Transcript

Ani
Hi, and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast, episode 121 today. Hi, Brian. Hey, Ani. What’s so funny?

Brian
I’m just thinking about the topic of our podcast, and we’ve already tried to start this twice and not gotten it perfect.

Ani
Yeah, well, not everybody can be perfect, or can they? Can they?

Brian
We’re here this week talking about getting perfectionism right.

Ani
Well, we didn’t get it right. We had to start the episode twice. Or did we? Maybe it was perfect.

Brian
Maybe it was perfect. Let’s turn perfectionism around.

Ani
So we’re going to get perfectionism right today?

Brian
We’re going to get it right today.

Ani
Speaking of perfectionism, you have a little drop of coffee on your nose. Do I? Okay. I’m getting that for you. We are today.

Brian
How do you know it wasn’t perfectly on there? What is perfectionism?

Ani
Why can’t we get it right?

Brian
The question is, do we want to ease into this today, or do we just want to get to the punchline and get this done?

Ani
Let’s punchline it. Let’s just go.

Brian
Let’s just do this. I’m just going to go for it. Let’s just do it. Okay. You want to really know what’s at the root of perfectionism? Yeah. Okay. Well, it’s a defense. It’s a defense of a shame-bound ego. Oh, that hurt. Should we redo this? Because that was too much? Was that perfect or not perfect?

Ani
You know what’s hilarious is we have This is episode 121, and we have only had to, in 121 episodes, redo the episode or get it chopped or cut.

Brian
One other time. Once.

Ani
Yeah. Our team is- You might be thinking to yourself, I’ve been listening to your podcast, and you should chop it more. It’s hilarious. Our team at the beginning was like, I can’t believe you guys can go through the whole entire thing and not have to edit it like crazy. You all are getting the unfiltered version of us.

Brian
But it’s funny. We’ve only tried to start this one twice, and something happened each time, and it wasn’t perfect enough. Here we are. It’s perfect. It’s always Perfectionism really is what it is. It’s a defense of a shame-bound ego identity.

Ani
What does that mean? That’s all big, chunky words.

Brian
Why don’t we talk a little bit? Now we’ll ease our way in and we’ll just come back to it. All right. Okay. Let me ask you this, Ani. When you work with clients who are struggling with dealing with-I thought you were going to say for you. Perfectionism. How about for you? When you’re working with people and they say that perfectionism is an issue for them, how does it present itself? What do you see?

Ani
It actually comes up quite a bit, and I work with really highly aware people. They will come to me and they’ll tell me I want to work on my perfectionism.

Brian
Oh, really? Will they actually call it out?

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
So they see it that’s getting in the way? They actually see that’s getting in the way.

Ani
I think that’s all clients, but my clients are super highly aware folks who do a lot of their own work, have done a lot of their own work. So I can think back over my career and how it’s shown up for people. But for my people now, Brian, they show up and they say, I want to work on my perfectionism stuff. So in the past, I think that perfectionism has shown up suffering.

Brian
Okay. Say more.

Ani
So dealing with the same pain that’s going on and almost this perpetuating writing of it is something. A real inability to accept one’s own humanity. So things like, I have emotions, specifically anger, really shows up for people that they don’t want to be angry.

Brian
Oh, interesting.

Ani
Yeah. And trying to get around being angry or sad or any negative emotional state. A perpetuation of really harsh self-talk.

Brian
Yes. That is a key feature, actually, of perfectionism. Yeah.

Ani
Shows up like that. Of course, I think it seems probably more typical. I can never achieve my goals. If I do, I don’t notice that I do, and I don’t allow myself to celebrate where I’ve gotten. A denial of more some of the little things in life and presence. Actually, presence is a big That’s one that I think a lot of people are looking for and can’t seem to achieve. I would say that shows up with a lot of perfectionist stuff. Difficulty maintaining present, really wanting to be present.

