108 | The Perfection Trap: How Trying to Be the Perfect Christian Keeps You From Managing Your Emotions

Let's talk about the trap of trying to be the perfect Christian. Striving to be more like Jesus is a great thing until it isn't. When you fall into the perfection trap it's no longer about sanctification it's about chasing the impossible.

In this episode, I'm talking about how the perfection trap stems from spiritual bypassing, why it's dangerous, the problem with the way some Christians view emotions, plus the importance of authentic faith.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Raise your hand. If you have ever tried to be the perfect Christian Yep, me too For a really, really long time. I spent most of my time in God's Word, most of my time in prayer, trying to figure out all of the things that I needed to do to be good enough for God. I wanted to check all the boxes, do all the right things, because I felt like that was the answer to all of the trouble and the hard times going on in my life. Spoiler alert it was not the answer for me. It's also not the answer for you, and I really learned that my hard times were not a result of, like my failures or successes when it came toward, from my faith, and so I really wanted to take a look at this pressure to be the quote unquote perfect Christian and how it affects us emotionally and spiritually, especially when we are walking through hard times. Are you looking to manage your emotions and calm your mind so that you don't feel overwhelmed by all the hard times going on right now? Would you like to find true rest and peace in God and a little joy in your weariness? What about understanding why you feel things so deeply, especially when you're stressed? If so, you're in the right place.

Speaker 1: 1:20

Welcome to the Peace Filled Mind podcast, your go-to resource for practical tips, real talk and encouragement. I'm your host, latoya Edwards, life and mindset coach and, most of all, a woman who's walked through pain and suffering just like you. No matter what you're currently facing in life or how you've dealt with things in the past, I'm here to help you find peace, joy and hope again. Pop in those earbuds and let's get to it. Are you feeling overwhelmed by the pressure to be the perfect Christian? Do you find yourself struggling to manage your emotions when life gets hard? Well, listen, you are not alone. So many of us have been taught to just suppress and ignore our feelings or put in a facade of strong and calm and having it all together, when, deep down inside, what we really want is a safe place to fall apart and do the work of healing and find the encouragement and peace that we know we need. To get through these hard times okay, and the truth is that striving for this perfection when it comes to your faith or spiritual growth actually hinders the thing that you're looking for. Right, it is going to keep you from having that peace that God promises and that you know you want to have when things are going haywire in your life, right, instead of experiencing the freedom of joy and the peace that passes, understanding and close connection with God and others, we feel like we're trapped inside this cycle of just anxiety, depression, hopelessness, you know, doubt, and we're just not growing spiritually. But listen, it doesn't have to be this way. You can come and join the Peaceful Mind Group Coaching Program, which is going to help you on your journey towards developing emotional resilience, growing spiritually, having authentic faith and relationships with God, yourself and other people. Inside this program, I tell you everything that I have learned about managing your emotions, processing your emotions and how you can just have strong faith and take care of your whole being when you're walking through hard times. So if you are looking for some help with learning how to cope when things are going hard, with not being overwhelmed by your emotions, by not being kind of stuck in this negative thought spiral, this is the program for you. Come on over to latoyadedwardsnet slash group. You can find all the details about the program and I would love to see you on the inside.

Speaker 1: 3:41

So last week we took a look at spiritual bypassing and why it is so harmful to you when you are walking through hard times, specifically right, and this idea of striving to be a perfect Christian is part of that spiritual bypassing, and it really has a lot of emotional challenges and consequences as well that you may not be aware of. There's so much pressure today on people, especially inside the church, to be perfect. We are judged when our life doesn't match up this ideal Christian image that people have in their heads. If you don't go to the right church, if you don't read from the right version of the Bible, if you don't have the right friends, if your kids aren't educated in the right way, like all of these things that we've decided equal a good Christian, there's pressure to achieve that, and so a lot of times, we get stuck in this perfectionism trap of trying to hit this idealized image of what it means to be a perfect Christian.

