Show notes
This episode’s guest is Eliza Reynolds. Eliza is a senior at Brown University where she is studying developmental and social psychology & Gender Studies. Eliza was a peer-counselor throughout high school and an S.O.S. trained educator for Planned Parenthood. She continued to use these skills working in Providence city schools as a sexual health educator. Eliza has recently co-authored a book titled: Mothering and Daughtering: How to Create a Deep and Enduring Relationship Through the Teen Years with her mother Sil Reynolds. Eliza was a featured presenter at the 2013 Emerging Women Live Conference in Boulder, CO. In this episode of Grace & Fire, Eliza and I speak about: Perfectionism and her battle with her inner critic How perfectionism isolates us as women and how she recommends to break these walls Advice for Moms to help their daughters cultivate self-acceptance of their bodies A final piece of wisdom for girls who are facing their inner critics Tune in and listen to Freeing Girls from a Culture of Perfectionism with the young and insightful: Eliza Reynolds. Subscribe to the Emerging Women podcast on iTunes. Transcript: Chantal Pierrat: Welcome, Eliza! Eliza Reynolds: Well, thank you, Chantal! CP: Now, tell us where you are right now. ER: I am in Providence, Rhode Island. It is drizzling outside [and] that typical New England fog that’s settling in. I’m at school at Brown University, finishing up my senior year, and I’m curled up on my couch with my candle and my mug of tea. I’m so excited to be here talking to you. CP: Nice! Now, you’re in your senior year, and you also just published a book that you co-wrote with your mother. ER: Yes, ma’am, I did. CP: And you also are launching, I believe, a website. ER: Yes, I am. TheWholeGirl.com is the new beginning that I’m really excited about. I come from a background of teaching—actually, we’re in our eighth year of teaching together, my mother and I, and I’m 22, so that’s pretty exciting to have had this legacy of teaching behind us and really be heading into innovating material together as a mother-daughter team. But as a senior [who’s] graduating, I’m launching my own work, The Whole Girl, which is looking at wholeness versus perfectionism, specifically in teenage girls today. But, gosh, our inner teenage girls never truly leave us. Even though I may be 22, I still feel pretty tied in, and I know, for example, women like my mother do as well. So it’s for the whole girl in all of us, really. And [it’s about] looking at wholeness as an alternative model to perfectionism and to a pretty rapid and dangerous culture of perfectionism that often gets masked behind other standards or other goals that can be very dangerous. And [it’s about] looking at ways that we can see ourselves live as whole entities, whether it’s not just as a value of our bodies as the center of our identities—where we ourselves look at ourselves in wholeness and work to live for and towards wholeness as an experience. CP: And do you have personal experience with perfectionism? Do you feel like you’ve been a perfectionist? ER: Oh, yes ma’am! [Laughs] Oh gosh, yes. I can definitely say perfectionism has been one of my inner demons, among other things. Different traditions call it different things, whether it’s the super ego, to be Freudian, or the inner critic is definitely one, a phrase that speaks very powerfully to me, or if you look at it in Jungian psychology, often we hear the voice of the inner negative mother or the inner negative father. And for me, it’s been a pretty consistent cohabitant of my brain. And I would say that my inner critic, in many ways, has served me [by] kicking my own ass into gear in one of the most awesome ways. And yet, there came a time that my inner critic was truly running the show, and that I was living in a place where I was being negatively driven from moment to moment, from achievement to achievement, whether it was a conversation with a friend, a school paper, a relationship, a work event. It was never good enough, I was never good enough, I was never enough, according to this voice. And first of all, it just became such a pain to live with, but I also realized it wasn’t coming from a true place in myself to be living from this voice and to associate this voice, this inner critic, as myself. I thought that was me, that [that] was always the truest expression of myself, rather than one of the many voices that we live with in our heads, these energies that we live with, whether we imagine [them] as an inner counsel that’s always giving us feedback or really kind of a one-on-one relationship of attention with this perfectionistic drive where it’s never good enough, it’s never enough. I remember I would get up to speak, for example, at a conference or teaching a workshop, as I do very often, and there’s that moment of elation, like, “OK, I’ve reached my audience and they laughed”—that moment where you’re riding a wave of speaking to a group. And I would get off the stage and I’d probably give myself maybe 30 seconds to enjoy it, and then I’d start to strip myself down inside. “Could have done this better, could have done this better.” And I told myself that criticism was the way that I was going to actually improve myself, and that’s very true, of course. We do need that energy and that voice to