Toxic curse Little Miss Perfect : Women feel under pressure to excel Antonia Hoyle for the Daily Mail © Provided by Daily Mail MailOnline logo
Every evening, after putting her two daughters to bed, Sheena Tanna-Shah walked into her own bedroom, closed the door behind her, sat on the floor with her back against it, and sobbed.
‘My emotions were all over the place. I was irritable and angry,’ says Sheena, 37, from Northampton. For years, the high-achieving optometrist had strived to have the perfect body, be the perfect wife, the perfect friend and perfect mother.
By the time her youngest daughter, Isla, was two, the effort to excel had brought her to the brink of breakdown. ‘Every day I’d try and be perfect,’ she recalls. ‘The more I tried, the worse I felt.’ Six years, endless therapy sessions and much soul-searching later, and Sheena has learned to stop holding herself to impossibly high standards.
Toxic curse of trying to be Little Miss Perfect : More and more women feel under pressure to excel
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A Rocking Chair with a Fan? Parallels with Psychotherapy
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The recent news that Bill Gates, 65, and Melinda Gates, 56, are divorcing after 27 years of marriage took much of the world by surprise. The power couple appeared to be the picture of marital stability and longevity, having raised three children while founding and leading the world’s largest nonprofit, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has distributed over $54 billion in grants since its inception.
While we don’t know all the reasons behind the Gates’ decision, it is clear they are not alone in separating after decades together.
The Journals of Gerontology found that more than 1 in 4 people getting divorced in the United States are over age 50, and over half of those divorces happen after 20 years of marriage. Pew Research data from 2017 found that the rate of divorce after age 50 nearly doubled from 1990 to 2015. And a study published in June 2020 the