Thomas Curran

work harder push myself to do more um ignore what was happening don't talk to anybody repress it as far down as i possibly can because that was something that revealed weakness it was something that revealed vulnerability and i didn't want to show those things into the world and it ended up like in a quite significant psychological problems um which i would probably call a breakdown if you look back and then i did seek help

And then I was brought to the awareness that this was really driven primarily by perfectionism, like making it much more difficult to deal with challenging situations.

No, no, they called it perfectionism.

Right, yeah.

But again, the thing, also the thing to remember, perfectionist don't want to let go of perfectionism.

So they'll hold it close.

They'll hold it dear because they think it's the one thing that's holding them up in the world when everything and all around them seems as though it's coming down.

Perfectionism is what's keeping me going.

It's what's keeping me successful.

It's what's keeping me from, you know, fully capitulating sort of thing.

So they'll hold it really dear.

And that was the same for me.

I was like, no, no, this thing is really important.

Like I've got to hold onto this because this is the only thing that's keeping me going at work and

Uh, and, and work at that point was the only thing in my life that I had, or I could point to and go, that's, you know, that's where I'm, where I feel like I'm being assessed because everything else.

So, you know, but it was actually the perfectionism that was, that was creating the problems that was, that was underneath a lot of the, um, difficulties because the perfectionism was amplifying the stress.

Right.

It was telling me that this stressful event says something about your imperfect.

uh self as to say it's exposed it it's showing it to the world and you have to hide it and you have to repress it and you have to use your perfectionism double down your perfectionism as a mask to put out into the world that no actually you are hyper functional you are competent you are successful so you as you're really using my perfectionism to blow through these problems and and it was the perfectionism was amplifying them and creating the issues in the first place so so that was a turning point for me when i realized ah

This thing that I believe and a lot of people around me believe is an important part of our success, happiness, whatever, is actually creating significant problems.