Brian
It’s interesting because at the Somatic Coaching Academy, we have two tracks that people engage with the organization. One of those tracks is people get coaching for themselves, and the other track is they get trained to do sensation-based motivation coaching. While you and I both overlap into both of those areas, you take more of the lead in the coaching, the individual performance. Sure, we can associate coach to you. I take a little bit more lead in the teaching side, in the certification side. As I’m listening to you talk about what perfectionism looks like in your clients, I come at it usually from students. What does it look like in In the students? Sure. In the students, because we’re doing things where people are learning information and where people are then integrating that information and using it, where I see perfectionism show up and people are not doing it right. Right. And there’s a big attachment to doing it the right way. I think this is the way we go at it with the coaching also is like, Well, how do you know it’s the right way or the wrong way? I mean, who told you that it right or wrong?

Brian
And so a lot of times, it’s just breaking down some of those belief systems around rights and wrong to begin with. Yeah, lots of it should. Because the natural laws don’t work that way. Correct. And we come out everything from a natural law frame point. Just breaking down the rights and the wrongs for people, whether it’s working with clients directly or whether it’s working with people who are being trained with us. It shows up a little different in each way because the interfacing is that we’re doing. What it boils down to is really the right and the wronging of things.

Ani
When you were talking about all of that should is the way I should be doing it like this, I should be doing it like that with the students. The same thing comes up with clients in that I should have achieved this, or I should be able to do this, or I should be able to get myself to do this. There’s a lot of I should be able to get myself to do this energy that shows up in our associate coaching with all All of the coaches on our team and the clients that they see, whether it’s I should be able to get myself to exercise, I should be able to get myself to do my business development, I should be able to make phone calls, I should be able to have that conversation with my partner. There’s a lot of this thing I want to do, and I can’t get myself to do it, but I should be able to do it energy, which I think points back to this shame-binding thing that you were talking about. It’s really Finding is such a great word to use around it because it’s not the thing that we can just talk about and get over.

Ani
It’s the thing that when we work with perfectionism and we do the sensation-based approach, a lot of times what we see with the coaching clients is there’s a question that the coach would ask or something that really turns a perspective on its head for somebody, and then working with And then going in and working with the sensations actually allow the unfolding of a new way around it. But if we just try to intellectualize and ask questions and talk about it, we’ll run around very covert kinds of intellectualized defenses.

Brian
Yeah. Actually, to that point, let’s talk about maybe the bioenergetics of shame-binding, because everything you’re speaking to leads directly to that idea. If we think about this through the chakra system, and I guess probably pretty soon it would be good for us. I was going to say should, pretty soon it would be a good idea for us to do a podcast on the chakra system. Let’s do a series. As a way that we look at this. I think that could be really helpful for people. Now, so first chakra, pelvic plexus. It’s really about safety, security, me and trust. If we just want to be very quickly about this. Now, anybody who’s done a lot of work with chakras are going to say, Brian, that’s so incomplete the way you’re describing it. I know, but we don’t have all the time to dig into all the chakra stuff right now. But let’s just say this. Chakras, we develop these pelvic plexes as we grow. The first chakra is developed primarily in utero through about… People say different time periods here, so don’t Don’t quote me on this, but through a one-year-old. And that system is really about developing a primal trust in being here in human form.

Brian
Second chakra. Second chakra develops primarily between the ages of six months and two years. It’s really about movement, about desire, about pleasure. If you think about the parts of the body that develop in that period of time, a child is learning how to sit up, crawl, to move over. It’s all about a movement, and movement is very pleasurable for a child. So the second chakra development, which is the sacral chakra, which is down in your sacrum, right? And the lower than your solar plexus, if everybody knows where the solar plexus is, it’s in their abdomen. We’re talking about lower than that is second chakra. Okay, third chakra. We’re talking about the solar plexus. That’s the pelvic plexus associated with the third chakra. This chakra develops primarily between the ages Well, it starts, again, depending on how you’re looking at it, like two years old to four years old, something like that, maybe 18 months to four years old. The third chakra is really about autonomy. It’s really about creating a sense of self. This is where the ego gets developed. This is where we learn the rights and the wrongs. Think about a toddler around that 18 month, two year to four year old, they are learning a lot about what they should and should not do.

Ani
I’m laughing because our niece is… She’s turning five. She’s been in this stage for a while. And one of her favorite questions to ask me is… Our kids are older, so two early 20s and one late teen. And she is fascinated by asking me who tells them what to do. She She wants to know who tells them what to do. I’m just thinking about all right and wrong. What should they do? What shouldn’t do? And she’s obsessed with who tells them what to do?

