Yeah. Okay. Sorry to scare you with the first one.
Haley Radke: Oh my gosh. When you're talking about going up to strangers and like getting ready to be rejected for whatever reason, I'm like, no.
Pam Cordano: Yeah. But those were like the entrepreneurs who needed to practice rejection.
I mean, with us, it's more like, can we be in a relationship, a friendship, whatever kind of relationship with someone and make, you know, a small to medium, even a large-ish mistake and work it through and calm our nervous systems down so that we can know we're still loved.
Like, is there room for mistakes in our relationships?
Okay. And then the third one is working on how we talk to ourselves in our heads. So, you know, it's easy with perfectionism to have negative self-talk, to be self-blaming, to be going over and over the mistake that was made and all of the terrible implications of the mistake or worrying obsessively about the next one that could happen, or the deadlines or the whatevers.
And so any of those kinds of thoughts can be like red flags that can signal a person to switch gears and think of three things that they're doing right in general. I could ask you, and you don't have to keep this on the recording, but what are three things you're doing right, Haley?
Haley Radke: I am, oh my gosh, this is hard.
Pam Cordano: It is. You don't have to keep this if you don't want to.
Haley Radke: Okay. I put myself in a mommy time-out today. I made a good choice there. I feel like I'm a good mom. And I feel like I'm a good podcaster.
Pam Cordano: I love hearing you say those things. I'm smiling. You can't see me right now, but I'm smiling when you say nice things about yourself.
And I think, you know, when we care about people, we love people, we like when they're happy and we want them to feel good about themselves. And we have a relationship with ourselves and we like to feel good about ourselves too. So the practice of thinking of three things we're doing right in any given moment is a nice thing to do for ourselves.
Haley Radke: You know, when I heard someone today, I'm in this podcasting mastermind with another lady, her name is Kelly Covert, and what she said was, when you hear a friend say something that's self-deprecating, to say to them, don't say that to my friend. When she said that, I thought. if we're thinking of ourselves, like, we should be our best friend, you know, we should be kind to ourselves.
Pam Cordano: And we can say, oh no, let's not talk to ourselves like that. Let's think of three things we're doing right or even one thing we're doing right.
Haley Radke: A tiny habit. Okay, so we have our three practical tips. And what's the last thing that you're super duper excited about?
Pam Cordano: Just that we're all so unique. What brings each person alive is really important. You know, for me it is traveling and I love music and I love helping people. I love being a mom and hanging out with my kids and my husband. I was out in the garden today and it was really fun to pull weeds around the tomato plants, just things that make me feel connected to the larger world.
And what's really important about that is that feeling connected to the large world with something we enjoy is actually a stable place in our brains. Like, if you enjoy hanging out with your kids, that's just not something that can be questioned. That's just a fact. It's just a reality that hanging out with your kids is important to you.
It means a lot to you. I mean, I know kids are hard sometimes, but basically it's something that means a lot to you. So, unlike this perfectionist thinking, it's something more solid. So I guess, if perfectionism comes from a lack of security, then what do we replace that with?
And I'm suggesting that we move toward, bit by bit, recognizing that our security really lives in what's meaningful and important to us about life, about our lives. And because this is such difficult territory because it's a minefield and there are so many dangers with being perfectionistic, it would be great if you or anyone listening or me, if we could find a part of us that's even a little bit excited or could think it could be a little fun to try chipping away at this.
You know, so that there's not like a drudgery or an overwhelm feeling about starting to address it, but more like curiosity and how could we make this fun?
Haley Radke: Wow, that's so profound. And then what a shift that will be, you know, like if we can find healing in this area, that'd be amazing. Even in small segments, right?
Pam Cordano: Yeah. And I think our perfectionists, our inner perfectionists, our inner adoptee perfectionists need gentleness from us and from each other.
Haley Radke: Thank you so much. There's so many good things to think about in this episode with you and I know it's going to be so helpful to a lot of us, me included. Where can we connect with you online, Pam?
Pam Cordano: My website is www.pamelacordanomft.com.
Haley Radke: Wonderful. Thank you for your time again, and your wisdom.
Pam Cordano: Thanks for the time with you, Haley. I always love talking to you. You can bail on an appointment with me anytime.
Haley Radke: But I wanna come and jump out garbage on your floor. Just one kleenex.
Pam Cordano: I totally want that. Yeah, I totally want that someday. We should do it, like, over Skype.
Haley Radke: Oh, how perfect would that be?
Okay. I'm gonna be so honest with you guys about this. I felt so stressed out about putting this episode out because there's some really personal moments we share. I didn't know whether or not to cut a few different things, and I know there's some technical glitches in the recording. It felt paralyzing.
And Pam even read this really great poem to wrap up the conversation with this beautiful sentiment about perfectionism. I mean, I had goosebumps and I had to cut it because of copyright issues. So instead, I put a link in the show notes to the author of the poem, Mary Oliver, reading her work. It's called “Wild Geese” and I recommend you go check it out. It's really great.
The show notes are on adopteeson.com, and for any of the other Healing Series episodes that feature Pamela and several other adoptee therapists, you can go on over to adopteeson.com/healing. Okay, so we've had the little confessional moment.
You know, it's a ton of work to make this podcast and I just absolutely love doing it. And this episode is brought to you by the generous support of my partners. I have 26 partners on Patreon who are donating monthly to help support my work, and they are literally making it possible for me to keep producing this podcast for you.
Adopteeson.com/partner has the details about supporting the show, and I have some great thank you gifts for you, including a secret adoptees-only Facebook group that is giving me so much life right now.
If you found this episode to be helpful, would you tell someone today? Maybe you have an adoptee friend who you know struggles with perfectionism. You could both listen to this episode and talk about some of the exercises Pamela gave us to work on. Thank you for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.
