Therapized

02/01/2026

Faith, the Brain, and the Day I Realized My Nervous System Needed a Pew

I used to think healing would look dramatic. A summit stage. A big announcement. A transformation montage with inspirational music and a sudden six-pack. Instead, it looked like me sitting quietly in church one Sunday realizing I was not scanning the room for exits, judgment, or imaginary social threats. I was just… there. Present. Breathing. Not dissociating. Not planning my escape route like a covert operative disguised as a parishioner.

No one clapped. No one noticed. My amygdala, however, deserved a standing ovation.

For years, my nervous system operated like a smoke detector with a low battery that never stopped chirping. Trauma does that. Anxiety does that. You walk into a room and your brain is already writing three alternate endings, two apologies, and a resignation letter. Even when nothing is wrong, your body is like, are we sure? Should we double-check? Triple-check? What if the floor collapses? What if someone looks at us funny? What if we forgot how to walk?

Then one day, you realize you sat still for an hour and your body didn’t treat it like a survival drill.

From a clinical standpoint, what’s happening is not mystical, although it can feel spiritual. The brain has two major operating modes that most people casually refer to as calm and panic. In neuroscience terms, it’s more like sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activation. Fight or flight versus rest and digest. Hyper-alert security guard versus peaceful librarian.

Prayer, ritual, and repetitive cadence do something fascinating. They create predictable patterns of breathing and posture. Slow inhale, slow exhale, repeated phrases, standing, sitting, kneeling. The brain loves predictability. It interprets rhythm as safety. Your heart rate slows, cortisol drops, and suddenly your internal alarm system goes from DEFCON 1 to maybe we can have tea.

It turns out spirituality often overlaps with physiology. You don’t have to be religious to experience it. Meditation, chanting, yoga, humming, even folding laundry can create the same nervous system response. The difference with faith spaces is the layered meaning. You are not just calming your heart rate; you are attaching it to purpose, memory, and identity. It’s like guided meditation with stained glass.

What surprised me most wasn’t the calm. It was the confidence. I used to enter spaces hyper-aware of my body. Too thin. Too big. Too loud. Too quiet. Wearing the wrong thing. Saying the wrong thing. Existing incorrectly. Years later, I found myself wearing a comfort hoodie to church and not feeling like I needed to apologize for oxygen consumption. When I do dress up now, it’s exciting. Not defensive. That is a psychological shift more powerful than any number on a scale.

Healing, I learned, is less about becoming someone new and more about not fighting yourself every five minutes.

There’s also the social piece. At some point you realize not everyone deserves a front-row seat in your mind. Emotional boundaries are not cruelty; they are neurological conservation. You stop replaying conversations like courtroom transcripts. You stop proving. You start being. The loudest growth is often the quiet decision not to engage with every irritation like it’s a constitutional amendment.

Clinically, this is cognitive load reduction. Spiritually, it feels like grace. Practically, it feels like finally putting down a heavy bag you didn’t realize you were carrying.

The irony is that the most significant progress rarely looks impressive from the outside. It looks like sitting through a service without panic. Wearing comfortable clothes without shame. Letting an annoying person be annoying without letting them live rent-free in your head. It looks like laughing at yourself when you catch your brain trying to catastrophize a minor inconvenience like it’s a global summit.

The brain is plastic. That word gets thrown around a lot, but it simply means it changes based on repetition. Every time you stay present instead of dissociating, you lay a new neural pathway. Every time you breathe instead of bolt, you reinforce safety. Every time you choose reflection over rumination, you build resilience. It’s not magic. It’s repetition with meaning attached.

Faith, in this context, becomes less about doctrine and more about direction. A place to sit. A rhythm to follow. A reminder that you are not required to carry every burden in a single nervous system.

I used to think healing would announce itself loudly. Now I know it whispers. It shows up when you realize you are home in your own body again. Not perfect. Not finished. Just present. And sometimes, that presence begins with nothing more dramatic than a pew, a prayer, and a brain that finally decides it’s safe to rest.