Brian
Right. Yeah. So that third chakra is you’re developing your autonomy, your willfulness. So a child, when they want to do something at the age, they want to do it. They want to eat the whole basket full of cookies.

Ani
They want to stick their hand in the pie.

Brian
Exactly. They want to go outside Side in the snow with no jacket on, and they want to do it. And then, of course, when the parents are like, No, you’re not going to do that, there’s a lot of fight around that, right? Because there’s a lot of willfulness in a child. And we want a child to have that energy, that determination.

Ani
We want them to develop their will. Yeah, we want to develop their will. Well, we say we do. But going through that developmentally, especially if you’ve ever parented one of those.

Brian
Yeah, well, it’s important for a child to develop their will and not crush their will, because then that leads to all other kinds of problems as a child It helps. But here’s the thing. So shame binding happens at the third chakra. The shame is what we call the demon of the third chakra. It’s the emotion where that chakra can get bound up. So when we learn a lot about rights and wrongs, should and should not, there’s an energy always rising from the lower chakras coming upward into someone’s experience of their life. And The second chakra, which is the unruly chakra of desire thing. It’s like, what I want, I want that because it’s pleasurable. I want to have the whole basket of cookies because it’s going to- Because I want it. I want it so much. And then, no, no cookies. So Now, in the third chakra, you’re learning to begin to, let’s say, in some ways, mediate the desires of the lower chakras. Now, from above, if we go up for a second, we had The six chakras, seventh chakra, those are descending energies of consciousness. The way we intellectualize, especially the six chakras, a lot about intellectualization, rationalization, reason.

Brian
When the third chakra gets really bound up with a lot of shoulds, rights, or wrongs, the way that we are conditioned, and you see this in very strict religious traditions, there’s a lot of shame binding around the desires that you have are wrong. The desires that you have are wrong. Now you’re binding the energies of the second chakra with the third chakra. And so when that third chakra is really tight and bound up, no energies rise up, but a lot of energies come down. And so the energies of conscious thinking come down into the system. There’s no energies from the bottom rising up, where ideally, they meet. And then we express those energies in the world in really helpful ways. But people who experience perfectionism have a lot of over intellectualization going on because there’s no or not a lot of energy rising up from the bottom, but there’s a lot of energy coming down from the top. And so all that energy of consciousness just circulates in a person’s thinking, if you will. It creates a lot of self-critical thinking. That’s a way to maintain the shame binding. It’s a way to maintain a suppression of those lower desires is with a lot of self-criticism.

Ani
If you’re wondering if you have perfectionism tendencies and you are an overthinker, specifically a critical overthinker, then you probably know that you’ve got some perfectionist stuff going on. And there’s a suppression of natural urges that are happening in your natural energies that are happening in your body. And that’s taking up a lot of energy.

Brian
Yes, it’s taking up a lot of energy. Exactly. And the energy being- A lot of energy. Yeah. And It’s being bound, right? So there’s that binding idea. Actually, shame is binding the system, and that binding the system results in all that perfectionistic thinking about making sure that everything is right. Everything is presented as being right, accurate, good, all really polarized thinking.

Ani
I’m just imagining this whole thing playing out, how the binding is keeping it in a line, in order. Keeping it in order so that you don’t get out of order. Right. Yeah. So that you don’t get out of line.

Brian
Yeah. Now, the problem with that is that those lower energies cannot be held back forever. Those lower impulses cannot be held back forever. They leak out. They either leak out or every once in a while, they’ll erupt. Right. And they erupt as an outburst. They’ll erupt as some type of lapse of ordinarily really tight self control. Then all of a sudden you’re binge watching something that you’re not supposed to watch or you’re eating forbidden foods.

Ani
It can go into under functioning or it can go into over functioning. It can go into under functioning like, I’m going to sit around and watch Netflix all day. It can also go into over functioning where I’m going to clean my whole house thing. That wrestling. You were saying polarization.

Brian
Yeah, sure. But at some point in time, it’ll blow up, which actually creates more shame.

Ani
Yeah. Well, it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?

