Presence, Not Perfection
Becoming a trauma specialist healed my lifelong battle with perfectionism. Through my training, I made peace with the part of me who finds safety in high-performance and “getting it right.” I learned to sit with the part of me who uses the armor of achievement to hide her longing for connection, until she softens and lays down her shield.
I needed to grieve for all the relationships that I missed out on, in the past, because I was so focused on trying to “get it right” that I missed opportunities to connect with people I care about.
We sabotage relationships when we try to "get it right." When we act how we think we "should," we sacrifice our authenticity. We might think that "getting it right" in relationships will bring us more love, safety, and belonging. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth.
Trying for perfection distorts our ability to connect with others. We focus on a rigid and unattainable ideal instead of allowing ourselves to be seen in all our messiness and vulnerability. Often, this comes from a deep fear of rejection or abandonment.
We might feel that being vulnerable with others is unsafe because of past attachment wounding and relational trauma. It's easier to hide in perfection, trying to "get it right" so that we never risk further emotional pain.
If the attachment wounding happened early enough in our lives, we might not even have a felt experience of safety.
We might have learned in childhood that being loved was conditional on "getting it right." We then carry that with us into adulthood and wonder why it doesn’t feel safe to reveal ourselves to others, or why we feel anxious whenever we get close to intimacy.
Our Longing for Authentic Relationships
Every human’s nervous system is wired for connection with others. We long to be seen, accepted, and loved for who we are.
But how do we do that, especially if we're coming from a background of attachment wounding or relational trauma?
Trying to be perfect doesn't create the closeness or connection we need. But when we are clinging to old patterns, this is hard for us to see. Rather than take responsibility for the dynamics our perfectionism creates, it's easy to collapse into a downward spiral of despair.
Perfectionism is an anxious attempt to prevent rejection or abandonment. But acting from wounding doesn't create healing. Often, it creates the very things we’re trying so hard to stop from happening. And that is sad.
One way to cope with perfectionism is to try to avoid relationships entirely, because they're too "messy" or "complicated."
But no matter how much we might try to pretend we're "tough" and don't need anyone, our biology says otherwise. Studies have shown that people with avoidant attachment experience the same levels of stress response in their systems that anxiously attached people do. They just push it below the level of conscious awareness and minimize their pain.
No matter how tightly we might cling to the idea of “getting it right,” we can heal by learning how to be authentically ourselves. In a world that likes to tell us how to look and act, authenticity is a fundamentally brave and creative act.
What Presence Looks Like
Presence is as simple as "being here now." But how do we do that? Trying to force ourselves into presence through sheer effort can lead us right back to the trap of rigidity and perfectionism.
By increasing our awareness, bit by bit, we can teach ourselves how to come into presence.
Presence is a practice, not something we can get "right" or do perfectly. There is only the continual commitment, again and again, to being more here, moment by moment and breath by breath.
I like to practice presence by starting with the body. After all, the body is the container of our being. Without the body, we have nowhere to go and no one to be. The body is an instrument of presence, highly attuned and deeply intelligent.
When we decide to step away from perfectionism and into presence, we remember the body is home. But we often need to learn how to “do” presence.
This is why a regular embodiment practice can be a generous gift to ourselves. When we make time and space to practice embodiment, we unearth somatic intelligences that are simply not present at the level of the mind.
Learning to be more embodied shifts our presence in relationships, too. As we bring more awareness to our bodies, we notice more how we feel and what we need. This also makes us more attentive to others' feelings and needs. And as we respond more to our bodies’ needs, we become more comfortable and at ease in the world.
The mind has a central place in our cultivation of presence, as well. Simply through focus and intention, our mind can connect with our body. When body and mind work together, they become greater than the sum of their parts.
When we are mindful of the body, we also notice when we check out or dissociate around others. We learn what it feels like to cultivate presence and bring more awareness to our interactions. From this harmony of mind and body, our authenticity begins to emerge. We are naturally powerful when we connect to the world from a state of embodied and aligned presence.
Moving from perfectionism into presence requires that we recognize and honor our emotional needs. Being willing to be present with our emotions requires courage to accept what we find, without trying to change or fix it. Far too often, we shame our emotions or make them wrong. Being present with our authentic, embodied emotions means meeting them without judgement.
Emotions are full spectrum. Experiencing their breadth allows us to access the fullness of our humanity. We don’t only have "nice" or "good" feelings. It's natural and healthy to also experience emotions we think of as bad or wrong. Practicing presence teaches us to navigate emotional intensity without blasting our emotions onto others or distorting our self-expression in the world.
Presence is Worth the Risk
Presence, as a practice, creates opportunities for our authentic needs and desires to emerge. No minimizing. No hiding. Our dreams and goals arise from our experience of embodied authenticity.
If we don't learn how to let go of “getting it right” and cultivate presence, we get lost in perfectionism, becoming so painfully hard on ourselves that we stand in the way of our thriving. We feel stifled and trapped in inauthentic relationships that don't meet our needs or that trample our boundaries.
There is no "right way" to be ourselves or to be in relationships.
When we learn to be present, we make ourselves available to be seen and loved for who we are. Love is messy. It's not about "getting it right." But being seen and loved for who we are is what life is all about
May you experience the messiness and joy of presence. And may it lead you to the fullest, most authentic expression of you. Because we need you. The world needs you. Just as you are.
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