a certain extent, because we need this discernment, we need feedback. But when it comes from a place where the thought is really more of a destructive force that I was telling myself was for a higher goal, that I truly lost sight of that higher purpose within myself, and it was nearly breaking me apart every single day. It was almost a constant struggle to tell myself of my own value against the battle with my own perfectionism and my own inner critic. CP: Right. And when you say that it was a battle, how did you pull yourself out of this? What was the battle like? What was your process like? ER: Well, I say “battle” because there are a number of battlegrounds that have most explicitly shown up in my life, the body being one very specific one that I’ve done quite a bit of work around. Sometimes I feel like it can be hard to have a concrete idea of perfectionism versus wholeness. How is that actually in my life? And the body is an embracement of the means for me to look at that. I can see my own perfectionistic drive manifested on my body, whether it’s language—“I have to, I should,” whether it’s “I should run today,” or “I shouldn’t eat that, I should eat this,” instead of tuning in to my own body, what my body wants and trusting its system that creating an exterior standard which, to me, lines up with my inner critic and a perfectionistic cultural guideline that we’re so living from. Another place that it plays out in the body is black-and-white thinking and these absolutes that I have found myself at different times getting stuck in, whether it’s the idea—it truly frightens me sometimes, when you have those moments when you realize, “Holy shit, I didn’t realize the extent to which I was living from this unconscious belief,” which is terrifying to me. I see it other people but I think, “Oh no, I’m fine.” For example, I work with body image. “I love my body! Of course, it’s great. No, I’m not even going to engage with that.” And yet to discover, to a certain level, the way in which my inner critic, my perfectionist values have stripped down and broken apart this self-love, to the point where I have a piece of me that goes, “Unless you are attractive, you’re not valuable. Unless you’re sexy, you’re not a woman. No one would even want you,” and letting in these certain internalized messages that come from such perfectionistic culture, that comes from such gender culture, which is at work on me and realize, “Wow,” and have compassion for myself, and internalize that. And once I concede that in myself—and it really is about consciousness—and allow that to become conscious, allow [myself] to acknowledge that rather than say, “Oh no, I have no issue. Oh no, that’s not going on with me. What am I talking about?” To acknowledge that, then I get to begin to work with it. And so for me, the first part and the first and most important step of my process in this battle against perfectionism was to clearly identify the voice of this inner critic. Sometimes it was writing a letter to myself from this inner critic just to hear the tenor of [its] voice, a voice that I know so well, and to go, “That voice is not my voice.” CP: So you would write a letter to yourself from your inner critic? ER: Yes. Now, it’s a pretty nasty letter, I’ll be honest. Sometimes it comes out in more subtle ways and sometimes it comes out in pretty explicit ways. But I’m a big fan of journaling. So sometimes I would sit down, and if my inner critic was beating me up, I would write it down. I would go, “OK, you know what? We’re going to sit down and we’re going to write this out.” So I’d write out everything my inner critic was saying, and then I would look at it and say, “OK, that is the voice of my inner critic. There it is. There’s that voice.” But when I hear it going off in my head, I know it’s not me. I know it’s not my essence, my core, my truest self speaking to me. I know it’s my inner critic, which sometimes is valuable and very often isn’t that valuable or needs to be taken [as] a little bit more of a balancing act. CP: Yes. Do you feel that, in general—I know that, here you are, in college, the heartland in New England, having the New England collegiate experience—as a teenager, and also as a co-ed in the college arena, do you feel like this is more particular towards girls, or do you see it also in boys? And in [what] ways is this manifesting differently in both genders? ER: That’s a great question. Well, first of all, I say absolutely I see a much larger manifestation of perfectionism within an academic college, [a] very structured and traditionally masculine format. There is no coincidence that we see a huge rise in perfectionism in a society that’s based on patriarchal values. Surprise, surprise. That’s the system that’s been internalized and I think often we have to be careful about throwing out the old, rigid guidelines that we identify with the patriarchy and then not just taking them on under different guises. I see a lot of really amazing, what you would call empowered women. I’m [in] Gender and Sexuality Studies here at Brown, and so I’m kind of right in the most feminine of the feminine that you can be in the academic system, and yet the standards of rigid perfectionism—where’s the pleasure? Where’s the breath? Where’s the slow meal? Where’s the delicious enjoyment of