January 31, 2026
Copyright by Anne Petraro

01/30/2026

My prayers are being answered!

The American Psychiatric Association has announced big upcoming changes to psychiatry’s big book of mental disorders, the DSM

01/29/2026

Adolescence Is Not a Problem to Be Solved

(And It Never Was)

Every generation does this.

We look at teenagers and say, something is wrong with them.

A hundred years ago, the panic was novels.
Then comic books.
Then radio.
Then television.
Then Atari.
Then Nintendo.
Then video games.
Then the internet.
Then social media.
Then phones.

Different decade. Same fear.

Teenagers are too rebellious. Too distracted. Too emotional. Too impulsive. Too something. And instead of asking what adolescence is, we keep asking how to fix it.

Neuroscience has already answered this question. We just don’t like the answer.

The Brain Is Doing Exactly What It’s Supposed to Do

Adolescence is not a broken version of adulthood. It is a distinct developmental phase with a brain that is still under construction. The prefrontal cortex — the part responsible for impulse control, long-term planning, emotional regulation, and decision-making — is still wiring itself well into the mid-20s.

Meanwhile, the limbic system — the emotional, reward-seeking, socially driven part of the brain — is fully online.

Translation:
Teenagers are biologically designed to feel deeply, seek novelty, question authority, test boundaries, and prioritize peer relationships.

That’s not pathology. That’s evolution.

If adolescents regulated emotions the way adults do, we wouldn’t have innovators, activists, artists, or change-makers. We wouldn’t have people who challenge systems, question injustice, or imagine something better than what exists.

And yet, we keep comparing them to fully formed adults and then acting shocked when they don’t measure up.

Meanwhile, let’s be honest — adults aren’t exactly crushing emotional regulation either. Adult therapy offices are full for a reason.

If It’s Not Working, We Label It

Here’s where we go wrong.

When a child struggles in school, we look for a diagnosis.
When a teen is dysregulated, we blame biology.
When they don’t fit in, we blame screens.
When they fail a test, we blame motivation.
When they don’t make the team, we blame effort.

Someone has to be at fault.

Because if we admit that adolescence itself is messy, nonlinear, emotional, and unpredictable — then we’d have to change the system instead of the kid.

And systems hate that.

Even when a child does have a neurodevelopmental difference, trauma history, or mental-health diagnosis, the problem is rarely the child. It’s the expectation that they perform like someone they’re neurologically not meant to be yet.

Bullying Is Not a “Victim Problem”

Let’s talk about bullying — because this is where the damage becomes lifelong.

We pour resources into anti-bullying campaigns that ask, What’s wrong with the kid being bullied?
They’re different. Sensitive. Quiet. Neurodivergent. Not athletic. Not popular.

Sound familiar?

It’s the same logic we’ve always used. The same logic used against kids who read books instead of playing sports. Against kids who didn’t fit gender norms. Against kids who questioned authority. Against kids who stood out instead of blended in.

Here’s the part we don’t want to confront:

The bully needs intervention just as much as the victim.

Why does causing harm feel rewarding to them?
Why does power over another human regulate their emotions?
What is happening at home, internally, relationally, neurologically?

We treat bullying like a character flaw instead of a behavioral symptom — and then we act shocked when it repeats.

Meanwhile, victims carry it forever.

They self-harm.
They internalize shame.
They withdraw.
They develop anxiety, depression, trauma responses.
Some don’t survive it.

And still, we rarely ask the harder question: Why are we allowing environments where dominance equals worth?

Schools Were Never Meant to Be Mini Societies of Survival

Schools were meant for learning.

Now they’re places where children are expected to perform socially, athletically, emotionally, and academically — all while navigating puberty, identity development, and brain rewiring.

Teachers are trained to teach.
Now they’re trained for lockdowns.

Guidance counselors are meant to guide.
Now they’re expected to be everything — crisis managers, trauma responders, mental-health systems — without the time, privacy, or structure to do actual trauma work.

