You’re in your element, deeply connected to who you are and what you do. It feels right. For at least a little while, you feel the way you always want to feel. This connection transcends your flaws, doubts, and fears. Everything just feels right.
In touch with what you create and or what you want to accomplish, your passion and inspiration leads the way.
And, even if you feel challenged, don’t know what you’re doing, or make mistakes, you persevere. Challenges energize you. Mistakes aren’t a problem. You know they are teaching what works and what doesn’t. The things you don’t know invite you to get curious and discover something new.
In moments like these, nothing else matters. You’re in the flow, completely at peace with yourself and what you’re doing.
Why does this experience feel so real and magical at the same time?
This state feels as powerful as it does because you’re experiencing a real connection to everything that you are and what you’re doing in the moment. You’re in an emotional space where your talents, skills, passion, imagination, and inspiration come together, becoming one. It’s a remarkable thing to engage from your real inner self.
Unfortunately, you don’t live in this connected emotional space most of the time. No one does. It’s not reasonable to think you could stay in this state forever, but it is possible to visit it with some regularity. It’s essential that you reach this emotional space often enough so you can stay connected to who you truly are and create a life that matters to you.
So, what takes you out of this emotional authentic space?
It could be a comment you hear or the look in someone’s eyes as they observe something you’re doing. It might be a memory of someone telling you that you “are doing it wrong,” “ruined something,” “keep breaking things.” Your own self doubt can cause the disconnection, especially when your inner voice says things like “I’m afraid I will fail,” “people won’t like me,” or “I can’t do this.”
These are messages of not being “good enough” keeping you stuck in the quest for perfection. The desire to be or do things “perfectly” is a mental space of fear that leaves you caught in anxiety about being wrong, making mistakes, or being flawed.
When perfectionism takes over you, you feel like you can’t get anything right
Old emotions and beliefs make their way in the present and you no longer feel attuned to your inner world, your life energy, or what you want to create or accomplish. You‘ve shifted into your head and your worries take over and you are afraid of being seen in all your human flaws.
You may not be aware of it, but you start chasing the ghosts of perfection. The harder you try to get everything perfectly right reminds you how imperfect you are. It becomes a vicious cycle: when you are uncomfortable with your own inevitable human flaws it just perpetuates the feelings of being inadequate.
Ultimately, perfectionism can trap you in an addictive loop, leaving you chasing something that you never achieve. The more you hunt this elusive perfection, the more lost and empty you feel. Slowly, it saps your courage, your inspiration, your motivation. For many, it turns into anxiety, depression, and addictions.
Perfectionism becomes the wall that separates you from something you really need to be in touch with: the core of who you are.
Rather than being a worthy goal, perfectionism is an unhealthy defense that you build to protect yourself from your own inherent humanity.
The more you invest in this defense mechanism, the more it keeps you stuck in feelings of inadequacy.
EMDR therapy is a powerful psychotherapy approach that helps you heal perfectionism
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) works with the defenses you built to protect yourself from feeling flawed. It enables you to access and heal layers of perceived inadequacy and long-buried fears that have built over time.
Through this process, EMDR also helps you get in touch with empowering feelings that make you feel good about who you are. When such feelings start having an imprint on you you can begin to connect to your core self so you can feel grounded in who you are, including both your beauty and your flaws.
EMDR allows you to see your imperfections from a place of emotional acceptance and curiosity. Insead of being anxious, scared, or controlled by your imperfections, you start seeing them as a unique part of you. You work with your flaws to create your life.
As you develop the trust that you can show up in the world for who you are you can cope with the imperfections – the fears, insecurities, and self-doubts – that come with being human.
This is grounded confidence: real confidence in who you are – beauty and flaws – and an emotional knowing of how you can use all of it to create your life.
How Does the EMDR work to help you transform perfectionism into emotional freedom to create your life?
EMDR activates the traumatic memories that are trapped in your right brain. These are the memories related to feeling powerless, “not good enough,” or hurt by a sense of judgement, dismissal, or shame. When these memories get triggered, you go back in time, reliving the moments that hurt you.
EMDR engages a natural brain process – REM (Rapid Eye Movement) which helps integrate traumatic trapped memories with your higher mental processes in order to facilitate healing. You essentially rewrite the traumatic event into a new empowering story. You can, actually, feel and see yourself in this new story – thus, it creates a new imprint that transforms all that you are.
Thanks to EMDR you are able to stand outside the trauma and to look back on what happened to you. You can see it without being emotionally pulled into an old traumatic emotional space. This work frees you to make conscious decisions about how to respond to similar events, now in the present, from a sense of grounded confidence. 
You can be in touch with who you are and connect to that sense of flow that enables you to create and achieve your goals with more ease.
We all experience fears, insecurities, and doubts, but when we reach a state of emotional freedom, we can ride the waves. We can stay connected with what is. We can work with what is now-in-the present. Everyday challenges become the emotional energy that propels you forward.
If you have any questions about EMDR or would like to know if it’s a good psychotherapy approach for you, please contact me for your free 15-20min phone consultation.
I am Mihaela Ivan Holtz, Doctor in Clinical Psychology. I help creatives and performers with emotional trauma, depression, anxiety, performance anxiety, creative blocks, relationships, and addictions – to be and live their own best version. You can read more about Therapy for Creatives and Performers here.