the body rather than the utter control of the body? [They’re] really, really not present to a level that saddens and shocks me, especially [for] a young generation in their 20s, teens. I have so much hope that there will be a transformation there, and specifically in this academic bubble, I’m not seeing it. CP: Are you not seeing people identifying with pleasure that way? Or are you not seeing opportunities to engage in it, presented through high school or college, or both? ER: Both. I’d say that I’m not seeing pleasure or [respect for] time as [having] pauses. It has a more natural rhythms [that are] connected to our body’s needs, to the earth. I’m not seeing any space for that here. I think there are individuals—there are some great programs being offered and analyzed by the department that look at the soul. But those are severely underattended. Maybe five students out of thousands go to that. There’s not a break there. It’s an achieve, achieve, achieve [culture] going on, and I do see it as completely gendered. I do think more and more men are internalizing aspects of it, but right now, it is kicking the female ass particularly hard. It’s just not attacking the men in my life on as many different levels as it is the females in my life. It may be attacking them in their work lives, and they get perfectionistic tinged there, but it may not be attacking them in their bodies in the same way or in their family relationships in the same way. My experience is that with the teenage girls, young women, even older women, the perfectionistic standard is not just attacking their work lives. It’s attacking their relationships, their family dynamics, their friendships, [their relationships] to their bodies, to exercise, to food. It’s kind of being applied across the board. CP: Right. And what do you think actually happens when someone’s [a] perfectionist? It’s funny because I, myself, have never been a perfectionist in quite this way. I was always like, “Hey, B+, I’ll take it!” All my friends are total perfectionists, and maybe I am a perfectionist in other ways, but I just have other things. This is not my cross to bear. And yet I know it’s a huge problem. You can just see it in all the eating disorders, and the media doesn’t help any with all the retouching that they do and putting up unrealistic models for us to yearn for. But internally, as a girl, and I’m reaching for perfection, what actually happens? Why can’t we talk to each other, for instance, and say, “You’re feeling this, too? This is bullshit!” What happens that isolates us in this process? ER: I think [that] right there is the heart of it. If we could really talk to each other—and it’s conversations like this, making “perfectionist” not a buzz word but a real conversation and a real internal presence instead of, “Oh, you know, it’s a big issue with girls.” End of conversation. No, what is the big issue? Why this drive? I do come from, in many ways, a psychology perspective, and for me, so much of it is internalized signals. For me, a lot of it was about not only proving myself to myself, but I think we have a generation of women, especially really empowered women who bear a kind of feminist mantle saying, “OK, what are we going to do as young women in this generation?” And one of the phrases we’ve internalized from the very beginning was we said we wanted to change the world before we even knew what that meant. “It’s up to you guys!” was the phrase that was dropped off the lips of well-meaning parents and teachers and mentors and coaches, and I think it’s been especially internalized truly by the empathetic girl. I think it’s an emotional function that becomes internalized toward an inner drive. It’s like, “I care so deeply, so what the heck do I do about it? I see photos that terrify me, I see statistics, I see my friends suffering, and I kick myself into overdrive because I care so deeply.” I think in some ways, it’s not really seeking to heal pieces of the world in which girls let in their truly empathetic feelings for, but it’s a mechanism for running away from sadness, from grief, from letting in what is, in essence, a really beautiful experience of empathy and oneness with the world. But, of course, in a pretty straight, academic setting, it would hardly be presented as that. It’s presented as cultural guilt or whatever different words we put on it. But truly I think it is, in some aspects, internalized despair. Perfectionism is where we start to attack ourselves. The tragedy is we become our own worst enemy where the standards are never quite good enough. CP: It’s interesting, what you said was that in your generation the weight of the tragedies that are happening—and you know, it’s all relevant, the tragedies that are happening now were probably relevantly the same as when other generations were growing up. Although that’s hard to believe, because there weren’t people shooting children in schools and things like that. But I do feel like the nurturing instinct in girls and that intense capacity for empathy and just the intuitive connectiveness we have with the world I don’t think is [just] innately unique to feminine energy. I don’t think it means that the masculine can’t feel that. But we’re sort of born with that awareness of other. And I…
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