Leslie's BlogThank You Card Aversion
Our Christmas holidays have ignited these past years into bonfires of activities. The running of the gauntlet features tree-buying, tree-decorating, tree-needle picking-up, holiday card sending and receiving, baking, shopping, gift hinting and gift puzzling out what the picker members of the family want, wrapping said gifts, coordinating relatives’ visits and a general implosion of life pre-Thanksgiving. Toss into that two week holiday season my husband’s and daughter’s birthdays and I fairly collapse across the finish line after January 2nd, broke, ten pounds heavier and ready to run over Grandma with a Reindeer myself. I view writing thank you cards as the last vestiges of the burning embers. When I plunk the notes into our mailbox I imagine them to be like lit candles floating down the Ganges River sporting a “Forever Stamp” and signaling the end of the holiday season.
Thank You Card Aversion (my term) has been a struggle that comes and goes, depending upon my mood and length of the mailing list. After you sort out Christmas gifts, my husband’s birthday gifts, and then my daughter’s birthday’s gifts, the cards number into the serious double-digits. I’m better now than I used to be about acknowledging gifts, which isn’t hard because I used to be terrible.
An extreme example was ten years ago after I my husband and I celebrated our May wedding and the list of people to send thank you notes sat untouched until almost October. I’d pass the pile of pristine cream-colored stationary and just shudder, adverting my eyes. As summer slid into fall, I received a polite, but questioning, call from my new in-laws, asking when were they, and the rest of the gang, going to receive their notes? Not a good first impression.
I cringe when I think how people must have thought of me as disorganized or uncaring. But underneath it was my perfectionist thinking; because I wanted to do an excellent job of acknowledging people for the gifts, I’d become overwhelmed at the task. Cascading into fear, I’d finally hit the perfectionist’s defense mechanism of avoidance. As the months past, my shame put a hard shellac over the whole process by keeping the cycle in place and me feeling more stuck and less competent.
Looking for help, I found the work by Canadian psychologists Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett who define three main types of perfectionism.
Self-Oriented Perfectionism: This is a tendency to have standards for yourself that are unrealistically high and impossible to attain. These standards are self-imposed and tend to be associated with self-criticism and an inability to accept your own mistakes and faults.
Other-Oriented Perfectionism: This is a tendency to demand that others meet your unrealistically high standards. People who are “other-oriented” perfectionists are often unable to delegate tasks to others, for fear of being disappointed by a less than perfect performance of the job.
Socially Prescribed Perfectionism: There is an exaggerated belief that others have expectations of them that are impossible to meet. Furthermore, people who are socially prescribed perfectionists believe that in order to gain approval from others, these high standards must be met. Unlike self-oriented perfectionism, in which expectations are self-imposed, in socially pre-scribed perfectionism, the high standards are believed to be imposed by others.
When I saw how hard I was on myself around the wedding thank you cards, I devised a plan where I would essentially trick my avoidant brain into approaching the problem; I’d tell myself I’d work only fifteen minutes a day. Once started, I’d feel uncomfortable but I was going in a forward motion. Fifteen minutes would turn into thirty. The next day I’d tell myself I’d only work thirty minutes, which would turn into an hour. By the end of the week the notes were all done. Late, but done. The relief was palatable and the lesson learned. Take the Big Job and break it into smaller pieces of time. Or as my grandfather used to tell me, “It’s a cinch by the inch but hard by the yard.” Amen.