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

by Katherine Morgan Schafler

You don’t achieve liberation through control; you achieve liberation through acceptance.

Perfectionists are totally fine operating at an average and below-average level in a lot of areas, just not the areas they long to excel in.

if you don’t honor the drive in you to actively explore the ideal, you’re likely to experience an enduring sense of defeatism.

All perfectionists have vocal inner critics. Adaptive perfectionists learn how to respond to their inner critics with compassion, thereby disabling negative self-talk from having power over them—but the tape still plays.

“Rigid perfectionism” is defined in the DSM as follows: A rigid insistence on everything being flawless, perfect, and without errors or faults, including one’s own and others’ performance; sacrificing of timeliness to

ensure correctness in every detail; believing that there is only one right way to do things; difficulty changing ideas and/or viewpoint; preoccupation with details, organization, and order.

WHY ARE YOU STRIVING? Is your motivation to bridge the gulf between an ideal and reality born from the desire to excel and grow (adaptive) or from the need to compensate for perceived inadequacies and avoid failure (maladaptive)? HOW ARE YOU STRIVING? Are you hurting yourself or others in the process (maladaptive)? Or are you striving in a way that feels good for you (adaptive)?

Self-worth is about understanding that right now, with all the things you have yet to achieve, you are as worthy of all the love, joy, dignity, freedom, and connection as you would be had you already achieved them.

You are worthy of all these things because you exist.

Your self-worth is prearranged; you have no hand in it. From the day you were born until the day you die, you remain worthy. You’re worthy in every passing hour, through every mistake, in sun and in sto...

you’re operating from a mindset of abundance. You already have what you need, and you feel secure. For adaptive perfectionists, striving towards an ideal is a celebratory expression of that security. Maladaptive perfectionists do not feel whole or secure. They feel broken, and they operate from a mindset of deficit. Their striving is driven by the need to compensate, to fix what’s broken, and to try to offer substitutes for or try to hide what’s missing.

Maladaptive perfectionists strive to achieve goals (including interpersonal goals like people-pleasing) in the hope that others don’t feel empty-handed in their presence.

If you’re in a maladaptive mindset, it’s not necessarily that you feel worthless. You just don’t feel fully worthy right now. You think that after you finish fixing yourself (i.e., making yourself superficially perfect and therefore worthy), then you’ll finally deserve that which you most long for. You live in a state of waiting.

Being disconnected from your self-worth feels more like this: Okay, I’m almost there, I’m close, so I’ll be able to enjoy my life soon, as soon as I’m ‘done,’ as soon as I’m skinny, as soon as I make over X amount of dollars, as soon as I get the job, as soon as I get pregnant, as soon as I’m accepted into that school, or my children are accepted into that school, as soon as I make partner, as soon as I’m in a relationship, as soon as I can buy the person I love the present they want, I can feel good about myself as soon as I’ve earned it. When you’re disconnected from your self-worth, you think your ability to feel joy is won through goal attainment. I wonder if I wrote this entire book just to write this next sentence: You don’t earn your way to joy. Joy is a birthright. So is love, freedom, dignity, and connection. As the inimitable James Baldwin said, “Your crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is wear it.”

The confidence of having already won liberates your potential. When your self-worth isn’t on the line, it becomes easier to take risks. You get more of what you want because you’re more willing to risk trying. When you’re disconnected from your self-worth, you’re fixated on control. You may be experienced as demanding or needy to be around because you’re so attached to a specific outcome’s unfolding. You need something to happen in a certain way to feel relief. Whether you realize it or not, you are desperate.

Control encourages restriction; power encourages freedom.

Your memories of perfect moments are memories of moments in which you were most present.

When you’re present, your life now is not dictated by that of your past; it’s dictated by possibility. You’re encased in your own wholeness and at the same time, you are utterly free.

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.

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.

changes the way you move, the angle at which you choose to hold your head, the tone and speed of your voice. Whether you pull your breath in below your collarbone and deep down into your belly, or let it dangle from the ceiling of your throat like a chandelier made of air. Whether you notice or miss entirely the vibrancy of the colors surrounding you. Whether you interrupt others or listen. Whether you pick away at some part of your skin or let your hands be still. These are features of the quality of your presence.

