What We Gain As Wives And Mothers When We Release Perfectionism
SHOW NOTES
The inside job of unhappiness often traces back to one culprit: perfectionism.
In this episode, I explore how the very drive for excellence that has fueled your success can quietly hijack your joy as a wife and mother. From the comparison trap to the inability to receive or offer gratitude, she unpacks how uncontrolled perfectionism keeps you scanning for what's wrong instead of savoring what's right.
Key takeaway? Turning down the volume on that inner critic is possible, and it doesn't mean losing your standards. It means gaining your life back.
Warmly,
Linda
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Meet Your Host!
Linda Sanderville, LCSW, RYT-200 is the founder of Satya Counseling & Yoga LLC. She specializes in concierge therapy for female founders and public figures, helping high-profile women navigate public scandal, executive burnout, and the values that will define the second half of life. Based in Albuquerque and serving clients virtually in DC, Maryland, Virginia, and beyond, Linda combines clinical expertise with somatic wisdom to help leaders reclaim their truth.
Read below for full transcript.
[00:00] Intro: The External & Internal Sources of Unhappiness
Hi, I'm Linda, emotion coach and hypnotherapist who also loves a good sunrise yoga class, listening to the belly laughs of my baby boys, and hunting down the best vegan donuts. This podcast is for ambitious and high-performing women who want to feel fulfilled in all areas of their life. I'm here to give you practical tips and mindset shifts that will help you to put your self-love skills into action. Welcome.
So I don't know if you've seen it, but there's a recent documentary called Fair Play Life, and it highlights the persistent inequality that women face in the home. It's to the extent that even if women are working, they are still doing 65% of household tasks compared to 35% for men. This kind of unevenness in the relationship and the burden experienced by the majority of mothers is a huge part of why mothers and wives can really struggle to find happiness in the daily rhythm of everyday life, and they can often even feel quite unfulfilled at home.
I want to talk about those external factors more in a different video, including how women and men experience stress differently. And, as you know, many, spoiler alert, women are affected much more badly than men. But today, let's consider how the inside job of unhappiness stems from perfectionism.
[01:34] Perfectionism: Not Purely a Weakness
Now, I want to go on the record and say that I actually don't consider it a total weakness to be a perfectionist. You can struggle with it, yes, but I don't think it's always such a bad quality. Most of the women that I've worked with are perfectionists, and they would call themselves that. I certainly am a perfectionist myself, and the truth is that my desire for excellence and my high standard for, you know, how I do the things that I do actually has a lot to do with many of my successes.
I'll talk a little bit more about why that's a complicated relationship later, but I'm guessing that's probably true for you as well, that your perfectionism is not just some terrible weakness or character flaw, but it also contributes in some ways to why you've done so well in certain areas of your life.
Now, the problem is, and what I'm talking about right now, is more when that drive, that fire, that desire for the best takes control. It just takes over, right? And then your mood gets affected, the way that you handle stress gets affected, the way you handle changes or the unexpected can really downgrade.
You can find yourself really struggling with those kinds of situations, and that's when you know that your perfectionism has gotten the upper hand, and it's starting to mess with you. And that's what we're talking about, right? That's the part that really steals joy when it comes to experiencing your life as a wife and as a mother.
[03:04] The Comparison Trap & Negative Belief Loops
So perfectionism in its uncontrolled state, it'll have you comparing yourself, it'll have you comparing your mothering style to other moms you see, whether they're on the street or they're your friends or they're on social.
You'll feel like you're never measuring up. You can never get that birthday cake order in time to that fancy upscale bakery. Your kid is always one of the last people there at pickup. Your Christmas cards, on occasional years they turn into happy new year cards because you just couldn't get it all done on time while you were doing everything else.
And am I sharing these examples because I can relate to them? Of course not. You have set those standards so high for yourself at times that you were always bound to fall short at some point. They're just that high. And then when you do fall short, it just confirms for you what you already believed anyway.
You already believed that, oh, I am a mess. I can't seem to keep it together. And then even when I have a win, I really can't be trusted. Maybe that was just a fluke. So in fact, you think that you deserve to be handled harshly. That you have to talk to yourself with tough love because you know you won't get it otherwise. You've got to be tough. And then you also believe that you need to create more rules for yourself to try to stop from messing up again like this next time.
So when your perfectionism, or mine, is running the show, you can do no right, right? There's really no winning because it's always just a matter of time before you prove your negative beliefs right again. And that's all about cognitive dissonance. I'll talk more about that later if you're interested.
So if you are, be sure to put cognitive dissonance in the comment section down below. But when we have a belief, our brain looks for ways to keep what we perceive and how we interpret the things that we are perceiving so that it all matches up with that belief that we already held anyway. So if we have a negative belief about ourselves, we will look in our environment for things that confirm that, because the cognitive dissonance of having a belief and then having it challenged is really uncomfortable for us as humans. So that's part of why perfectionism can run like this.
[05:50] When Perfectionism Blocks Gratitude & Presence
So when we are having our perfectionism really take over and run the show, that can be the reason why sometimes even when our spouse or our kid expresses that they are grateful for something that we did for them, because we have made their day better, or let's face it, we make their life better, we won't be able to really receive that gratitude.
Like it's going to be hard to let it in because in your mind you weren't performing to your own standard, right? And that's the voice that you hear more loudly, not so much their thanks or their appreciation. And it's not just about receiving thanks. You will also find that you're struggling to be grateful yourself. And it's not because you were necessarily selfish or you know a brat or something like that.
