Stop Shoulding Yourself

It was a Monday evening. The sun had begun to sink, and I sat across from my counselor, my arms wrapped around the tasseled throw pillow that had been in my chair when I arrived. Calming white noise played faintly from a speaker on the other side of the closed door behind me.

I was recounting many of the anxieties and worries of my life. Disappointments, discouragements, and doubts clouded my mind. Perfectionist tendencies and unrealistic, unreasonable goals had built up in my spirit like a clog in a shower drain, weighing me down and causing a sort of mental mildew to grow. I described how I felt trapped, stuck in negative patterns of behavior and thought. I finished my rant and said, “I just feel like I should be doing better, or doing more. I’m not living up to my own standards.”

My counselor leaned forward with a kind and knowing smile on his face. “Andy, I think there’s something really important that you need to do. You need to stop shoulding yourself.”

Stop shoulding yourself. Three words I’ll never forget.

My entire life, I’ve been burdened by high expectations, values of moral and spiritual perfection and mental fortitude and willpower that I can’t possibly hope to reach on my own. A great many of these expectations are self-imposed, consciously or unconsciously. Some probably come from the way I was raised, though I fault nobody for that. Ever does the Enemy sneakily twist our belief systems into something they were not meant to become.

I think my perfectionism—my shoulding—is a form of control obsession, a result of not trusting God to work within me in ways that I simply can’t (and often won’t admit I can’t). It has been a powerful tool that the Enemy has used to keep my spirit from flourishing under the care of my Heavenly Father.

I should myself all the time. In the past—and still somewhat today—I’ve been so afraid of failing at difficult (or seemingly difficult) tasks that in many cases, I never start doing a thing that’s important to me because I don’t want to see it go down in flames due to my own flaws. That, or I don’t want to look under the surface and see just how imperfect and spiritually needy I really am.

“Should” has become an enemy, to the point where if I start to think in such a way, I feel like I’m starting to hear videogame boss music. It arms itself with shame and bears down on me.

So what to do about it?

“Should” and “can” are related, and yet in many ways, they’re also opposites. For instance, if you’re trying to run in a race, you should be able to finish it well. That doesn’t mean you can actually do it yet. You have to train. You have to set goals and work for it.

What you can do at the moment, perhaps, is get up and take a fifteen minute jog/walk to start building endurance. There’s a distance between the “now” and the “then”, between the “can” and the “should”. Should is a goal, a standard to reach that takes time and effort. That doesn’t mean it’s an attainable one yet, and you may not even be able to attain it alone.

I’ve had to learn this the hard way (though I have heard many forms of this idea over the years), and it’s been discouraging. Honestly, I’m still learning it every day. I’ve been shoulding myself for most of my life, and I’m not going to be able to stop overnight. But I can decide, in the moment, to do one thing differently, to do something that will meet a small, achievable goal, and continue to work at it until I reach the “Should”.

And in the meantime, giving myself grace is a beautiful thing.