The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

by Katherine Morgan Schafler

Women receive an eternal fountain of directives every day about how to be less. How to weigh less, how to want less, how to be less emotional, how to say yes less, certainly how to be less of a perfectionist. This is a book about more. About how to get more of what you want by being more of who you are.

If you’re looking for a book to instruct you on how to deal with the parts of yourself that are broken, you’ll have to continue your journey elsewhere. This book explores the possibility that (even with those self-destructive habits of yours that we’ll be addressing in chapter 5) there’s nothing wrong with you.

Disconcerted by their own paralysis, procrastinator perfectionists assume that if they had more energy or discipline, they’d be able to execute, which is not the case. Procrastinator perfectionists have plenty of discipline and aren’t lazy at all. What they don’t have is acceptance. Acceptance that now is the only time anyone ever starts anything, and that starting now means you’re taking something that’s perfect in your mind and bringing it into the real world, where it is bound to change.

Messy perfectionists believe that they can do it all without ever having to give anything up, that they can be the humans who figure out how to exist without limits. When it becomes apparent that they can’t, messy perfectionists are crushed. Like procrastinator perfectionists, messy perfectionists experience a type of loss associated with their perfectionism, just at a different stage in the process.

Compared to their maladaptive counterparts, adaptive perfectionists demonstrate higher levels of motivation to achieve goals; they also worry less and are more optimistic when thinking about future performance.[5] This is perhaps because adaptive perfectionism has been shown to be a significant predictor of encountering “flow” states, moments of intense yet effortless engagement with a task or goal.[6]

Additional tripartite research (where adaptive, maladaptive, and non-perfectionist groups are compared to one another) indicates that of the three groups, adaptive perfectionists report the highest levels of meaning, subjective happiness, and life satisfaction.[8] In line with preceding studies, adaptive perfectionists are the least self-critical[9] and the most interested in working with others.[10]

Mainstream discourse on perfectionism doesn’t include adaptive perfectionism. Instead, we decry and reduce the entire spectrum of perfectionism into its negative iteration.

Ambition is not a universal trait. Some people are not interested in continually pushing themselves towards their highest potential or chasing an ideal. They may not ever even think about it. Writer and spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle calls such people “frequency holders.”[14] Those who contribute to society by maintaining a consistent level of engagement with the status quo. According to Tolle, the role of frequency holders is as vital as the role of those who create, advance, and work to revolutionize. By “just being,” frequency holders offer collective stability[15] and install a solid ground from which to push off. Too much chaos would ensue if everyone tried to break all the limits at once.

Operating under an illness model of care doesn’t just carry powerful implications for the way we conceptualize perfectionism, it impacts the way we conceptualize every aspect of mental health. The slightest pang of sadness, a drizzle of frustration—we register any decline in positive emotion with an assumption of pathology. It’s a cultural tic. The tic is born from the pathology-centered illness model we operate under. Before we seek to understand, we seek to diagnose. Instead of saying, “Let’s figure out what’s happening here,” we say, “Let’s figure out what’s wrong with you.”

As a perfectionist, you have a lot of energy inside of you, more than you might know what to do with. But what if you figured out what to do with it? As long as you’re playing small, that energy rattles inside you and makes you ache. Stop cursing the ache and become curious about why it’s there. If you’re a perfectionist, you want more of something. What is it? Why do you want that? How do you imagine getting what you want will make you feel? Perfectionism invites a deep, unending exploration of who you are and what you most desire from this life.

Limited perceptions don’t dictate reality. The moon is always full and whole, even when it hangs like a slither in the sky, even when you can’t find it in the sky.

You’re not “one in a million,” you’re not one in a billion, you are the only one.

Well-being can be divided into two basic branches. Hedonic approaches to well-being seek to increase happiness and avoid pain, whereas eudaemonic approaches to well-being seek to increase meaningfulness.

A lot of perfectionists think they’re driven by success when what they’re really driven by is the avoidance of failure—two very different animals.

Saying words out loud changes something. Sometimes you say a thought out loud to give it weight because it matters. Sometimes you say a thought out loud to let it go because it’s trivial. Until you allow the words to hit the air, it can be difficult to tell which is which. The stakes are higher when you say something out loud because the truth becomes clearer to you.

This is the way so many ambitious women spend their twenties, thirties, and beyond—building the “balanced life” they were told everyone wants, then not wanting it themselves. Rupa finished her “be balanced” to-do list, then she waited. Nothing. The opposite of satisfied, she felt a crawling, muffled, scratchy anxiety. It’s always a sobering sight to behold—the quiet, anticlimactic, slow-drip shock of the “finally balanced woman.” Sitting on my couch too exhausted to do anything other than tell the truth, asking me (which is to say, asking herself) some version of the brutally rhetorical question Is this it?

It’s easy to get hooked on the feeling that you’re really close to achieving balance, like a gambler at a blackjack table playing just one more time for the fifty-fourth time—but alas, the house always wins. Balance remains one step ahead, the ever-elusive prize of female modernity. And yet, in my practice, women are constantly reporting their failure to achieve balance to me as if everyone but them has it figured out.

The implicit message behind the word “perfectionist” is: you’re doing too much. Balance is offered (proselytized) as the corollary cure. The implicit message behind “finding balance” is to take care of yourself by getting calm and slowing down while also taking care of everyone else by being all things to all people at once.

Being a female perfectionist isn’t always pathologized. If a woman deploys her perfectionism in adherence to traditional standards of femininity, her perfectionism is recognized as excellence, and rewards are bestowed. If a woman deploys her perfectionism in historically male-dominated arenas or in adherence to traditional standards of masculinity, her perfectionism is pathologized, and punishments will ensue.

Do you think it’s a coincidence that our culture embraces, celebrates, and syndicates female perfectionists when their perfectionism is expressed through improving and decorating the home, hosting social gatherings, and tidying up? The celebration serves as both reward and signal: this is how to behave.

The push for increased balance is not a response to the state of women’s health; it’s a response to the state of women’s power. Unfortunately, the implicit messaging works. Women scatter their energy on a wild goose chase to find balance while internalizing their perfectly healthy desire for more as a deficiency in gratitude.

To be clear, perfectionism is not considered a disorder. Unlike narcissistic personality disorder and OCD, there’s no standardized criterion one can meet to be clinically recognized as a perfectionist.

The clinical disorder most adjacent to maladaptive perfectionism is obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD). The name sounds a lot like OCD, but it’s a very different illness. OCPD can be marked by, among other diagnostic criteria, an excessive preoccupation with work at the expense of healthy interpersonal relationships, an obsession with control, and a preoccupation with orderliness and what the DSM refers to as, “rigid perfectionism.”[3]

Perfectionists want to keep striving towards an impossible ideal throughout their entire lives; as we just discussed, they in fact need to. Adaptive perfectionists find it to be an honor and a privilege to have discovered an endeavor worthy of endless pursuit.

The reward of doing work you know you can never finish is that you get to continue to do the work. Compulsively striving towards an impossible ideal is the base of perfectionism. Why you strive and how you strive determines whether your perfectionism is healthy or not.

A misconception about being present is that presence equals happiness. We take deep breaths, fix our posture, then wait. We’re waiting to feel something. Shiny, clean, ready—happy. The way people in car commercials look like they feel. You can be present and feel tired. You can be present and feel heartbroken. You can be present and not feel ready. Presence guarantees freedom, not happiness. Being present is not a state of mind; it’s a state of being.

The greatest, most catastrophic heartache of seeking peace through external performance happens when you achieve your goal.