Speaker 1: 4:50

Okay, and it's so damaging because it's a lie, right, it's not the truth, you're not able to actually be yourself, you're not honest about what you're feeling, what you're going through, and none of that is going to help you when you are walking through hard times. It's going to make life more overwhelming, it's going to make coping with hard times more difficult, and so we have to learn how to get out of this perfectionism trap, how to take that pressure off of ourselves and instead learn to just be who we are and let God like be part of our journey of learning how to live here on earth and cope with whatever it is that life is throwing at us. Okay, and I know that you know, this idea of falling short of this image of perfection is scary, right, and when we give into that fear, it's going to keep us from acknowledging that that's not possible, and then we're not going to address what's actually going on with us. Okay, instead of being open and honest about how you feel, you're just going to be stuck in denial about what is going on. You're not going to have a firm grasp on your faith because you aren't actually asking those deep, hard questions that really solidify your faith, that draw you closer to God and that help you care for yourself in a way that allows you to have healthy coping techniques. Right, healthy. You know things in your toolbox that you can use when you're having a bad day, when life gets hard and you start to feel overwhelmed. Right, things that will keep you from sliding down into despair and into a place where you can't really get out of without a lot of support, right and professional help, andvision. We want to be able to avoid that whenever possible and I think that learning how to avoid or get out of this idea that we have to be flawless Christians is a great first step in that direction. So remember, when we are talking about spiritual bypassing, it's just using your faith, right or spiritual practices to avoid facing what's really going on. So, instead of dealing with your anxiety, instead of dealing with your depression, instead of dealing with your anger, you just do good Christian things instead.

Speaker 1: 7:22

So a great example of this from my own life will be a time when I was running around trying to do every book, club book study, bible study that I could find, because, right, I believed that the way out of my depression, the way out of my, the way to deal with the hard things that I was walking through at the time right, it was divorce and sickle parenting and losing a parent to cancer. Like I was, like I just, I just need, if I study the Bible, if I can really get a firm grasp on God's word, I'm gonna have all the answers and all the solutions that I need, and so I was doing all kinds of studies with friends, at their churches and my church and everywhere, and I was busy, you know, doing all of these things. And so from the outside I looked like I was coping well, like I had it. Look at her, look at how great she's doing. She's doing three studies. She's doing her own personal devotion. She's always willing to pray for people. Latoya really has it all together. No, latoya didn't. Latoya was a hot mess. She just wasn't dealing with it because I was so focused on checking these quote unquote, good Christian boxes, ok.

Speaker 1: 8:37

And so, as a result, like I got worse, right, because I wasn't dealing with what was actually going on. I got worse and like I got to a point where one day I woke up and I didn't even recognize myself. I didn't know who I was. I had no idea who this person was looking back at me in the mirror because I had avoided, like her, for so long. That was so deep in anxiety, so deep in depression, that she couldn't even get up and take care of her kids. Like every single day, like all I was able to, I could get up, throw on a sweatshirt over my pajamas, drop the kids off at daycare, go back home, get back into bed and stay there until the very last minute where I had to go and pick them back up from daycare because it was closing. Like I was not living, I wasn't functioning, but you never would have guessed that from like all of the things I was running around doing, that looked like what a quote unquote good Christian would do.

Speaker 1: 9:35

And so here are some of the dangers that come from this pursuit of perfection, or this perfectionism trap that we often find ourselves in. All right, so number one is increased anxiety and stress, and I am the poster child for this. Okay, the amount of effort that I was spending on being perfect, of appearing like I had everything together right, because I didn't want, like I didn't want to appear or act like or be that person that didn't have faith, like that, I didn't believe that God was going to help me, I didn't want to be that person, and because all of my energy was going into that, I set myself up to fail. There was no way that I was going to be able to keep up with four Bible studies with all the things that I had going on in life, like, I mean, I really needed to just go to church and be at church and just sit out in a pew and just be there. But I was trying to do all of these things and I wasn't keeping up. I was not keeping up, I was pretending and faking through like discussions and things. It was awful.

Speaker 1: 10:41

And so you know what, how I felt. I felt worse Instead of feeling better by being in God's word. I felt worse because I wasn't living up to these expectations that I had placed on myself and that I felt like other people had on me as well. So then I was more stressed, I was more anxious, I was more depressed, I was completely burnt out. Right. Everything that I was trying to solve by doing all of these things just got worse because of all the energy that I was spending on something that is 1000% unattainable. My depression got worse.

