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Perfectionism is often lauded in modern culture as a desirable trait—a mark of ambition, diligence, and high standards. But for those of us raised in the shadow of abuse, perfectionism is not a quirk of personality. It is a trauma response. It is what remains when love is conditional and safety is a myth. In this essay, I unpack the bitter inheritance of childhood perfectionism, the internal war it fuels, and how we might begin the long, slow walk toward self-compassion.
This is not an instruction manual. It is a reckoning.
The Myth of the Perfect Self
The word itself gleams like polished brass—clean, composed, commanding respect. In the world’s eyes, it evokes order, precision, the tireless pursuit of excellence. It sits comfortably on résumés and slips easily from the lips of high achievers as though it were a badge of honour, a testament to ambition. But for me—and for many others forged in the white-hot crucible of childhood abuse—perfectionism has never been a virtue. It is not a personality trait. It is a wound.
A quiet, festering wound stitched together with fear.
Perfectionism, in my life, is not the pursuit of beauty or brilliance—it is a compulsion born from terror. It is the armour I built from the wreckage of my boyhood, fashioned not for decoration, but for survival. It is the fruit of a poisoned tree, ripened in the dark soil of neglect and cruelty, watered daily by the withering gaze of a father who loved nothing but control.
You see, I didn’t want to be the best. I just didn’t want to be hit.
That was the transaction. My best behaviour in exchange for less violence. My silence in exchange for fewer punishments. If I made myself small enough, good enough, invisible enough, perhaps I could avoid becoming the target of his rage. Every neatly made bed, every cleaned dish, every forced smile was a silent plea: please don’t hurt me today.
And so the seed was planted.
Now, decades on, that same child sits ghostlike in the corner of my adult life, still pleading. He whispers into the ear of the grown man I’ve become, telling me that I must be exceptional—flawless, in fact—if I am to be safe. And I obey, almost without thought.
I strive relentlessly to be the perfect father. The attentive, unshakeable partner. The unimpeachable medical professional. The writer who crafts prose so exquisite it absolves every past sin. I don’t merely aspire—I chase perfection with the breathless desperation of someone whose life depends on it.
But perfection, by its very nature, is unattainable. It is the cruelest of mirages. A shimmering oasis that recedes the closer you get, laughing as you stumble through the sand.
It is a Sisyphean punishment, dressed in professional clothing.
Every summit I reach reveals another, higher peak. Every accolade is hollowed by the whisper: not good enough. And the world, ever complicit, rewards the pursuit while never questioning the cost. What appears as drive on the outside is often a scream on the inside—a scream that was never permitted voice in childhood, now muffled beneath spreadsheets, manuscripts, and the desperate need to never, ever disappoint.
Perfectionism is not pride. It is the art of self-erasure.
It is a lifelong attempt to become so flawless that no one will ever have reason to harm you again.
But here’s the truth no one tells you: the perfectionist is not safe. The perfectionist is exhausted. And the perfectionist, like the child they once were, is still waiting for someone to say, you don’t need to do anything to be loved.
And perhaps that someone must now be ourselves.
Where It All Began
I was a '70s child, raised in Germany beneath the long shadow of the Cold War—a child of the British military machine stationed abroad, surrounded by whispers of Soviet invasion and the smell of shoe polish. We lived in married quarters that clung to the grey-slabbed estates like bunker outposts. The winters buried everything in snow, the summers stretched into long evenings painted orange by NATO skies. On the surface, we were the archetypal army family: regimented, respectable, tight-laced.
But behind closed doors, inside that regimented symmetry, was a system built not on discipline—but on dread.
My father was a violent, narcissistic tyrant. A man both inflated and hollowed out by his rank. To the outside world, he wore the mask of an officer—a man of order, of structure, of crisp creases and protocol. But at home, the uniform came off and the tyrant emerged. He ruled our household with rage disguised as righteousness. His cruelty wasn't spontaneous—it was structural. A methodical dismantling of anything soft, kind, or different.
My mother, ever-present but emotionally unreachable, offered no resistance. Maternal only by virtue of biology, she folded herself into silence. She didn’t hit, but she didn’t help. She observed—always—and in her stillness, I learned early what it meant to be abandoned while standing right next to someone.
Let me put it plainly: there was no love in that house. No sanctuary. No softness. No room to be a child. I was not nurtured—I was managed.
And so I adapted.
I learned quickly that love, or anything resembling safety, would never be handed to me freely. I would have to earn it. And since love was nowhere to be found, I set my sights on peace. If I could just be good enough, quiet enough, obedient enough—perhaps I could slip beneath his radar. Perhaps I could avoid the next outburst. I wasn’t trying to become a better version of myself. I was trying not to be destroyed.