And here’s the truth that matters: deep trauma work does not belong inside a school building alone.

If a child has trauma, ACEs, grief, loss, or complex emotional needs, that work requires outside therapy — consistency, confidentiality, specialization, and depth. Schools can support, coordinate, and reinforce, but they cannot ethically replace real trauma treatment. A guidance counselor cannot do deep trauma work in a period block between classes, and pretending otherwise does more harm than good.

School should be about learning, development, exposure, and growth — not about becoming a substitute mental-health system because society refuses to fund accessible therapy.

We push kids through instead of sitting with them.
We pass them along instead of teaching resilience.
We rescue them from failure instead of teaching meaning.

Then we wonder why adulthood feels unbearable.

Sports Were Meant for Development — Not Manufacturing Professionals

Somewhere along the way, youth sports stopped being about movement, teamwork, resilience, and joy.

Now they’re pipelines.

NBA.
MLB.
Pro lacrosse.
Scholarships.
Exposure.
Recruitment.

Children are being trained like assets instead of humans.

Statistically, most kids will not become professional athletes. That’s not pessimism — that’s reality. But every child can benefit from sports as a tool for confidence, regulation, collaboration, discipline, and learning how to lose without losing themselves.

When sports become identity, failure becomes crisis.
When performance equals worth, injury becomes collapse.

Sports should build humans, not hedge bets.

This Starts at Home — and Science Is Clear About That

Yes, neuroscience tells us adolescents are wired for rebellion.
Yes, they will question authority.
Yes, they will push boundaries.

But boundaries still matter.

Eating dinner together as a family? Backed by science.
Supervision and age-appropriate limits? Backed by science.
Clear expectations about relationships, privacy, and safety? Backed by science.

Schools should not be responsible for teaching basic morals, boundaries, or supervision that starts at home. They can reinforce values — but they cannot replace parenting.

And here’s the paradox research supports:

The safer the home environment, the safer the rebellion.

Kids are going to rebel anyway. When they can rebel within supervision — having friends over, watching movies together, being curious in a monitored environment — the rebellion is less dangerous because it happens in connection, not secrecy.

Nobody Knows What They’re Doing at 16 — and That’s Normal

We’ve created this myth that teenagers are supposed to know who they are and where they’re going.

They don’t.

At 10, kids want to be everything.
At 16, they feel pressure to decide.
At 17, we demand life plans.

Reality: most people don’t start gaining clarity until mid-college, sometimes later.

Adolescence is about exploration, not certainty.

When we push premature identity decisions, we don’t create maturity — we create anxiety.

The Roles We Assign Become the People They Become

In families and in schools, roles stick.

The smart one.
The athlete.
The problem kid.
The anxious one.
The bully.
The quiet one.

Once assigned, the role becomes identity.

If you’re always picked, you learn worth equals performance.
If you’re never picked, you learn invisibility equals safety.
If you’re rescued from discomfort, you learn avoidance.
If you’re labeled early, you carry it forever.

And then we spend adulthood in therapy undoing what never should have been cemented in childhood.

We Are Not Raising Humans — We’re Training Systems

We’re not raising kids to discover who they are.
We’re training them to fit what systems reward.

Grades.
Teams.
Labels.
Resumes.
Connections.

We manipulate applications.
We optimize optics.
We brand children before they know themselves.

And then we wonder why adults feel hollow, burned out, disconnected, and chronically dysregulated.

If a child struggles academically, assess learning differences.
Support them. Teach differently.

But stop blaming screens, biology, or diagnoses for every failure to fit.

Adolescence is not broken.
Teenagers are not problems.

They are becoming.

And if we stopped trying to fix them — and started fixing the systems around them — we might finally raise a generation that doesn’t need to recover from childhood.

Not because they were perfect.

But because they were allowed to be human while growing into themselves.

Copyright, Anne Petraro January 29, 2026

01/28/2026

Clap for your kids. Just don’t turn it into a competition.

