Eight Negative, Long-Lasting Effects Of Growing Up With Strict, Perfectionist Parents...

Breaking up with perfectionism is as difficult as an adult.

Did you grow up with overly strict, controlling, or perfectionistic parents? Was familial conversation strained and limited? Did you frequently feel like you weren’t allowed to be yourself or express certain emotions?

Every child experiences invalidation growing up.

This is natural and unavoidable. But some parents take it too far by being overly strict and perfectionistic. And parenting styles like this have a lasting impact.

Growing up in a household with an endless amount of rules for what is right and what is wrong (whether those rules are communicated explicitly or implicitly) is exhausting. If you constantly felt like you were walking on eggshells in your childhood home, the consequences can be quite damaging later in life.

Maybe your parents told you that certain emotions (most commonly sadness and anger) weren’t okay to feel. Maybe they told you the way that you were (i.e., sensitive, boisterous, communicative, shy) was inherently wrong. Maybe they told you that your emotional responses to things were incorrect, silly, or bothersome. Maybe they withheld their love from you unless you were performing or achieving constantly.

Whatever happened, it didn’t feel safe to be human, to feel emotions, to try things and mess up. Love was given to you based on your performance and adherence to arbitrary rules, not given based on your existence.

The down sides of having perfectionist parents include:

1. Emotional suppression

The first and most common overarching symptom of having been raised by perfectionistic parents is that you will be prone to suppressing your emotions. Whether it’s sadness, anger, frustration, jealousy, or any other emotion that is frequently labelled as "negative" in modern society, you will likely have a difficult time accessing certain emotions on a day to day basis.

This doesn’t mean that those emotions won’t exist in you (they will), it will just mean that it’s arduous for you to gain access to feeling your way through them. These chronically suppressed emotions will then turn into sickness, anxiety, depression, or (long-term) diseases like cancer and more severe mental illness.

2. Shame

The more disconnected you are from feeling your emotions, the more likely you’ll be to turn your less pleasant emotions towards yourself.

Here’s an example. Say that your parents divorced when you were six years old. Because children are inherently egocentric (they believe that the world revolves around them), you will create a story that it is your fault that your parents split up. You will then build on that story for years to come, and have a deeply permeating sense that you are unloveable, and somehow flawed.

This is especially the case in perfectionistic households. If there are hundreds of rules of how you’re supposed to behave, and you’re constantly getting in trouble for not adhering to them flawlessly, then there must be something wrong with you (or a lot wrong with you).

3. Being prone to addiction

Addictions can take many forms. You can be addicted to work, sex, alcohol, drugs, chewing your nails, love.

So what is addiction? At its core, addictions are maladaptive stress responses. Put another way, your addiction is what you do to cope with stress that you feel, when you’re not sure what else to do with it.

People that grew up with highly perfectionistic parents are more prone to addiction than most, because it’s their parents perfectionism itself that was a constantly modelled maladaptive stress response.

For example, maybe your parents felt an intrinsic sense of unworthiness growing up because their parents never validated or loved them in any obvious way, and so they learn to try to do life “correctly” in order to gain love and approval from their emotionally absent parents.

4. Perfectionism

Surprise, surprise! You will be prone to continuing the generational legacy of perfectionism until you decide to commit to a new path.

5. Chronic stress and physiological tension

If you’re always trying to do life right, then you’ll always feel on edge, anticipating the next mistake that you’re about to make.

That’s where the downward spiral of perfectionism starts. Every mistake that you make will thereby reinforce your sense of inadequacy and imperfection, compelling you to want to do things even more correctly, until you break the pattern.

6. Difficulty receiving criticism

Perfectionists have a non-stop self-critical inner dialogue. It’s like having a drill sergeant in your head telling you how to do everything, in order to avoid being criticized.

When someone gives you corrective feedback (or criticism) as an adult, it will be especially difficult to receive if you had perfectionistic parents. Their tone will remind you of your parents, and you will feel more triggered and defensive than if you had grown up in a loving and supportive household.

7. Living a life out of alignment and always seeking to please others

By constantly trying to live by your parents strict standards, you will set yourself up for a long life of living to please others. As you continue to live your life for other people, you will slowly erode your sense of self and slip into a general feeling of malaise.

8. Difficulty with intimate relationships

Being in any intimate relationship is an ongoing practice of allowing your self-protective ego to dissolve, in order to allow you to get close to someone. The way to feel fulfilled in an intimate relationship is to be with someone who you love, trust, and respect, and to let go of control.

If you had perfectionistic parents, it’s intimacy is going to be especially challenging for you.

You will resent your partner challenging you. You will resent the things that they say that you perceive as criticism. You will fear that your partner getting close to you will mean that they will witness (and confirm) your fundamentally unloveable nature. And you will be prone to defensiveness, passive aggressive communication, and stonewalling your intimate partners.

Again, the way that you succeed in intimacy is letting go of control and simply allowing your partner to be who they are. It’s therefore understandable that people with perfectionistic parents would have a difficult time allowing themselves to be loved and seen by another.......

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AUTHOR
Relationship coach Jordan Gray helps people remove their emotional blocks, maintain thriving intimate relationships, and live a better life. You can see more of his writing at JordanGrayConsulting.com.