Brian
Exactly. Then we have to try to recontrol it, rebind it down, even tighter this time, and then it’ll leak through again at some point in time, and then we go into that whole cycle again. Lots of times when we see people, either people that we know or even people in the media or whatever it is, and all of a sudden they do something that’s way out of characteristic for them that seems like a loss of self-control thing, that’s really what’s showing up. It’s what’s showing up is that there’s a tremendous amount or enough shame binding that occurs that it just can’t hold it back forever. You’ll get an explosion of a lower instinctual behaviors that ordinarily someone is trying to hold under control that then happen. And then there’s all this apologizing and trying to explain it and all that stuff. And then the lid goes tighter, and then who knows what happens after that. But that’s oftentimes what you see. And so perfectionism creates even more tension in the system. But really what it is, it’s a defense mechanism, or it’s a defense of a shame-bound ego identity.

Ani
I’m just thinking about how the whole thing starts to crumble when you start to understand the natural laws and understand that there’s no right or wrong.

Brian
Yeah, exactly.

Ani
You need to actually embody that to actually do something with it. It does start to crack. You’re not just going to fix it by, Oh, well, now I understand that. That’s not how it works. But it does start to crack the theory when you start to understand the natural laws. Like, wait a minute.

Brian
100%, because the natural laws, there are no right or wrong with the laws, and they’re natural. Nothing is inherently good, bad, right? But here’s the thing. You might have been taught, which goes into this third chakra development, that the natural laws are wrong, or that the way you think about those laws or processes are wrong. Sure. And anytime you’ve been taught a black and white right and wrong, it’s going to create some type of tension in the energy system in the body, which is going to then create imbalance influence perspectives and perceptions and then create suffering, as you noted in our start.

Ani
So black and white thinking is a sign and symptom of shame binding.

Brian
Yes.

Ani
I used to deal with a lot of black and white thinking. Now I can catch it more often. I couldn’t even catch it at first. But I think that’s a really good one to notice for people and to be able to see it for what it is. I’m just remembering being in coaching school, and I don’t even remember the technique that they were proposing we use with people who had black and white thinking. But I remember it was intellectual, but it was an intellectual technique to use. What are the ways that black and white thinking shows up that you might not recognize is always and nevers?

Brian
Yes. You’ll hear yourself saying it out loud.

Ani
You hear yourself saying always and never, or one of the ones that slips out of my mouth last us now, but used to all the time, is everybody and nobody. Yes. Everybody thinks this. Nobody thinks that. So just some really practical ways to be able to catch yourself in black and white thinking, because these are subconscious patterns that are running. We have to really use our conscious attention to watch and witness ourselves and be able to catch ourselves. Yeah, for sure. In the act.

Brian
For sure. There’s a little trick I like to use when helping people begin to erode the perfectionist identity from an intellectual place. And again, this is not an end all or be all. It’s just a way to start chipping away at it. It’s because perfectionism is either or thinking, a question I ask people and say, well, then may I ask you a question, is it that nothing is perfect or that everything is already perfect?

Ani
Yeah, boy, that just really screws with you, right? Because you hear out there both sides of that one.

Brian
Right, but just presenting that. That’s not perfect. That dilemma for someone helps them to like, Gosh, I don’t know. Is nothing perfect or is everything already perfect?

Ani
Yeah, that’s really… That screws with you.

Brian
Just from a natural perspective, thing. Let’s just think about that. And while those questions are great places to start, it’s still actually using the ego rationalization against the ego. So you’re actually using an ego tool against itself, and you ask that question. It just starts to be… It starts to week. Like a jedi trick? It is actually a bit of a jedi trick, but it just starts to- Sounds like a little Star Wars. It starts to just erode a little bit that association where there’s no room for error. That’s what perfection is really about, right? That’s what shame binding is really about, is that there’s no room for error. What we have to move is from the black and white into the gray. Have to help people realize that the world is really gray. It’s not black and white.

Ani
That is hilarious that you said that because you know what I say? It’s rainbow color.

Brian
It’s rainbow color.

Ani
You would say it’s gray.

Brian
Yeah, it’s gray.

Ani
I would say it’s rainbow color.

Brian
I guess the rainbows are all between black and white, right? Yeah. So it can be gray rainbow also, I guess. It’s not black and white. Let’s put it that way. Let’s just say like that. So really- Which one’s right? Which one’s right? Are we getting it right? Are we getting perfectionism right? So if we know that perfectionism is really a shame-bound ego identity, then let’s ask ourselves, what’s it really protecting against? What is perfectionism really protecting against then? If we come back to the third chakra and the development there, what’s really protecting against is humiliation. It’s protecting against the experience of humiliation or exposing the impulses that we’ve been taught are inappropriate or unacceptable.