Presence changes how judgmental, compassionate, and solution-oriented you are. Being present invites relief from living in a world where what’s missing and wrong relentlessly eclipses what’s good and already there.

Even in the moments when being present is hard because embracing reality is painful, presence retains an ameliorative quality. Being present is the only attainable ideal, which is...

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 you cultivate presence internally, the more you allow yourself to feel whole, alive, and connected, regardless of what’s happening around you. The more present you are internally, the more you recognize perfection externally.

When I listen to people describe perfect moments, they’re not describing the material; they’re describing feeling whole and connected. When I listen to people describe moments that “should’ve been perfect” but weren’t, they’re describing exterior, superficial perfection amidst an internal sense of feeling fragmented.

being “in the zone.” Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it being “in flow.”

Being present can also be described more generally: freeing yourself, letting go, opening yourself up to possibilities, living without dictation from the past or instruction from the future, making room for spontaneity. What all these descriptions have in common is their emphasis on losing control.

When you’re absent, you’re disconnected from your power. Instead of feeling worthy, you’re waiting to feel worthy. Instead of feeling spacious, you feel emotionally claustrophobic. Instead of taking up full residency inside yourself, you vacate the property. Instead of accepting what is (which doesn’t mean you have to like it), you bleed energy rejecting and resisting the reality of the situation you are currently in. Your identity is replaced by your output—what you do and how well and fast you do it becomes who you are.

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. Control is maximized because when you feel powerless, being controlling feels like the responsible thing

The greatest, most catastrophic heartache of seeking peace through external performance happens when you achieve your goal. Finally, you’re number one. You’re the best. You’ve earned what you consider to be tangible proof of your worth. Maybe it’s the sleek office with the fancy title. Maybe you closed on the big perfect house. Maybe you can fit into the jeans. Maybe you received a heavy award with your name etched onto the base. The point is that you got everything you said you wanted. For perfectionists in a maladaptive mindset, that’s when

the observation that when maladaptive perfectionists do achieve “perfect,” when they hit their goal, even far exceed their goal, they still aren’t satisfied.

“inverse ratio” between success and inner security: “instead of feeling, ‘I have done it’ he merely feels that ‘it happened.’ Repeated achievements in his field do not make him more secure, but more anxious.”

just fail to bring some perfectionists satisfaction; often, achieving their goals makes perfectionists feel worse.[12] Why in the world would anyone feel worse after getting exactly what they want, even after exceeding their goals?

yourself and ask how you’re feeling, as you would a friend

Enacting power looks like freely giving yourself access to goodness instead of waiting to see how things turn out before deciding how much goodness you deserve. Enacting power looks like putting boundaries around the people and things that make it harder for you to believe in your worth and stay present.

You’re worthy of peace now; you’re worthy even as you sleep.

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. Accordingly, we need to return to the raw manifestations of perfectionism.

adaptive when it inspires improved performance without cost to your wellness and without attachment to outcome—for

When the inability to act on behalf of your most authentic self develops into a patterned response, that indicates dysfunction. 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.

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.

The process of becoming who you are didn’t start out perfectly, so how could it ever be any good?

Possessing a gift without the chance to hone the skills around it and without being able to enjoy it for yourself or share it with others—that’s painful. Possessing a gift that you interpret as a burden—that’s even more painful.

maladaptive perfectionism is correlated with using emotional suppression to cope with stress.[13]

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. Instead of running from their feelings, adaptive perfectionists work to regulate their emotional experience in healthy ways. (We’ll talk about how to do all of this in the second half of the

Then, remembering that ideals are not meant to be achieved, only meant to inspire, you use this ideal to guide you in

As “proof” that you’ve healed, you want to feel a specific way to a specific degree in a specific circumstance.

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. Preconceived notions about what it means to be “officially healed” loiter around in our minds and hearts. These imaginings of what we think our healing is supposed to look like are always wrong. You have no idea what form your healing will take. One way to define healing is becoming open to possibility. When you focus on emotional control, you close yourself off to possibility. Power lies in understanding that whatever you feel, you have agency over every moment in

your life. The exception to this rule is trauma.

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.

couldn’t predict or control her emotional response, which she experienced as a personal failing.