HOW TO BE ENOUGH: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists, or "explaining my entire life to me"

HOW TO BE ENOUGH: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists
ELLEN HENDRIKSEN, Ph.D.
St. Martin's Essentials (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Are you your own toughest critic? Learn to be good to yourself with this clear and compassionate guide.

Do you set demanding standards for yourself? If so, a lot likely goes well in your life: You might earn compliments, admiration, or accomplishments. Your high standards and hard work pay off.

But privately, you may feel like you’re falling behind, faking it, or different from everybody else. Your eagle-eyed inner quality control inspector highlights every mistake. You try hard to avoid criticism, but criticize yourself. Trying to get it right is your guiding light, but it has lit the way to a place of dissatisfaction, loneliness, or disconnection. In short, you may look like you’re hitting it out of the park, but you feel like you’re striking out.

This is perfectionism. And for everyone who struggles with it, it’s a misnomer: perfectionism isn’t about striving to be perfect. It’s about never feeling good enough.

Dr. Ellen Hendriksen—clinical psychologist, anxiety specialist, and author of How to Be Yourself—is on the same journey as you. In How to Be Enough, Hendriksen charts a flexible, forgiving, and freeing path, all without giving up the excellence your high standards and hard work have gotten you. She delivers seven shifts—including from self-criticism to kindness, control to authenticity, procrastination to productivity, comparison to contentment—to find self-acceptance, rewrite the Inner Rulebook, and most of all, cultivate the authentic human connections we’re all craving.

With compassion and humor, Hendriksen lays out a clear, effective, and empowering guide. To enjoy rather than improve, be real rather than impressive, and be good to yourself when you’re wired to be hard on yourself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I was the youngest child of my parents. My older siblings were more like aunts than siblings...we were two presidencies apart, almost three...and as adolescents lumbered with a toddler they didn't want in their ambit, weren't any more careful of word or deed than one would expect from members of a toxic system at a terrible passage in human life. In other words, not kind, not loving, not supportive. Add that to parents who didn't model those things and...well.

This book understood me.

So much of the world is based on conditionality: if you want this thing/state/privilege, you must give that thing/service. Conditionality and capitalism are deeply intertwined, I venture to suggest inseparably so. One's self-worth in a capitalist system becomes imbued with that transactional conditionality: I'm not working hard enough to deserve this or that bauble. Far worse is the knock-on of that, I'm too "poor" to afford this thing/service so I must be lazy/undeserving/unworthy.

It enters one's bones and imbues all one's relationships: I'm not getting this thing/behavior/feeling I need so I must not deserve it...if I work harder/behave better/give more of this or that resource I have, maybe then I will deserve or even get it.

The internalization of perfectionism is thus complete and the transactional relationship template is frozen into immobility. As are many of us who got this message. We're frozen into immobility because then the desired whatevers *not* being ours makes sense. We don't deserve whatever. Therefore the world makes sense because we don't have it.

A book like this one that makes the pathology plain does a huge service to the sufferer from the condition. It's wonderful to be told plainly and baldly that: "Pretty much every high achieving person experiences a gravitational pull to feel left out. Meaning we reflexively look for signs and signals that tell you you’re being excluded or not wanted." It's a balm to know the roots of this awful paralysis are there in multitudes of us, then be told how that: "What perfectionism neglects to tell us is that getting it right doesn’t make us part of a community." Ultimately, we've bought the bullshit and not the bull himself; we paid for the bull, and now here's a way to get him.

The author is, I suspect, an excellent therapist in practice. In writing she is clear, concise, and manages to be evocative in her phrasemaking. No small feat! I don't tthink this book is for those who struggle to see their own pathologies, there are more effective tools to break walls of denial. I think most readers are some way into the process of denial-busting, but again the best audience for the read are those who already see their perfectionism, have an idea it's a problem, and would like some help building coping strategies for its dismantling.

This book is a wonderfully useful tool for that purpose. I can't offer a full fifth star because there is just that soupçla;on too little interlinking of strategic implementation: How, after this insight hits home, the reader should look for that and the other one to arise.

As cavils go, it's really pretty minor. As self-help books go, this one belongs on far more bookshelves/Kindles than it doesn't.