You reread the email ten times before you send it. Someone offers you a project you could probably handle, and you find yourself taking a small step back. From the outside this looks like caution, or maybe modesty. But sit with it honestly for a moment and you may find that the fear of making mistakes isn’t really about the mistake at all. What frightens you is what comes after — the pause, the shift in someone’s face, the moment people see that you got it wrong. Being afraid of the mistake itself and being afraid of being seen can sound like almost the same thing. But the difference explains where the fear comes from, why hiding your mistakes makes it stronger, and what can loosen it.
Why is the person in your head so much more capable than the person who has to do the work?
Most of us carry two selves at once: an ideal self, the one we picture in our heads, and an actual self, the one who is really here today. The ideal one is impressive. When you describe your plans out loud, they sound convincing, and you can see clearly how everything will turn out. In your mind the work is already finished — the article written, the difficult conversation handled with grace. The actual self is the one who has to sit down on a Tuesday afternoon, with limited energy and no clear next step, and it can’t yet do everything the ideal self has already done in your imagination.
So you hesitate before beginning. It can look like laziness, but something else is going on: the moment you start, the distance between the finished person in your mind and the learner you are today becomes visible. If you do not write the first page, nobody can see that it is awkward. If you decline the project, nobody can discover what you do not yet know. Putting things off protects that ideal self, because as long as you never start, reality never gets to test it. The cost is that each time you put it off, you also lose a chance to get better.
Were you ever allowed to get something wrong and find out you were still all right?
What helps a person mature is usually not success. It’s mistakes. When we get something wrong and come through it, we learn what reality is actually like: what a mistake really costs, and how much smaller that cost turns out to be than we had imagined.
In the first months of life, a baby does need care that is close to perfect: for a while, food and comfort really do need to come the moment they are needed. But only at first. Donald Winnicott, the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, said a caregiver does not need to be perfect, only good enough: closely in tune with the baby at the start, and then, little by little, slightly late or slightly off. These small lapses, coming gradually as the baby grows, are not a flaw in the care. They are how a child finds out that the bottle does not always arrive the instant the crying starts, and that it still arrives.
After infancy, a child grows partly through disappointments small enough to live through: a trip is cancelled, the answer tonight is no, a parent is busy until seven but comes back as promised. Each time, the child finds out that something can go wrong, the feeling can be borne, and life goes on. A child who does not get enough of these experiences can grow into an adult who has never learned from experience that the bad feeling after a failure passes. Then one mistake does not feel like something to fix. It feels as if the whole person they were trying to be is collapsing.
Can care that blocks every fall become its own kind of harm?
Some parents always get there first: they clear the obstacle before the child reaches it and fix the mess before the child has even felt it as a mess. The intention is almost always love. But protection that never eases off as the child grows can work against the child: it takes away the very experiences in which a child learns that a bad thing can happen and then be over.
Stepping in completely is exactly right at the beginning; a newborn can do nothing for themselves. What matters is what comes after: a slow handing-over, in which the parent steps back a little each year and the child carries a slightly larger share of the consequences. When that handover is skipped, the child never gets the practice of getting something wrong and recovering, so a mistake keeps feeling like a disaster. The child grows up still believing in the impressive self in their head, because reality has never been allowed to test it. For someone who was never allowed to trip, a small stone in the path can feel like the edge of a cliff.
Was it a failure you could bear, or one you couldn’t?
Two questions are worth taking slowly:
- Were you allowed to experiment, and to get things wrong, often enough?
- Were those failures kept to a size you could actually carry?
Picture a child who makes a mistake while someone is nearby. That person helps put things right, shields the child from the worst of it, and then says something like it’s all right, here’s what we do next. The mistake shrinks to a size the child can bear. It becomes information: this went wrong, and here is what to do. The mistake is followed by repair, and the child learns that getting something wrong does not cost them the person who looks after them.