That’s how perfectionism began for me—not as ambition, but as camouflage.
I polished my behaviour like a weapon. Sat straight. Spoke when spoken to. Kept my bedroom spotless. I lived as if the smallest mistake might detonate the world around me. I was, in every way, a performance child—one who learned the choreography of survival without ever being taught the steps.
Sometimes, I would sit on my hands—not in rebellion, but in strategy. It was one of the few things I could control. They were mine. Hidden. Unreachable. He couldn’t strike what he couldn’t see. In a house where even the way I buttered toast was scrutinised, my hands tucked beneath my thighs felt like a small act of resistance. The quietest mutiny imaginable.
Everything about me was too much for him—my size, my softness, my questions. I was the antithesis of what he believed a boy should be. And so he tried to reshape me through ridicule, shame, and brute force. My father wasn’t just disappointed in me—he resented me. I reminded him of everything he couldn’t fix in himself. And in his eyes, my existence wasn’t just a nuisance. It was a provocation.
Even as a boy, I knew he hated weakness. He feared difference. His entire worldview was a brittle ideology built from self-loathing and projection: white, straight, male, military. Anything outside of that frame—especially if it was tender or intelligent or nuanced—had to be crushed.
And I was all three.
So I became the family defect. The one who didn’t fit. The “slug,” as he liked to call me. A name he spat with such glee it etched itself into my psyche. His words weren’t careless—they were carefully curated weapons. He spoke to maim, not to mould.
Even when I achieved, it was dismissed. I passed the 11-plus, had a reading age beyond my years, could discuss current affairs with startling clarity. None of that mattered. Not to him. Not when there were teachers like Mr Page, who branded me a clown and labelled my left-handedness a fault to be corrected. My father held his opinion in higher regard than any exam result or personal truth I dared present.
In a system designed to diminish difference, I was perpetually out of place.
In therapy, many years later, I learned the word that describes what I felt every day in that house: incongruity. That gnawing, ever-present sense of not belonging. Of being a misfit in the very place that was meant to shape and shelter me. I wasn’t allowed to take up space emotionally, intellectually, or physically. And so I became an emotional contortionist—bending, folding, disappearing.
This is the context in which my perfectionism was born. Not from a desire to excel, but a desperate need to not be obliterated.
I was not a child dreaming of greatness. I was a boy learning how to stay out of the line of fire.
Perfectionism, for me, wasn’t about standards. It was about survival.
And long after the violence stopped, the habits remained. The compulsions calcified. The belief that I was only as safe as I was spotless lingered into adulthood. It seeped into every role I played—the husband, the father, the medic, the writer. Even now, I sometimes find myself looking for praise that will never come, trying to earn worth in rooms that no longer hold any danger.
That’s the problem with growing up in a war zone. Even when the bombs stop falling, you still duck at loud noises. You still flinch at shadows. You still live as if safety is something that must be bought.
And sometimes, you still sit on your hands—because you’ve forgotten what it feels like to reach for anything.
The Illusion of Control
Children raised in abusive households often cultivate behaviours that appear, on the surface, to be conscientious or even admirable. But beneath the polish, these behaviours are rarely about character. They are about control. Or more precisely, the illusion of it.
In the chaos of an unpredictable home—where moods swing like wrecking balls and affection is bartered like contraband—the child learns quickly that control over their own inner world is impossible. So they turn outward. They begin to shape the world around them, compulsively and obsessively, in the hope that a spotless environment might lead to a softer day. A quieter evening. A reprieve from rage.
We tidy. We straighten. We go above and beyond. Not because it brings joy, but because it might lessen the violence. We perfect our environments not out of pride, but out of panic. We polish ourselves into palatable versions of who we think we need to be: smaller, quieter, more compliant. More lovable. Less punishable.
And when the shouting doesn’t stop? When the belt still falls, or the venom still drips from a parent’s mouth? We don’t stop. We double down.
Maybe if I vacuum more. Maybe if I preempt their anger. Maybe if I speak less. Maybe if I disappear entirely, I’ll be safe.
That’s the cruel sleight of hand that childhood trauma plays: it convinces the child that the problem is them. That if only they could be better—more helpful, more silent, more perfect—the abuse would stop. But abuse doesn’t stop. Not when it’s systemic. Not when it’s fuelled by unresolved generational rage.
And here’s the bitter truth: the more perfect we try to become, the more our abusers find fault. Because it was never about cleanliness. Never about our volume. Never about us at all.
Perfectionism, in such homes, is like trying to build a raft in a storm using only the debris from the last beating.
And when praise comes, if it ever does, it arrives laced with poison. It is never unconditional. It is never safe. It is transactional—doled out in crumbs when we grovel just right. It’s the kind of praise that reinforces obedience, not personhood.
