Never Off Duty: Perfectionism and Motherhood
6/23/202637 min
Dr. Cassidy Freitas grew up watching her mom — a Hispanic judge who fought her way into white male spaces with no margin for error — come home carrying that same no-error version of herself. Her dad pushed straight A's as the path to financial safety. She absorbed all of it.
And then she became a mom.
She had a plan. A written, formatted, shared-with-her-doctor birth plan. When it fell apart in the operating room — her daughter already here, her husband saying "look at her," and Cassidy turning her face away — the drive that had gotten her through everything else had nothing to offer her.
Dr. Cassidy is a therapist and the author of Mom Needs a Moment. In this conversation with Dr. Becky, she traces how perfectionism forms in childhood as a survival strategy, why it works right up until you have a baby, and what it actually looks like to loosen the grip without losing your edge.
There's a phrase she comes back to: context is the bridge to compassion. You can't have compassion for the way perfectionism shows up in you as a mom if you don't understand where it came from.
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Looking for more support navigating pregnancy, postpartum, and life with a new baby? Good Inside Baby gives you practical tools, scripts, and expert guidance for the moments that can feel most overwhelming in early parenthood.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsBecky Kennedy· Host0:00
Okay, listen up. I have some questions for you. Were you the easy kid, the good kid? You know, the one that teachers loved, the one who got the gold stars, the one maybe where your parents described you as, "Oh, we got so lucky with her." Were you responsible, driven? Even if you kind of roll your eyes, like yeah, you kind of had it all together. And now maybe you're a mom and you're an adult, and you're sitting on the floor of the bedroom at 11:00 PM folding laundry that was already folded, going around cleaning your house, and then maybe finding yourself hysterically crying on the bathroom floor. First of all, I'm not trying to call you out because holy moly, every single thing about what I just said was totally me. That story was also the story of our guest today, Dr. Cassidy Freitas. Dr. Cassidy is a licensed marriage and family therapist, and she writes about what it looks like for moms to loosen the grip of old patterns, especially patterns of perfectionism, and make a little more room for themselves or maybe for a wider version of who they could be. I'm so excited for an episode solely focused on perfectionism because I get asked about this all the time, or maybe I get asked about it not explicitly, but so many of the common questions I have