Now picture the same mistake with no one there, or with someone who points out the failure but never shows a way forward. The event is the same, but it lands very differently. The child is left alone with more feeling than they can handle, and the mistake stops being something that happened and becomes a verdict on who they are: “I’m someone who can’t even get this right.” This may be part of why one person treats an error as useful information and is done with it by lunch, while another is still awake at three in the morning going over it. It isn’t that the one lying awake cares more about getting things right. One of them may simply have been helped, early on, to keep failure at a size they could survive.
A mistake becomes bearable when someone stays and points to the next step. Left alone with it, you are likely to take the same mistake as proof that something is wrong with you.
Is perfectionism about doing well — or about not being found out?
Now suppose that happened to you again and again as a child: no one was there, or someone only pointed out what went wrong. Then having a mistake noticed can come to feel like being attacked. As an adult, the moment an error comes to light, it can seem as if the whole room has turned toward you. Your body reacts before you have time to think: heat in the face, a drop in the stomach, an urgent wish that it weren’t true. In that state, only one option seems to be left: hide it.
So you may organise your life not around avoiding mistakes, which is impossible, but around making sure no one sees them. You rewrite the email ten times, cover up an oversight, or turn down work that would make you visible. This is also why perfectionism, the need to get everything exactly right, is so hard to loosen. Each time you hide a mistake successfully, you feel relief, and the relief strengthens the belief that being found out would have been a disaster. And because the mistake stays hidden, you never get the experience that could change that belief: someone sees the mistake, you fix it, and afterwards the relationship is still there and you are worth no less than before. So the real aim of all that effort to be perfect may not be to do well. It may be not to be found out.
The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called the face we show the world the persona: the public self that lets us play our part at work and among other people. He didn’t treat it as a fault; everyone needs a persona. The trouble starts when a person takes that face to be all they are. Then there is nothing behind it to fall back on, and the polished self they show others is no longer one part of their life but the whole of it. Any crack in that face, even one small mistake that someone else can see, then feels like an emergency, because the face is the only thing holding them together.
When did you start reading everyone else’s signals instead of your own?
An infant signals constantly: hunger, discomfort, the need to be picked up, or left alone. When those signals are read reasonably well, the child learns that what they feel and want matters and is worth showing. If the signals mostly go unnoticed, the direction turns around: instead of the adult reading the child, the child starts reading the adult — tracking their mood, anticipating their irritation, adjusting to whatever the room seems to require.
Once this becomes a habit, it carries on into adult life. You notice a manager’s irritation before you notice your own exhaustion, agree before asking yourself whether you want to, and provide what others need before they ask. You may become very good at reading the room while losing track of what you yourself want. Winnicott called this the false self: a self you build to keep your relationships going by fitting in with what other people want. The attention that could have gone to your own feelings goes, all the time, to watching other people and keeping them satisfied.
This habit of fitting yourself to what others want, often called people-pleasing, is also what makes a small mistake feel so dangerous. If you’ve never lived by a standard of your own, someone else’s standard is the only ground you have to stand on. Falling short of it doesn’t feel like “we just see this differently.” It feels like losing the only place you had to stand. No wonder a small mistake can feel like a threat to your very existence rather than one ordinary thing that went wrong this week.
What is one small thing you could try today?
Pick one minor mistake — genuinely minor. Something you’d normally play down, make excuses for in advance, or quietly fix before anyone notices. This time, say it plainly to the person it affects, in a single sentence: I missed this; here’s how I’ll correct it. No preamble. No self-criticism attached, no string of apologies.
Then add one more line, this time silently to yourself: It’s all right. Here’s what we do next. These are the same words spoken by the person who stayed with the child in the scene above: the sentence that shrinks a mistake back to a size a person can carry. It may be the one nobody said to you when you were a child. It can still be said now. It counts even when you’re the one saying it. Little by little, each time you admit a small mistake like this and it passes, you learn from experience that being seen is not the disaster you expected.
None of this replaces help from another person. If the pattern runs deep, or if being seen at all has started to feel unsafe, it’s worth exploring in therapy, with a professional who can stay beside you while you practise. But loosening this fear can begin here, with one small mistake you did not hide, said out loud.
Related
- The Good Enough Mother: Winnicott on Perfect Parenting
- Codependency: Why You Can’t Leave a Relationship That Hurts
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board