“You’ve done well—this time.”
The goalposts always move. The rules change mid-game. The critic inside—formed in the likeness of the abuser—learns to keep up. It sharpens its claws, adjusts its expectations, and whispers that next time, you’d better do better.
So the shame begins to calcify. It hardens around the heart like emotional scar tissue. It becomes part of the body, part of the breath. Not a feeling, but a state of being. And the child grows up believing that worth is conditional, that love must be earned, and that failure—even imagined—is proof of their unlovability.
By the time we reach adulthood, the compulsion to perfect is so embedded we call it personality. But it’s not personality. It’s survival programming. And it will bleed into everything—our work, our relationships, our creativity, even our rest. Because nothing ever feels enough. And the echo of those shifting goalposts still follows us.
Shame: The Great Inheritor
Shame is the great inheritance of the traumatised child. Not the momentary embarrassment we all feel from time to time—but the deep, cellular conviction that we are unworthy. That we are bad. Shame, in this form, becomes more than a feeling—it becomes a framework. A blueprint. A lens through which every human interaction is filtered and distorted.
This kind of shame doesn’t fade as we age. It evolves. It learns our patterns. It gets smarter.
It arrives in adulthood dressed in civility, camouflaged as “drive,” “professionalism,” or “high standards.” But underneath its tailored coat, it is still the same thing: a poison that convinces us we must earn love by being flawless, by being indispensable, by being everything to everyone—always.
So we overcompensate.
We work longer hours than we need to. We apologise for existing. We hold back our opinions in rooms where we have every right to speak. We love harder, not because we feel secure, but because we fear abandonment. We over-function, hoping someone will finally say, you’re enough.
But the world outside the family home doesn’t operate by the same warped rules. Your boss doesn’t love you, even if you never miss a deadline. Your partner isn’t your parent—and they’re not watching you to see if you pass the test. And yet, when we fail to meet the impossible standards we carry, the inner critic pounces.
“You’re a failure,” it sneers.
“Useless. Lazy. Worthless.”
And then it offers a solution.
Not a healthy one. Not a kind one. But a solution all the same.
Eat.
Drink.
Swipe.
Snort.
Disappear.
The Addiction Spiral
This is where addiction creeps in—not as a choice, but as a coping strategy dressed as comfort.
Addiction rarely arrives with fanfare. It sidles in gently, promising a brief vacation from the noise. For those of us raised in emotional warzones, addiction is often the first thing that feels safe. Predictable. Dependable. It doesn’t shame us, doesn’t scream, doesn’t withhold love. It just… soothes.
So we eat—not to feed hunger, but to quiet the inner critic.
We drink—not to celebrate, but to silence the static.
We scroll, we swipe, we gamble, we binge, we work ourselves into the ground—not out of desire, but out of desperation.
And for a while, it works. That’s the seduction.
The high. The calm. The forgetfulness. The numbing.
The space between ourselves and our pain.
But then comes the cost.
The food leaves us heavy with shame. The drink leads to regret. The sex leaves us lonelier. The work burns us out. The escape becomes its own prison. And that same critic, the one we tried to muffle, returns with even more venom: You failed again. You’ll never change. You are broken beyond repair.
And so, in order to escape the shame of the escape, we go back to it.
Again. And again.
This is the cruel symmetry of trauma-driven addiction:
What once saved us now slowly destroys us.
And yet, in the core of every addictive spiral, there’s a message trying to be heard:
I am in pain. I was never loved safely. I don’t know how to soothe myself.
Addiction is not the wound—it is the bandage. But it’s a bandage wrapped too tightly for too long. And to heal, we must learn what it was covering in the first place.
How to Begin Again
Here’s what I’ve learned after thirteen years in therapy: The critic is not real. The perfectionism it demands is not necessary. And the shame it feeds on is not yours to carry.
The way forward? It starts with a breath.
And then another.
After that, gratitude. Not performative, social-media gratitude. I mean real, raw, imperfect gratitude. The warmth of a morning sun. The wag of a dog’s tail. The small hand of a child reaching for yours. The fact that you are still here.
Perfection is not the goal. Presence is.
I remind myself daily: not everyone will like me. Some will disapprove of my choices. Others will misunderstand my healing. And to that I say, with all the kindness I can muster—fuck ‘em.
The Freedom to Be Flawed
Being human is not a flaw. It is the point.
I am not healed. I am healing. I will never be perfect, but I am no longer performing for a tyrant. I am no longer sitting on my hands.
I am writing with them.
I am living with them.
And for the first time, I am using them to build a life that isn’t a performance—but a truth.
A messy, magnificent truth.
If this resonates, please consider sharing it with someone who might need it. Healing doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens when one wounded soul whispers to another: “Me too.”
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