Clapping for our kids matters. A lot.

We’re the first mirror they ever look into to learn whether effort counts, whether hard work is visible, whether they’re allowed to feel proud of themselves without becoming arrogant.

That’s the job. To teach pride and humility in the same breath.

To say:
I see how hard you worked.
You earned this.
You don’t have to shrink or shout—just stand in it.

And honestly? Parents work hard too. There’s nothing wrong with bragging a little. I actually think it’s healthy. We sacrifice time, money, energy, sleep, weekends, sanity—of course we want to celebrate wins.

Especially in a world where parenting is louder, faster, and more public than it’s ever been.

Social media changed the room.

Now the clapping doesn’t just happen on bleachers or at kitchen tables—it happens online, in group chats, comment sections, sidelines. And somewhere along the way, celebration started to blur into comparison.

That’s where things get interesting.

Because there’s a fine line between:
I’m proud of my kid
and
Let me make sure everyone knows where we rank.

Psychologically speaking, this is where humble-bragging sneaks in—not as confidence, but as status management.

It sounds polite. Exhausted. Grateful. But it carries a quiet subtext: please notice this.

And then comes the counter-brag.

Someone shares a win. Someone else responds—not with a clap—but with a comparison. Another credential. Another team. Another “well actually…”

Suddenly it’s not about kids anymore. It’s about proving. About one-upping. About hustle-by-proxy.

We live in a generation where people can list eight teams their child is on—but no one ever says,
That school has the greatest biology teacher.
That coach really develops character.
That environment protects kids’ nervous systems.

But everyone knows who made the elite team in New York City in fifth grade.

Take a breath.

This constant comparison doesn’t teach confidence—it teaches surveillance. Kids learn quickly whether pride is safe or only allowed if it outperforms someone else.

And here’s the quiet tell no one talks about:

If you share something you’re genuinely proud of and your so-called friends don’t clap—but later feel compelled to loudly brag about their own kid?

That’s information.

Not about their child. About alignment.

Real support doesn’t compete. Secure people don’t need to counter. They can hold space for someone else’s joy without proving their own.

The goal isn’t silence. The goal is balance.

Clap for your kids. Teach them to clap for themselves. Let them feel proud of effort, not just outcomes. Let authenticity—not performance—be the win.

And be mindful of who you celebrate around.

Because the healthiest rooms don’t require shrinking, proving, or hustling for worth.

They clap. They mean it. And then they move on.

01/28/2026

Some People Are Leaves. Some Are Roots.

(And Losing Friends Isn’t Always a Personal Failure)

We’re taught—explicitly or implicitly—that if we do life “right,” our relationships should last forever.

Same friends. Same circles. Same people.
If someone disappears, the assumption is usually: What did I do wrong?

But life doesn’t actually work that way.

Some people are leaves.

They show up for a season. Sometimes a long one. Sometimes a short one. School years. Early adulthood. Shared environments. Shared chaos. Shared convenience. They’re fun, familiar, and meaningful in that moment.

And then the season changes.

People get sick. Parents die. Kids grow up. Values shift. Grief enters. Growth accelerates. Truth gets louder.

And suddenly… those people aren’t there anymore.

Not because anyone is evil.
Not because you’re “too much.”
But because they were leaves.

Other people are branches.

They feel sturdier. These are the ones that hurt the most when they break. You thought they were permanent. You thought they’d hold. Sometimes they even tell you they will.

But pressure reveals structure. And under real weight—illness, loss, boundaries, honesty—some branches snap.

Then there are roots.

Roots don’t need constant access. They don’t require performance, minimizing your pain, or pretending everything is fine. They don’t panic when you change. They don’t disappear when things get uncomfortable.

They stay.

Here’s the part people don’t talk about enough:

Many of us learned early on that being giving was how we stayed connected.
Helpful. Available. Supportive. The one who shows up. The one who listens. The one who gives more, texts back faster, explains more, holds more.

