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April 20 - April 30, 2025
You think that once you manufacture perfection externally, then you’ll feel fully alive, satisfied, connected, in touch with possibility, spacious, whole, centered—all the things people feel when they’re present. The inverse is true.
The more present you are internally, the more you recognize perfection externally.
When someone’s fully present with you, it’s hypnotic. You think, “I’ve never met anyone quite like them.” Because you haven’t. Everyone has a signature presence.
Some people describe this level of engagement with the present moment as being “in the zone.” Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it being “in flow.”
What all these descriptions have in common is their emphasis on losing control. When you’re present, you don’t have control, and you don’t care. When you’re connected to your power, you don’t need control.
For a perfectionist in a maladaptive mindset, performance is the main priority. You must excel, even if you don’t care about what you’re doing, you don’t want to be doing it, you take no joy in doing it, or it actively hurts you to do it.
Why in the world would anyone feel worse after getting exactly what they want, even after exceeding their goals? Because the experience of winning forces you to realize that there are no substitutes for self-worth or presence. Not one.
The takeaway here is that you have to consciously respond, instead of unconsciously react, to perfectionism in order for it to be healthy. You can’t consciously respond to that which you are unaware of.
When we regularly feel obligated to act in ways that betray our needs, goals, and values, the obligation is usually to a standard of behavioral perfection we don’t realize we’re adhering to.
A procrastinator perfectionist, for example, might get stuck on the cognitive perfectionism loop that says, “I need to perfectly understand how every aspect of urban planning works before I apply for the job.”
We think perfectly understanding “why” can help us control our negative feelings about what occurred. Power is found in accepting and processing the undesirable feelings within you, not by erasing them.
Procrastinator perfectionists have to put in the work to not be overwhelmed by their desire for the process to begin perfectly. Messy perfectionists get stuck when the process doesn’t continue along perfectly.
If you find yourself mired in process perfectionism, use your awareness of wanting the process to be perfect as a cue to get present and get perspective.
When adaptive perfectionists notice their emotional response is different from the ideal response they’re holding in their minds, they get curious (not punitive) about why that’s happening; they wonder what they might need.
Marissa’s goal, like the goal so many of us fall prey to, was not to process what happened but to learn how to control her feelings about what happened.
The way you heal from trauma is not by returning to the person you used to be but by evolving into the person whom you decide you want to be now.
Perfectionists intellectually understand that they cannot change the past, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to change the fact that the past had an impact on them.
Power is understanding that your life can become a conscious choice to pursue whatever you want; it doesn’t have to be an unconscious reaction to run from what already happened.
“Several studies support the idea that perfectionism develops more easily in families with extremely critical parents and that an authoritarian parenting style may lead children to adopt a perfectionist orientation during the course of their lives.
Based on my conversations with perfectionists, perfectionism in kids can manifest through curiosities and interests that can be obsessional, sometimes including compulsive, self-directed behaviors.
I’ll never forget the chilling advice my boss gave me before I went into the field for the first time. She said, “Look for the kids who are behaving perfectly; those are the ones who are terrified.”
The perfectionist feels they’re telling a lie—they’re only pretending to be worthy, so they better get their story straight. They better perform perfectly because any holes in their story will reveal their deception.
Love and safety are needs. We don’t just need to grow up with love and safety, we need to cultivate love, safety, and belonging as adults, too.
Connection is the source of all growth and healing. Connection is a need. In the absence of healthy connections, we become dysfunctional.
1.4 million adults attempted to end their lives in 2019. The pandemic exacerbated the suicide crisis exponentially.[18]
If you don’t understand how impulsive the act of suicide can be, it’s difficult to appreciate how strongly the presence of a firearm in your home can impact whether you or anyone in your household will die by suicide.
Research suggests that acknowledging and talking about suicide reduces suicidal ideation and can lead to an increased willingness to connect to support.[27]
Though these studies are hard to interpret without a consistent definition of what perfectionism is, the short answer is yes. Perfectionism is positively correlated with suicidality.
However, when you’re imposing perfectionistic standards on yourself because you think others expect perfection from you, you may be more vulnerable to humiliation and shame because you feel there’s an “audience” watching you.
You may in fact be shocked to learn that anyone in your orbit feels such an immense amount of pressure from you. Your flexibility, openness, acceptance of mistakes (encouragement of mistakes?), and unconditional positive regard for the people in your world are points worth clarifying out loud and often.
There’s no gray area in dichotomous thinking—for example, you’ve either succeeded or failed, you’re beautiful or ugly, you’re revered or the laughingstock.
Once you’re aware that you’re engaging in dichotomous thinking, don’t try to force yourself to stop thinking in black-and-white terms. If you can find some gray area, that’s great. If you can’t, reach out and connect to someone. Connection will hold you over when nothing else can.
Adaptive perfectionists also learn how to stop making the number one mistake perfectionists make, which is to respond to missteps with self-punishment.
A self-punishment is consciously or unconsciously returning to something that you know will hurt you, or denying yourself something that you know will help you. Punishments are designed to create more pain.
Punishment doesn’t work. When you punish someone, that person doesn’t learn how to change; they learn how to avoid the source of the punishment. If you are the source of your own punishment (through critical self-talk, for example), then you learn to avoid yourself by numbing out.
You’re not addressing the problem when you use punishment; you’re avoiding the problem and creating a new one.
The ineffectual nature of punishment is critical for perfectionists to understand because if there’s one thing all the experts agree on, it’s that perfectionists can punish the hell out of themselves.[1]
Positive approaches to change include interventions such as teaching positive coping strategies; praising people when they do well; and when they do something wrong, taking the time to teach them how to better handle a similar situation in the future.[2]
Personal accountability requires you to own up to your missteps, yes, but personal accountability is less about taking the blame for a mistake and more about taking responsibility for the solution.
In this retributive rather than restorative culture where punishment is the first line of defense, it makes sense that you’ve internalized punishment as your first line of defense against the qualities you don’t like seeing in yourself. What does not make sense is for you to continue using punishment as an agent for positive change.
PROCRASTINATOR PERFECTIONISTS: Rumination Negatively comparing herself to others as well as idealized versions of herself, she minimizes any success she’s achieved thus far and focuses her energy on unproductive, circuitous thoughts about how she’s not doing enough.
MESSY PERFECTIONISTS: Arrested development She doesn’t allow her ideas (or herself) to flourish, develop, and mature. Eventually she’s forced to watch as her dreams die out.
Restricting yourself from an entire dimension of your life until you’re able to perform in a certain way. For example, I’ll start traveling once I lose the weight.
What’s the point of sitting down to relax if all you do is interrupt yourself with admonition the whole time? The point is to punish yourself. Again, engaging in your life punitively is often unconscious; it registers consciously as feeling “stuck.”
Nine times out of ten, we know exactly what to do to improve our lives, and yet we struggle to do it. The reason we’re struggling is that we’re engaged in a cycle of self-punishment.
When you’re in a positive state, your thoughts about the possible actions you can take expand; you realize you can do a lot of different things, and you make choices that promote future positive states.
As Fredrickson points out, positive emotions aren’t just “end states” that signal optimal functioning; positive emotions produce optimal functioning.
Practicing self-compassion expands your thought-action repertoire because it pulls you out of fear-based negativity and towards increased feelings of safety, reassurance, and positivity.
If self-compassion is so good for us and punishment is so bad for us, why do we keep punishing ourselves?
We’ve adopted this sanitized, “healthy people can bypass pain” view of emotional well-being (otherwise known as toxic positivity) because we prioritize analytical intelligence over emotional intelligence.
