How often do you find yourself refereeing other people’s relationships?
Many perfectionists are peacemakers as a side hustle – we know exactly what needs to get done in order for everything to be okay again. When you’re the go-to person for advice, you can inadvertently feel like the pacemaker of that relationship – without you, that relationship will slow down and stop pumping.
As parents, we often hear our kids’ complaints about this kid or that teacher or the co-parent who is mean to them. Many of us feel up to the challenge to make it better. We believe, that as parents, it is our duty to fix our kid’s problems. Obviously, age and development must be taken into consideration when it comes to these situations.
As a parent, you can’t allow a four-year-old to fend for herself with an issue she has with her peers, but you can begin to help her learn effective and age-appropriate coping skills. However, if your child is at elementary age and older, it is crucial for their development to learn how to navigate their complex social world. If instead, you are the parent who is constantly emailing the teachers, telling/reciting with your child what to say verbatim when future social situations arise, you are supporting your child, but not necessarily giving your child space to develop their problem-solving skills.
This also transpires in adult to adult relationships. If you typically represent family members to try to reach an agreement that has nothing to do with you directly, you are a peacemaker. If you are the relationship guru to your friends’ fraught love lives, you are their relationship’s peacemaker/pacemaker.
Perfectionists love to fix things.
Cross them off the eternal To-Do List and move on to something else. Perfectionists also like to feel needed. It helps our self-esteem stay put in the average to high range. Offering advice to keep the peace and pace of other people’s relationships makes us feel important and part of a community. But, here is where it gets a bit sticky. If your relationship is more about talking about the relationship between two other people, it can feel like you are close to that person, but in reality, you are the odd one out. The relationship depends more on the survival of the other two.
Furthermore, providing solutions to arguments only creates a dependency. When it comes to kids, we need to hold back that urge to fix and make better and walk them through the process of problem-solving. In Spanish, there is a saying, “No pasa nada” which literally translates to “nothing is happening”. Something is always happening and we need to teach our children how to sort through the consequences of their choices. When it comes to our adult relationships, we need to discern if giving advice is an effective use of everyone’s time.
Imagine if you took the time to listen and watch how they struggled a bit as they found a solution to their problem, instead of using that same amount of time and then some more, repeating yourself over and over to solve the same issues for them. It could be a game-changer.
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