From all or nothing – to finding balance
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| Barbara Steingas |
Barbara Steingas is an award winning author, inspirational speaker and radiant life coach, helping people to optimize their health and vitality. She can be found at Steingasbooks. Barbara is joining Mind Key as a resident columnist, sharing her 21 Tips for Healing.
It used to be all or nothing for me. That was due to the need for perfectionism that made me a person of extremes. Either I would have to do something 100% right or not at all. I didn’t know how to be balanced or allow myself any slack for mistakes or learning curves. It was all black and white so to speak, no gray areas.
As I was seeking a natural way back to health, after following the traditional medical route for the first several years, I discovered that the cause of me being extreme with the way I ate and needing to be all or nothing was really rooted in emotional issues. To illustrate, if anything happened to disrupt my day, the whole day was basically ruined. I had a hard time letting things go if they didn’t go 100% “right.” I would basically beat myself up emotionally for being flawed. I learned this patterning from my loving and well-meaning parents. They did the best they could to love me and raise me, and they had their own dysfunctional emotional issues and behaviors that I learned by observing them. As children we are sponges for learning so we can’t help but pick up on what we are around the most and that is usually our parents.
However, she had her usual reaction that I ruined the whole conversation. Long story short, I got her to realize it was only just one moment in a long conversation and that I was only sharing so we could use another strategy next time, such as her telling me she was tired and wasn’t able to keep up and got distracted. In this way we could avoid upset in the conversation next time something like this happens. She is also the woman who can’t stop cleaning because she is trapped by the need for perfection.