You struggle to be grateful because gratitude requires a level of mindfulness, of being in the now, that you simply can't connect to when you're in that perfectionist energy.
So if you're constantly scanning your environment for how things can be improved, it's going to be hard to sit in gratitude. You may feel that, you know, your house is nice, but you really wanted a basement. You know, you may think, oh, my basement's convenient, like that's cool, I really wanted a three-car garage. Perhaps you have none of those things, or more of them than all those things.
Maybe your husband is loving, funny, and kind, but if only he would dress better. If only your teenage daughter was a little more outgoing and confident, you know? So your brain is scanning for these things, okay? Not because you're mean-spirited or you're cruel or you're just like your mom or whatever.
Your brain is scanning for these things because it feels deeply threatening, right? Deep down inside, deep down inside, it feels really threatening not to have the best. That might sound silly, but that's just what it is. It feels deeply threatening not to be the best.
It's not always clear, right? Like if someone were to ask you, like, oh, you know, what do you think it's going to cost you to just be good enough? It might not always be clear to you. You might have a hard time verbalizing it, but you do know and you've bought into the belief that it's going to cost you something if you're not the best, if you don't have the best.
And so you stay in a state of fear and an expectation of some imagined worst outcome. And when you have those worst outcomes like going through your mind constantly, it becomes really easy to project those worst outcome fears onto other people that you love and want to protect too.
So in your mind, maybe the way your husband dresses has something to do with him getting passed over for that promotion. Maybe your daughter's shy, introverted nature is keeping as many kids from wanting to be her friend or including her in social events and things like that. Maybe your lack of XYZ, right, you'll just pick anything.
Maybe your lack of that thing is why you can't get down to the size you think you should be. Or why you can't go on the exotic vacations that she gets to go on to. Maybe it's why when you're at the event at school, you aren't included in the group of the other moms and you're just standing in the corner chomping on some cheap pizza or stale chips or whatever.
When your expectations, or mine, get oversized and unrealistic, we never get to be just here now. We don't get to feel the pleasure of this very moment and then it just keeps passing us by. When not achieving in every which way feels dangerous, then we stay stuck in this over-activated state and we can never just completely let go and relax.
And that's not like a "just relax," right? I mean, physically feeling the state of relaxation that feels so good to us but is so hard to achieve when we are running ourselves in this way.
[10:32] Relaxing Standards & The Domino Effect of One Thought
In truth, we are fighting an uphill battle approaching our closest relationships with that spirit of perfectionism. And that's because relationships are going to be messy. Life is messy. People are complex. And you're complex too. Nothing about you can just be sort of like fit in a tiny little tidy box, right? That's not you.
When we learn to relax some of our standards, I'm not talking about everything, y'all, like not relax every standard. I'm not about that life, right? But certain things, we learn to relax some of our standards that are keeping us just sort of like tight and constrained, right? And everything has to be just so.
Then we can discover how much easier life can be. It becomes more clear how much harder we have been making life for ourselves. And wouldn't you love it to just be easy? Easy without you wondering what's the catch? Like wouldn't that be a relief?
Our mindset has so much to do with how we experience all aspects of our life. And that's why the domino effect of getting just even one thought unstuck, one negative thought, it can be enormous. That domino effect can just like hit so many different aspects of our lives.
The women that I've worked with, when they've had that release, they frequently comment on just how like, wow, just letting go of that one thing, that one, you know, memory, that one, that thing that someone said to me, or what I believed for so long. Now there's so much space in my mind. Oh, and it frees up space in their bodies as well.
Now they have more energy to direct towards the things that actually matter to them, instead of having it be stolen constantly by these unrealistic standards and these old thoughts, these old beliefs. And I genuinely believe, I genuinely believe, that you deserve to have that space freed up too. That's why I'm talking about this.
I'm not here on YouTube just making videos for fun. I really believe that more women can experience that and deserve to experience that, and that the world needs you to experience that. We need you to have your energy, your time, the space in your mind and your body freed up, because all that other stuff you've got going for you, gosh, we need more of it. But you can't access it, right? If you're caught up in this perfectionistic hamster wheel, it's not going to get you there.
[13:22] Turning Down the Volume
That's part of why I have a whole week dedicated just to finding good enough in my online course, because I found that this need is so great that I needed to be just in depth, right, in its own section, like I just needed that space. And it uses the tools that I know work so well for allowing this release of these kinds of ideas and beliefs.
Of course, that's along with all the other foundational skills that are included that allow women to put their self-love into action consistently and effectively. The great news is that turning down the volume on perfectionism is totally possible. And when you turn down the volume on that voice, it allows you to still have access to the strengths of that quality, right? The quality of appreciating excellence in the things that you do, because that is a gift.
You don't have to keep the fear and the rigidity or the urgency to get what you want out of life. You don't have to keep those parts of perfectionism. Losing those things will actually gain you much more of what you want without having to suffer so much to get it.
I hope that this message encourages you and gives you a little window into what's possible for you. If you like it, be sure to stick around and subscribe, and I will talk to you in the next video. Bye.
You hung with me to the end, my shero. If you benefited from this video, please say thanks by leaving a wonderful review. It helps me know what's helping you the most and allows more like-minded women to find and learn from this podcast. We don't want to keep all the good stuff for ourselves. See you next time.
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