When you grow up this way, it’s easy to confuse being needed with being valued.

So you give.
And give.
And give some more.

Until one day you stop — not because you’ve become selfish, but because you’re tired of disappearing inside your own kindness.

That’s usually when relationships start to shift.

Because the truth is:
you don’t actually have to over-give to be worthy of connection.
You don’t have to be endlessly available to be loved.
You don’t have to lose yourself to be kind.

Being kind doesn’t mean self-abandonment.
It doesn’t mean silence.
It doesn’t mean swallowing truth to keep peace.

Authentic kindness is honest.
It has limits.
And sometimes it costs you people.

Other people are branches.

They feel sturdier. Like I already said, these are the ones that hurt the most when they break. You thought they were permanent. You thought they’d hold. Sometimes they even tell you they will.

But pressure reveals structure. And under real weight—illness, loss, boundaries, honesty—some branches snap.

Here’s the part people don’t talk about enough:

Some of the strongest roots come later in life.

After you’ve lost illusions.
After you’ve stopped trying to be liked.
After you’ve learned that being agreeable is not the same thing as being safe.
After you’ve realized that generosity without boundaries isn’t generosity — it’s depletion.
After grief strips you down to what actually matters.

This is usually the phase where people start saying things like:
• “I’ve lost so many friends.”
• “Is it me?”
• “Why does this keep happening?”

Clinically speaking (because I can’t help myself):
When someone grows up learning that connection depends on usefulness, emotional labor, or constant availability, relationships often form around roles, not authenticity.

When you stop performing the role, the relationship collapses.

That’s not dysfunction.
That’s development.

Growth can look a lot like loss from the outside.

It’s also why the people who stay often feel quieter, deeper, and less performative. Family—biological or chosen—tends to matter more over time. Not because friendships aren’t important, but because depth eventually beats breadth.

And yes, it hurts when people leave. Especially if you’ve spent a lifetime being misunderstood, minimized, or expected to “be fine” faster than you actually were.

But the tree isn’t failing because it sheds leaves.

It’s surviving.

If you’re in a season where relationships have fallen away, it doesn’t mean you’re broken. It often means you’re done contorting yourself to fit places you’ve outgrown.

And if this resonates a little too hard…
you’ll probably like my book, Therapized.
I write about this stuff a lot. 😌

The photo attached is one of my oldest friends — a true root. We’ve grown up together, walked through trauma, and somehow made it to triumph. We may not see each other every day, but we’re always in each other’s lives. That’s real friendship. Roots don’t need constant presence — they stay connected, they know where you came from, and they’re still there to witness who you’re becoming.

01/28/2026

01/27/2026

Built, Not Shattered

I was looking at old pictures the other day.

Dogs. People. Me—much younger, smiling, standing in moments that most people would probably label as traumatic if they knew the backstory. And what surprised me wasn’t fear, or sadness, or even grief. It was this strange clarity. Almost calm. Almost awe.

Because when I look at those pictures now, I don’t think, How did she survive that?
I think, Of course she did.

That’s the part people don’t always understand about trauma, survival, and the human nervous system. Some experiences that sound devastating on paper don’t always land as trauma inside the body. Some people are shattered by events. Others are built by them.

If you told someone that I swam out of a window during Hurricane Sandy while pregnant—and that my dogs saved my life—they’d probably gasp. They’d call it traumatic. They’d imagine years of fear, panic, flashbacks.

But for me? That was just survival mode kicking in. Tuesday energy.

When you’re born anxious, neurodivergent, hyper-aware—when your nervous system is already scanning the environment from the time you’re little—you don’t freeze in crisis. You activate. You move. You do what needs to be done. Chaos doesn’t shock you; it gives you instructions.

Danger doesn’t undo you.
Loss does.

That’s the distinction I didn’t have language for until much later in life.