Speaker 1: 11:16

Like I said before, my self esteem, I mean. It was terrible. It was pretty much non existent. I didn't think very highly of myself at all. I was constantly just speaking negatively to myself and about myself. I felt worthless. I felt unworthy of, like, my salvation, even Okay, and I was just stuck in this cycle where I felt bad about myself because I was not meeting, you know the standards and things that I set for myself and that made me feel worse and worse and worse about myself. Right, I was not walking in my identity as a child of God. Right, I was not walking and acting like a person that was beloved right by our Father in heaven. I wasn't doing that, and then this led to me like doing some really don't want to say strained, but just like behaviors that weren't serving me well at all.

Speaker 1: 12:11

I am, by nature, a risk averse person. Okay, like, I want a sure thing. I want the most logical choice. I don't want to have things that are like up in the air. I don't like being in the gray. Okay, okay, that's naturally, that's just how I am. Well, it's not even worse.

Speaker 1: 12:28

When I was stuck in the perfectionism trap, okay, I would avoid any risk of any kind because I was afraid of failing or being rejected Like, oh my goodness, they are going to see how messed up I am and they're going to want nothing to do with me because I wouldn't want anything to do with me and I'm pretty sure that God doesn't want anything to do with me because of this laundry list of things that I've done wrong. You know what that led to. Strained relationships, right, it's really hard for people to be there for you and support you when you aren't being honest with yourself, when you're down in the dumps all the time, like people can only handle so much of that before they have to take a step back for their own well-being, and so relationships became strained. Right, I was isolating myself from my community, and then I felt lonely and then I began to resent the people that had quote unquote abandoned me in my time of need. And again, right, I'm going to keep talking about this.

Speaker 1: 13:25

But my biggest I think the biggest thing that really was probably like one of the most devastating things was that I felt stuck spiritually, like I was doing all of these things and I didn't feel any closer to God. I didn't feel any stronger in my faith. I was like what am I doing? I'm killing myself trying to do all of these things and nothing is changing. I feel worse. God feels more far away, right, all I think about is how awful and sinful I am. What is going on? And all of this was a result of me being stuck in this perfectionism trap and I couldn't get out of it. I didn't know how to get out of it. Right, because I was looking for spiritual solutions to something that, like, was bigger and more complex than that. So now I want to just turn a little bit to let's look at right, unpacking emotions because this was really for me was the root of my issue.

Speaker 1: 14:26

Right, my perfectionism trap was around the fact that I really believed that there was something wrong with what I felt, about what I was going through. Right, there was something wrong with me that I was depressed, that I was anxious, that I was angry. Right, that I was struggling to forgive people that wronged me. Like there was obviously there was something wrong with me, because a good Christian doesn't have these emotions. They don't have these experiences. They don't think of the thoughts that I was thinking about people that had hurt me. They don't feel the way I was feeling about people that had hurt me. They don't feel the way I was feeling about life in general. That's just not what Christians do.

Speaker 1: 15:08

The book of Psalms is not full of David and the other psalmists experiencing negative emotions. I look at it now and I'm like, oh my goodness, I was so lost. I was so lost, I was so blind. But it's true, we don't deal with our emotions for fear that it's going to somehow cause us to lose our salvation. That I'm not a real Christian if I'm having all these feelings salvation right. That I'm not a real Christian if I'm having all these feelings which is bananas? Right, because nothing could be further from the truth. And all this does, when we put these labels on our emotions, is it makes us like we get worse. Okay, so if you aren't aware, if you've never heard me say this before, hear me right now.

Speaker 1: 15:52

Emotions are not good or bad. They just are, hey. Hey, they don't have morality attached to them or like value. They're just feelings. It's just how you feel and you know where they came from. They came from God, because our God has a range of emotions that we see him express right in scripture, and so they're just emotions. And so you've got to take this judgment and this label off of how you're feeling.

Speaker 1: 16:19

Right, it's not good, it's just how you feel. Like you're just sad. You're just feeling right, hopeless right now, probably because of what is going on in your life. Like, obviously it makes sense that you feel hopeless. Right, you're struggling in this area, you've got a health problem, you lost a loved one, like how you feel is just how you feel. It's information. It's information on what is going on in your life and you shouldn't, like, judge yourself or measure your faith or any kind of value to you based on what you're feeling. Like it's just how you feel, okay, and so when we have these misconceptions about emotions, or we misinterpret them, like oh well, I'm angry, I'm not a good Christian, right. Then we are confused, we're guilty, so then we suppress and push it down and ignore it more, which makes us more confused and more guilty, right, and it just keeps going on and on, and on and on.

