Fear of Making Mistakes

We can often become consumed in the fear of making mistakes, we become indecisive and avoidant and limit ourselves to activities we feel comfortable in. This can become a real detriment to our wellbeing as we become disillusioned with our lives and crave more.

The following article details the impact fear of making mistakes can have on us as displayed through a case study of a client that sat in my counselling room week after week for 2 years and aims to highlight the extreme nature of fear in living our lives well.

Presenting issues

A young lady with big dreams who, at 27 was yet to take a single step toward achieving them. Living with her very supportive parents, she was unemployed and friendless and spent most of her days in bed. She’d developed a severe case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and was searching for answers about how to live correctly on the internet, needing to understand what other people thought about how life should be lived, what was right and wrong, how to think, how to feel, how to behave and so on. She had zero trust in herself to make her own decisions and felt that simply by interacting with other people she would end up finding herself trapped in friendships that were time consuming and unfulfilling and she’d inevitably wind up stuck in a loveless marriage with 6 children having to forego her dreams and ambitions. Of course these dreams and ambitions were not going to happen from the comfort of her bedroom either, and she was lonely.

She felt she had no control over her life, and she fixated on her health, on her parents’ wellbeing and on the survival of her cat. She was experiencing extreme panic attacks, was worrying excessively about her loved ones, was unable to shower or touch her body in case she found a lump somewhere. She felt responsible for anything bad that happened to anyone out there in the big wide world, that her thoughts had somehow had a terrible impact on the strangers she would see in the news that had suffered injury or death, she was somehow in control of everything that happened to everyone and so developed thoughts and rituals that combatted these ideas in order to protect her family. So, if she touched her door handle 5 times before opening the door, no harm would come to mum, if she turned in a circle one way and then the other, her Dad would be okay, if she could shower without touching herself she wouldn’t develop cancer, if she glanced sideways whilst sticking out her tongue, the cat would survive another day. She had developed an irrational belief that she was entirely in control of every event that might occur in her life because she so desperately felt the need to be in control. The opposite effect had occurred.

During therapy, it became apparent that the underlying fear was around making mistakes and therefore failing to achieve those dreams and ambitions that were seeming further and further away as the months passed by. The fear was also layered in facing conflict, feeling embarrassed, feeling pressured, being judged, being disliked, being hurt, and of dying before being able to achieve any of the goals she desperately desired. If she didn’t make the right choice, she would be open to all of these possibilities and she would fail. It was easier not to try than to face the potential disappointment and sense of hopelessness. If she wasn’t able to take the first steps, she was safe from risk. She had therefore subconsciously allowed the OCD to completely overwhelm her.

Her inability to take action because of her fear of failure was ensuring she would indeed fail. She felt she was simply existing and living no life at all. This added even more pressure to make a change and start living a fulfilling life which made it more difficult again to get started, time was of the essence and she didn’t know where to start so she delayed day after day after day.

Moving forward.

What was needed here was trust. Trust in herself. Trust that she was able to think for herself, make decisions that were right for her, deal with conflict if it arose, manage challenging situations, and be safe in her choices. This was a lengthy therapeutic process but slowly she began to listen to her own instincts, believe in her own views and perspectives, and feel good enough and confident enough to begin living her life for herself. 

She was able to begin exploring the world and options around her. Starting small, a walk around her local area, a trip to the hairdressers, a swim at the local pool, she began building herself up towards meeting more and more people, challenging the fears she was so used to as they cropped up in her mind, developing a ‘what’s the worst that can happen’ attitude to venturing further and further out into the world.

She joined a knitting group, a bus ride away and found that, not only was this manageable but it was enjoyable. She developed a friendship that felt safe and equal and believed in her ability to maintain this relationship and keep it healthy, putting boundaries in place that helped her feel secure and in control. The bus ride, once anxiety provoking, quickly became a normal, mundane weekly activity in which she was able to relax and think of other things.

Her belief in her abilities and capabilities and the hope she found when considering her future quickly grew and her activities, once deeply avoided, increased to such a degree she was describing new situations and activities in a way that she couldn’t have conceived just a few months earlier. They were fun and relaxing and were giving her the motivation to do more. She wanted more. And she was confident that she could manage her anxiety around trying these new things. She found that all-important trust in herself and her choices. Her belief in herself was growing.

As her self-confidence grew and she continued to try new things and put herself in situations she sometimes found nerve-wracking, her view of the world changed. People weren’t generally that bad, and she found she could find trust in those around her because she knew what she was looking for and what was important to her. She found then that her ritualistic behaviours lessened, she was more easily able to detach herself from the intrusive thoughts that led to the behaviours and that had plagued her life previously because she had now relinquished some of the control she had been holding onto. She could be more open to opportunities because these new experiences showed her evidence that it usually went well. She felt alive. She felt connected. She looked forward to beginning her journey and achieving those ambitions she’d been dreaming of for so long. She felt alive.

Summary

When we’re so worried about making mistakes, we try desperately to maintain control to avoid the underlying fears we are so invested in avoiding. We can go to great lengths to keep ourselves safe and our lives in order but, unfortunately, this can never end well. It is impossible to control every aspect of our lives. Bad things will happen, but good things will happen too, and we can’t let the latter go to waste in our attempt to avoid the former. 

Life will be full of twists and turns but we can only deal with situations as they arise and find our own ways of getting through them, and when we believe in ourselves, have trust in ourselves, and put our trust in others, we can feel confident that we will indeed be okay.

In order to feel in control, we need to relinquish control. Tracy McCadden