I can handle emergencies. I can handle hospitals. I can handle floods, illness, unpredictability, things going wrong. I was raised in that. I was shaped in it. My childhood memories are filled with hospital rooms, sickness, terminal cancer, sudden endings. While other kids came back to school talking about Disney World, Paris, annual family vacations, I talked about walking down to the beach up the block—because it was free, because joy was small and local, because our world had already narrowed.

When you grow up like that, you learn early that the rug can be pulled out at any moment. You don’t expect permanence. You expect adaptation.

And that’s why it’s not physical danger that lingers for me.
It’s attachment wounds.

Pain in the body that comes out of nowhere.
Someone choosing to leave.
Complicated grief when someone you love dies too young, too suddenly, before life feels complete.

Those are the things that echo. Because they violate continuity. They rupture meaning. They’re losses you didn’t consent to, didn’t prepare for, didn’t get instructions for.

I don’t feel traumatized by surviving.
I feel tender about losing.

And that doesn’t mean I’m broken. It means I’m human.

I also know this: I never stayed in a victim role. Not because I’m tough, not because I minimized what happened—but because I processed it. I went to therapy. I reflected. I named things. I moved my body. I built meaning. I regulated what needed regulating instead of pretending it wasn’t there.

That’s the difference between trauma that calcifies and experience that integrates.

When I look at old pictures now, it’s not fear I feel. It’s something closer to reverence. Like my older self standing beside my younger self, putting an arm around her shoulders and saying, You did really good.

And honestly? That’s all she ever needed to hear.
But the adults were in crisis. Everyone was surviving. There wasn’t space for that kind of witnessing.

There’s also something deeply cultural in this for me—something Italian that I didn’t always appreciate when I was younger. Generational trauma gets a bad reputation, and for good reason. It carries silence, overfunctioning, emotional compression. But it also carries resilience, loyalty, endurance, and an almost cellular strength.

You’re born strong—but you’re also born holding things that don’t belong to you.

And when you finally break the cycles that don’t need to continue into the next generation? That’s not rejection. That’s liberation. That’s evolution. That’s saying, I’ll keep the strength, but I’m putting down the suffering.

As you get older—and as you heal—you start to realize something else too: time doesn’t really feel linear anymore. It feels more like overlapping timelines. Different versions of you walking beside each other. The inner child. The adult. The parent. The professional. The survivor. The witness.

Memories pop up out of nowhere, like files rediscovered in a cabinet you didn’t even realize you had. You watch your child go through something and suddenly remember going through it yourself—and you know, with clarity, that it won’t always feel this big. That life realigns. Just like our bodies realign. Just like our minds do.

That perspective doesn’t come from denial. It comes from integration.

Which brings me to diagnosis, labels, and the way we talk about mental health.

Symptoms are real. Brain health is real. Medication can be life-saving. I’m not anti-medicine. I’m anti-reduction.

So many diagnoses are reactions—to environment, attachment, nutrition, access to care, chronic stress. We cluster symptoms because systems need categories, not because humans are simple. Autism alone shows us that: what it used to be, what we understand now, how vast the spectrum really is.

Labels can help us relate. They give language. They give validation. They help people find treatment.

But they are maps—not identities.

And connection is powerful. Groups are powerful. Shared experience saves lives. But there’s a quiet question we don’t ask often enough: At what point does living in the shared story keep us anchored to the wound?

When does a grief group become a place you never leave?
When does recovery become an identity instead of a chapter?
When does connection stop being healing and start being containment?

There is no single answer. Some people need those spaces for life. Some people don’t. Neither is right or wrong.

And living fully is not a betrayal of pain—or of the people you lost. Often, it’s exactly how they would’ve wanted you to live.

We don’t truly relate because our stories are identical. We relate because our emotions are human. Empathy doesn’t require sameness. Two people can both say, “I lost my parents,” and mean entirely different universes.

That’s the paradox: we connect through feeling, but we heal through honoring difference.

So when I look at old pictures now, I don’t see trauma frozen in time. I see survival in motion. I see strength that didn’t harden into bitterness. I see a nervous system that learned how to carry life—and a heart that kept choosing meaning anyway.