Speaker 1: 17:26

So I want you to begin this journey of becoming aware and accepting of your emotions is to just start by, as you're spending time in your Bible, just take a note of the emotions that people are experiencing. Okay, jesus, right, is a fantastic example of somebody that experienced lots of emotions. We see him weep when Lazarus dies, right. We see him in agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, right before he's getting ready to be taken off to be crucified on the cross. Right. We see him get angry, all right, at the Pharisees and the Sadducees. We see him go to the temple and flip over tables and whip people, right, because he's so angry at what they are doing in God's house. So, if Jesus is walking around expressing all of these emotions, why do we convince ourselves that it's not okay for us to do so? Okay, and if that's not enough for you, just read through the book of Psalms. Okay, david was all up and down all over the place with all of his emotions, and he is still known as a man after God's own heart.

Speaker 1: 18:26

Okay, so your emotions are just part of who you are, and learning to pay attention to them, to be aware of them, to embrace them, to process and work with them instead of trying to avoid them, will help you go a long way towards healing and growth and finding that peace that you need and the other thing that comes with this, like the perfectionism trap, right? So we've talked about emotions and kind of how that effect that has, but it also has so much of an effect on you spiritually, all right, and I talked about this a little bit in the last episode of spiritual bypassing, but you have this tension between spiritual bypassing and true faith. Okay, true spiritual growth is about facing your emotions, facing your questions, facing your doubts, facing those struggles and working through them with God right, with the power of the Holy Spirit, facing those things and working through those things. It is not about ignoring those things, pretending that they don't exist, telling yourself that they're not Christian, that you're not being a biblical person, because you have them. No, true faith is about facing whatever is coming at you and working through that, with God by your side. Okay, it is about embracing, being vulnerable, open and honest and real, embracing the fact that you are not perfect, right, none of us are Jesus, jr. We are not perfect. It's doing all of those things to grow your faith, because that is part of what is going to help you get through the hard times.

Speaker 1: 20:09

How was I able to overcome deep depression? How was I able to overcome deep depression? How was I able to overcome like debilitating anxiety? How was I able to conquer rage that was building up in me and learn how to forgive people that had betrayed me and abused me and caused me so much pain? Right, a huge part of that was my fate is that I was like, lord, they suck and this sucks and I hurt and I am angry and it's your fault and it's their fault and I'm done. And he would be like, okay, you feel better. Yes, all right, I'm still here. I still love you. I'm still going to be here with you while you're processing that.

Speaker 1: 20:50

Okay, so we've got to learn to be okay with that. Don't leave issues and things unresolved because of some notion that that is some kind of comment about your level of faith. It's not. It's a comment about the fact that you're human. Okay, so we want to be able to have that deep connection with god Because we need it. You want to. I hear it all the time. I just want peace. I just want to know that god is with me. I just want to feel close to god. I just want to have peace of mind. I just don't want to be overwhelmed anymore. Right, I want to let go of this anger.

Speaker 1: 21:29

Well, okay, god wants that for you too, but it starts with letting go of this anger. Well, ok, god wants that for you too, but it starts with letting go of this need and this desire to be perfect. God does not expect perfection out of any of us. That's why he sent Jesus on the cross to die for our sins, because he knew that we could not do it. He knew that he does not expect that of you. He expects you to be open, right and truthful and vulnerable, to come to him just as you are with whatever you're dealing with and give it to him, because he wants to help you carry that burden. He wants to help you do all these things okay, along with right, getting support for your mental health if and when you need it, being in community, taking care of your body, sleeping, eating, drinking water, right, finding hobbies, learning to rest. All of these things go together to help you learn how to manage your emotions.

Speaker 1: 22:26

So if you are someone that has been spending so much time striving for perfectionism or for perfection, please let it go. That is a waste of your energy. Instead, can I just encourage you to take all of that energy, all of that effort, and put it into really truly learning how to manage your emotions, really truly understanding how you feel, what you feel, and developing the coping skills and techniques that you need to manage those to live life and enjoy your life, even when things aren't perfect. It is possible, and I so, so, so want that for each and every one of you. I hope you were blessed and encouraged by today's episode. I would love to hear from you. The best way to do that is to leave a five-star rating and review on your podcast player, sharing what you loved or found helpful about today's episode. This helps other women find the show and it's a huge blessing to me. Thank you so much for joining me today.