Ani
Wrong, yeah.

Brian
When we take then that perfectionism to the perfect level, let’s put it that way, it doesn’t just end up then helping us to moderate socially appropriate impulses. It leaches into everything that we do in our life. Then everything is either has to be perfect or nothing is ever perfect, and we’re back in that black and white again.

Ani
Trying to avoid humiliation is something else because humiliation is really painful.

Brian
It’s really painful. It’s part of that third chakra ego identity. It’s really to someone’s ego. The ego is developed in the third chakra at that period of time in our life. You can think about ego and third chakra are pretty synonymous with one another? Yeah.

Ani
When somebody feels humiliations, and I’m thinking back to my own experience of that, and with other people I’ve witnessed, when you experience humiliation and then you go, Oh, my God, who am I now?

Brian
Right. Yeah.

Ani
That’s just scary because part of the primal human fear is that we’re going to be abandoned. Yeah. And so not only might I be abandoned because I was just humiliated, so that’s an abandonment issue right there. But then if I don’t figure out who I am based on this whole experience, I risk my abandonment again.

Brian
It’s big stuff. Yeah. Right after a humiliating experience, the impulse for most people is to just really try to find safety again and find out where’s my safe community, where’s my Where am I accepted? As the impulse of that. Through conforming. Yes, through conforming. Or by jumping into communities that are not actually healthy or safe for them.

Ani
Well, back to the same. Go to what’s the same. Because that’s the known, I guess. Yeah.

Brian
The degree to which a person experiences perfectionism can They really actually tell you to what degree they are shamebound. I’ve met people. I think everything is in degrees. Again, perfectionism itself isn’t black and white. It’s not like you’re 100% perfectionism or not. We I’ll have percentages of these things. I’ve met people who have a tremendous amount of investment in perfectionism. I’ve met other people who have maybe tendencies toward perfectionism and other people who maybe just a couple of areas in their life they tend that towards. But the The degree actually does give you a really good indication of bioenergetically how bound someone is.

Ani
I’m just thinking some of the people I’ve met who are on the higher percentage of perfectionism actually present with a lot of projection, a lot of blaming other people.

Brian
Yeah, sure.

Ani
For me, that’s one of the markers that somebody is in a lot of shame-binding. There’s a lot of projection out.

Brian
The other thing that I often see is a lot of tension in people’s bodies. A lot of tension. A lot of tension, especially around the neck and throat. You might think, Well, why is that? Well, so fifth chakra is the connection between the intellectual higher chakras and then the more, let’s say, subconsciously created identity chakras below. And so that acts like a bottleneck. That fifth chakra really acts like a bottleneck, a choke point.

Ani
And that’s what it sounds like, actually, is it can sound like somebody’s voice is being squeezed off. Yeah.

Brian
And so you see a lot of tension in people’s neck, in their throat, which is also where the blaming is projected from, from the voice as well. And also a lot of tension, not healthy tension, held in the core in the back also.

Ani
Sometimes folks haven’t really been willing to do something about their problems until they get somaticized. Until there’s some health crisis, some physical problem that then will start to do some of the deeper work. If it’s a really high percentage of shame binding, that can show up.

Brian
The other thing you’ll see, too, and I think this is also why you see so much tension in the neck area is that people are relatively disembodied. Because there’s so much intellectual energy running, so much rationalization running, there’s a lot of energy high up in the body. Again, it all gets stuck up here in the neck and in the shoulders, and you’ll even see it in people’s eyes. The energy will get stuck in people’s eyes as well, especially when you’re asking them questions that start to probe, start to probe into the perfectionism defenses themselves. Then people are unsure how to answer the questions because they want to get the answer perfect. It creates a lot of them intellectual… It can overload the intellectual system also. But you start to see it even in people’s eyes that the whole system starts to get overloaded and revved up. There’s a little bit of a bioenergetic signature, if you will, that you can see what people are are experiencing energetically by looking at where they hold tension in their bodies.

Ani
I think that this is a really deep topic because we’re bringing it in a way that you may or may not recognize that if we just said, Do you have problems with shame? A lot of people say, No. We’ve spent a lot of time exploring a bunch of more superficial things that you may find that you have or that you see with folks and being able to recognize because we can’t change anything we’re not aware of. And a lot of times out there, people talk about shame or guilt or fear, but it’s hard to identify with those experiences. So seeing some of these more superficial ways and everyday ways that these things show up can help us to become aware of some deeper things that are going on. I just want to bring that up because I think sometimes with a topic like this, listeners might be feeling like, Oh, my God, I do some of those things. What do I do about it? One of the biggest, bestest things you can do is to become aware of and notice and continue that exploration of noticing because it’s really quite profound to be able to do that.

Ani
It’s a big deal to be able to become aware of yourself like that.

Brian
Huge. That’s a huge first step. We suggest that people actually spend a fair amount of time just doing that because you’ve been living in your patterns for years, likely. Oftentimes, by the time people get to this work at all, it’s midlife. People find this work, like around perfection Perfectionism, especially. They figure out, they learn that perfectionism is no longer working. I tell you when perfectionism actually works to help someone is when they’re in school, they’re school-aged, because you get good grades. It’s pretty easy. You You either get perfect grades, and you don’t get perfect grades, and you’re graded on it. Then all of a sudden, you get into the workplace, and for 21, 22, 23 years, you’ve been trained that study hard, answer the questions the right way, you’ll get good grades, you’ll get an A. Then obviously, you get in the workplace, and when you start working in organizations, you realize that the rules aren’t uniform. Not everybody claims by the same rules. You don’t get a grade for it. It’s not black and white anymore. More. Then people struggle with that for a really long time. They fight that typically for a while.

Brian
Then sometime in someone’s mid-30s, early-40s, mid-40s, the whole thing falls apart. They realize that perfectionism is not working for them, but they’ve been using it for 30 plus years, and so they don’t know any other way to be. When they start engaging with it, it takes a while to become aware of where perfectionism, that defense shows up in so many different places in a person’s life. You don’t want to jump over that step. You want to get as much information as you possibly can in that step. Yeah.

Ani
Then after doing some of that work, using the sensation-based tools will help you to begin to change the patterns, for sure. That first step is really, really critically important.

Brian
Yeah, absolutely. Then when you start working with the tools, you start working with them in your body to start loosening the actual binding in the body of the muscular tension patterns that are associated with shame binding.

Ani
Yeah. And one of the biggest side effects you’re going to see is it’s going to free up a tremendous amount of energy. So all of a sudden, you’re going to have better, brighter ideas. You’re going to have more color behind your eyes. You’re going to feel better. You’re going to be healthier. You’re going to have more passion and enthusiasm and magnetism. And all of that stuff happens as a natural side effect of releasing the binding because you’ve just released a tremendous amount of energy system. A lot of times people are looking for those things, the clarity, the enthusiasm, whatever, and it actually comes from releasing the binding. Yeah.

Brian
And as you’re engaging with this process, you might think, well, what’s the perfect way to do it. The invitation is you have to be able to let go of that defense mechanism in order to really meet the underlying somatic patterns that are holding the whole system. A whole pile of cards in place, if you will.

Ani
Because those patterns are just perfect the way they are.

Brian
Yeah, exactly. They’re just patterns, too, by the way. They’re not actually who you are. It’s just patterns. They’re patterns. They’re just patterns. We’re a bunch of patterns. A bunch of patterns. As we let go of those things, we can enter more into living in the rainbow.

Ani
Enjoy.

Brian
We’re into the gray.

Ani
It’s a rainbow. Diane, that was so nice of you to bring it back to the rainbow.

Brian
Back to the rainbow, and not in the black and white so much. If this This episode felt perfect to you and you feel like sharing it with a friend would feel enriching and perfect as well, please do that.

Ani
It’s a great one to share with a friend because then you can share in this conversation and help to have somebody to talk about, talk about it with, because that’s a part of this shame-binding thing is being able to talk about these things.

Brian
Get it out in the open. Yeah, get it out in the open.

Ani
Share with a friend. We always look forward to hearing your insights and your moments. So let us know about that. And we’ll see you next week.

Brian
See you next week. Bye-bye.