Time doesn’t exist the way we think it does. It’s not a straight line. It’s a conversation between who you were, who you are, and who you’re becoming.

And sometimes, healing isn’t about revisiting the past or escaping it.
Sometimes it’s about standing right where you are, looking back with compassion, and finally saying:

You did really good.

01/26/2026

Perfectionism slips into ordinary days wearing the costume of virtue. It shows up early, stays late, cleans its tracks, and asks for praise only in private. The damage it does is quieter, harder to name, and often mistaken for character.

Anne Wilson Schaef named that damage with a bluntness that still startles. When she wrote Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much in the early nineties, she was writing into a moment when women were being told they could finally have everything, provided they managed it flawlessly. Schaef was a clinical psychologist, a speaker, and an Episcopal minister, shaped by the recovery movement and by feminist critiques of caretaking as a moral trap. Her work circled addiction, codependence, and the ways socially rewarded behaviors can still hollow a person out. The book’s audience was not abstract. It was overfunctioning women who mistook exhaustion for virtue and control for safety.

What makes her claim about perfectionism sting is the reversal. Abuse is something done by an external force, not something we inflict on ourselves. Yet perfectionism thrives on internalized authority. The rules are invisible, the punishments self-administered. No one needs to scold because the voice already lives inside, precise and unsparing. The standards keep shifting. The relief never arrives. Excellence would allow for rest. Perfectionism does not.

Psychologically, the habit feeds on fear dressed up as discipline. The fear of being ordinary. The fear of needing help. The fear that any looseness will expose a deeper failure. In that sense, perfectionism behaves less like ambition and more like compulsion. Schaef’s background in addiction studies mattered here. She saw how behaviors that look admirable on the surface can operate with the same rigidity and self-erasure as substances. The harm is normalized because the results often benefit institutions, families, and workplaces that quietly depend on someone else’s overextension.

Culturally, the idea has only grown more relevant. The contemporary workplace praises optimization and resilience while quietly penalizing limits. Even outside paid labor, standards multiply. Bodies must be maintained, homes curated, emotions managed, relationships improved. The language has changed since the nineties, but the underlying demand remains. Be better, but never be finished. Think of how often a task completed cleanly still feels inadequate. The email sent and then reread. The presentation delivered and then replayed. We know the moment when the room empties and the second guessing begins.

Literarily, Schaef’s sentence belongs to a lineage of women who resisted the moralization of self-denial. Audre Lorde argued that self-care was not indulgence but survival. Adrienne Rich wrote about the cost of internalized obedience. Even earlier, Virginia Woolf noticed how women learned to serve an ideal that required their disappearance. Schaef’s contribution was to use the language of harm without ornament, refusing to soften the claim. Calling it abuse removed the possibility that perfectionism was merely a personality quirk.

Schaef herself became a complicated figure later in life. Some of her public statements, particularly around vaccines and autism, drew justified criticism and distanced many readers from her work. Acknowledging that matters. Wisdom does not arrive as a complete package, and insight in one domain does not guarantee judgment in another. Still, the clarity of her observation about self-punishment stands apart from those later controversies. The sentence survives because it describes a pattern many recognize before they have words for it.

The hardest implication is not that perfectionism hurts, but that it can feel like love. It promises protection. It claims to keep chaos at bay. Letting go can feel reckless, even immoral. I’ve noticed how strange it feels to stop revising something that could be marginally better, to send it off and sit with the small thud of incompleteness. The room does not collapse. The world does not notice. The quiet that follows can be unsettling, but it is also clean.

Anne Wilson Schaef was not arguing for carelessness or lowered standards. She was arguing for an end to self-hostility disguised as devotion. The line between care and cruelty runs through intention and outcome. When effort becomes a way to deny rest, worth, or forgiveness, the effort has turned against the person making it. Naming that shift is not weakness. It is the first unpunished act.

© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved