Our permanent expert, psychologist and writer Tatiana Salvoni, talks about what hides the desire to always look perfect.
Two girls were taking pictures near a Moscow restaurant. More precisely, one photographed the other. For a long time, with feeling, with sense, with arrangement. Silently. And they couldn’t get the right shot in any way. In the eyes of the one that was photographed by her friend, there was always something not perfect. Either the curl was not lying like that, then the heel flashed in the wrong angle. Both girls, in the eyes of the layman, were simply unearthly. Everything about them was perfect! Except for this mysterious dissatisfaction with myself. There was, on the one hand, a kind of despair in this, and on the other, absolute inaccessibility.
It really is. The striving for perfection and the constant control over one’s appearance brought almost to a neurotic state are knightly armor, psychological protection. Somehow, one acquaintance who has such a tendency to excessive perfectionism, opened up that she does not understand why her personal life is so difficult. That is why, she said, she liked a man somewhere in a bar, but he does not fit, only occasionally devours with his eyes from afar. But some psychopaths who have written on their foreheads “I will break my heart with half a kick” are being piled up.
She did not become ideal at once. At first, she had a very difficult childhood, which she does not like to remember, difficult relationships with her parents. From her youth, she plunged headlong into a career, and this was also very difficult. But as soon as she began to earn a stable income, she began to spend almost all the money on her appearance, on good clothes, and personal care. She gets up a few hours before leaving the house, because, as she says, she needs to clean herself up. Sometimes it is stipulated – “in combat readiness”. She has accumulated a lot of inner pain during her life, she has not worked with her yet, the only way for her to continue life in a normal way is to look good. It became such a protective knightly armor for her. And I think that’s why it happens. A normal living man sees this, it is simply unsafe for him to approach her. He’s not in armor, he’s vulnerable. But psychopaths always wear their psychological armor – a trained charm, style of behavior, the same words and techniques, so they are not afraid to approach her.
Psychologists admit that a well-groomed appearance is indeed a very good resource. It helps briefly when it is bad inside, when you are going through stress or a difficult life situation. But of course, it does not solve problems, it just helps to hold on. Such a psychological crutch. The same as excessive sports and travel. These are all good resources to withstand the times of change. If only not the main occupation in life.
Problems begin when the realization comes that protection by appearance no longer helps. And there are two ways out here.
The first is to courageously begin to deal with your cockroaches and with your life in general, set new priorities, live through pain, forgive, let go of the past, enter into healthier contact with reality, change it, changing itself, and so on. At some point, the need for a crutch disappears, and it becomes unnecessary to look like you are going to a wedding to an English princess every day. Then you notice that in the current trend, disheveledness, carelessness and freedom, and this trend suddenly begins to really like it.
The second way out is to start strengthening your defenses. So, not just cosmetic care, but already a surgeon’s knife. Perfect body and face becomes the goal. In trauma therapy, constant surgical intervention in one’s appearance without objective reasons is considered as a kind of auto-aggression, almost suicidal behavior. It sounds scary, but in general, any surgical intervention in the integrity of the body is no less creepy for a person. Anesthesia can relieve the awareness of pain, but the body “knows” that it is being cut. Here’s to whom appendicitis was excised or some other operation necessary for survival was performed, remember how alarming and exciting it was before that. In a similar situation, for example, the words did not calm me at all: they say, you will not feel anything, you will fall asleep, you will wake up, and everything has already been done. Because any operation on the body is a psychological wound as well. And then it is important to go through the stage of psychological recovery. And if a person deliberately goes to these wounds without an objective reason, then something in his soul hurts so much that it drowns out the voice of instinct.
But here’s the thing, no one knows what is best for a particular person. What is right and what is wrong. It is known that man is a self-adjusting mechanism. And what he does at this moment in life is what helps him right now, no matter how it looks from the outside and no matter what the driving motive from the point of view of psychology.