My need to make others perfect reflects my fear I’m not in control

By David McElroy · March 29, 2019

It was about 12 years ago and I was getting to know a woman who I would soon start dating. I don’t tell you this story with pride, but with shame. It really embarrasses me.

This woman had a brilliant mind. She was talented enough to do anything she wanted. Her competence, talent and intelligence were stunning. She could have done something really impressive if she had wanted, but what she really wanted was to be a teacher. She had received her degree and was about to start teaching.

That seemed like a waste to me. I thought she could do something so much more “impressive.” I don’t remember what I said, but I was trying to nudge her into thinking about something bigger. I was probably a bit condescending about it. You see, if she was going to be in my life, I wanted her to do something more impressive. I wanted to make her into what I thought she ought to be. I wasn’t honest enough with myself about it at the time to know this, but I made her career choice all about me.

I’m not a control freak, but I’m happier if you do things “the right way.” My way.

One of my core problems is my compulsion to reform everything around me, including other people. It’s not that I don’t also want to fix myself. I do. I want to fix the entire world around me — and that includes other people. This is really a problem of me needing control.

My world felt completely out of control when I was a child, so I learned to obsess about performing correctly — trying to be perfect to avoid criticism — and that led me to believe everyone needed to perform exactly in accordance with my standards. If I focused obsessively on trying to get myself and other people to meet those standards, it distracted me from realizing how little control I actually had.

It’s been a great defense mechanism. It has allowed me, at times, to believe I had more control in a chaotic world than I actually had. But there are ugly downsides to this defensive behavior.

For one thing, I obsessively beat up on myself for not being good enough — for not being perfect. Most people seem to be in denial about their faults, but I’m hyper-aware of mine. I’m hyper-aware of all the things I need to change about myself, and that frequently makes me far too hard on myself.

Second, I have sometimes allowed myself to become far too judgmental of the people I love most, especially in romantic relationships. Without realizing what I was doing, I’ve often decided what those people ought be at their best — and I have tried to mold them into that.

I’ve been aware of this tendency for a long time and I’ve worked hard to change it. It’s only been recently that I have finally understood, though, that my desperate efforts to perfect other people were mostly about my own fears of imperfection.

Trying to make other people more perfect — while I did the same to myself — made me feel as though I had more control over the world and over reality than I really do. Why do I fret so much about needing control?

It’s because I’m terrified of the chaos of the world around me.

It’s because I’m terrified of the physical dangers that are everywhere.

It’s because I’m terrified of the randomness with which we can be struck by disease or death or failure. It’s because I’ve been successful in starting to climb great mountains — and then I’ve fallen to failure — so I know how easy it is to lose everything.

Most of all, it’s because I’m terrified about my inability to control whether the people I need love me.

Writer and therapist Ian Morgan Cron says the personalities we build are essentially our reactions to the trauma of not getting the things we need, as children and as adults. I heard him say today that we’re all addicted to something — and the thing to which we’re addicted changes depending on our personality defense mechanisms.

When we think of addictions, we typically think of alcohol and other drugs, but those are just some of the behaviors of an addict. The thing we do in our addiction — whether it’s alcohol, cocaine, sugar or sex — is just what we do to numb the pain of the underlying problem. The underlying problem — whether we realize it or not — is a craving for love and understanding and acceptance. We chase other things as substitutes, because we don’t know how to get what we need.

“We all want love, but we settle for something else,” Cron said.

I settle for perfection — or striving for perfection — and that leads me to attempt to be in control. Another personality type might settle for admiration — for her achievements — when she doesn’t know how to get love. Another personality type will settle for something entirely different, in order to numb himself to the pain of not having the love he needs.

You have an addiction, too, whether you know it or not. Your addiction might not manifest itself in ways that are obvious to others. It might even manifest itself in ways that appear positive to others. But you are compensating — as all of us are — for whatever needs in our lives are still unmet. Those needs are often hidden from us.

Once you know that and accept it, some healing can begin — if you’re self-aware enough to stumble through the process and be vulnerable enough to allow someone to help you find your form of “sobriety.”

The only good thing about this for me is that I’m aware of my tendency and I’ve learned to be very open about my flaws. I have to be careful not to be too hard on myself, but making myself vulnerable to you — and hopefully with someone who will love me one day — can stop me from being controlling in the wrong ways. By confessing my sins, so to speak, I can allow others I trust to hold me accountable.

There’s nothing that anyone can confess to me which is going to shock me. I think this is why so many people over the years have found themselves sharing their deepest fears and darkest confessions with me. I am so aware of my own dark places that other people’s dark places don’t scare me so much.

I don’t want to control others. I don’t want to try to force others to be whatever my idea of perfection is. I don’t even want to poke myself constantly about my continuing imperfection.

I’d rather just be honest and vulnerable with you — both of us — and for us to both lovingly hold the other accountable for living an emotionally healthy life. It’s the only way I know to get past the addictions which often threaten to destroy us.

By the way, the woman who I condescendingly wanted to be something more “impressive” than a teacher turned out to be very, very impressive.

She did become a teacher. She’s a great teacher. She loves her students and she changes the lives of the eighth graders whose minds she’s shaping.

I’m proud of her — and I’m glad she had the wisdom to ignore my arrogance about what she ought to be.

Share on Social Networks

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

Related Posts