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

by Katherine Morgan Schafler

Numbing and blaming delay progress because they delay self-compassion. Negative self-talk also delays self-compassion.

As your pain grows, at some point your primary goal shifts from growth to pain avoidance. Instead of being motivated to practice habits that support your goals, you become motivated to practice habits that support numbing your pain.

Feeling good gives you energy; feeling bad drains your energy. Because being compassionate with yourself helps you to

In accidental moments of quiet, you replay other painful mistakes you’ve made, bigger mistakes. Because you haven’t disrupted your self-punishment with self-compassion, your mind can only stay on one channel—the “every painful mistake I’ve ever made” channel.

Until you can meet yourself with some compassion, you’ll reject the good in your life. No matter how small the good is, you’ll honestly believe you don’t deserve it.

it’s not perfectionistic strivings that are harmful to our mental health, it’s the self-criticism we lacerate ourselves with that endangers our well-being.[13]

Trying to show up as your full self while simultaneously punishing yourself is like trying to give a massage to someone who’s jogging. No version of it works. You can’t be as patient, creative, strong, loving, or reliable when you’re punishing yourself—you can’t be you.

The more she adapted inwardly, the more Maya’s life reached out to her.

Once you stop punishing yourself, you may be surprised at how much free space is cleared up in your mind, heart, and soul.

When your energy comes back, the successive openness can be disorienting. You start to notice things you never noticed before; you start to see others in a different light.

to be who you are, you’ll have to stop being who you’re not.

You’ll need to let go of what no longer serves you, fail forward as you discover what’s meaningful to you, and be compassionate with yourself no matter what.

You can change without healing, but you can’t heal without changing.

Healing is not about eradicating the parts of ourselves we most loathe, nor is healing won through achievement sprees. Healing is realizing that you are already whole (perfect) right now, as you are. In this moment, you are worthy of as much love, joy, freedom, dignity, and connection as any human being could ever deserve. If you could fully accept the immutability of your worth, that would be all the healing you’d ever need. This is very upsetting news for perfectionists. Perfectionists love a project.

Unless you consciously decide that you want to heal, you’ll always choose familiarity and convenience over surprise and effort because that’s what human beings are wired to do.

Familiarity and convenience offer us control, which in turn offers us predictability. If we can predict our environment, we increase our chances for survival.

Surviving doesn’t demand that you heal or thrive; surviving only requires that you don’t die. If your goal is merely to survive, it’s important that you close yourself off to any risk. If your goal is to extend your survival skills to “t...

Risks are not automatically dangerous; they’re automatically uncertain. To take a risk, you have ...

Relinquishing predictability is an ambitious task for two reasons. First, it makes you feel like you’re losing control (because you are, and this is a good thing). Second, it takes continuous effor...

initially, you have to process so much more information than you otherwise would: Do I like this? Is this what I want? Is this who I am? Is this working for me? Am I happier yet? Should I be crying right now? What is this doing to my relationships? How is this affecting my wor...

In the background of this psychological calculus is the evolutionary reflex to return to what’s familiar. When you engage in a dynamic that’s familiar, the incentive is that you don’t have to process any new information. It’s like getting out of an Uber without having to...

Your brain likes streamlined; hence, you gravitate towards what’s familiar even when what’s familiar is hurting you and you know it. The “devil you know” is mo...

The seductive ease that accompanies the familiar is constantly humming in the background of your healing. You don’t want to go back to your old ways, but familiarity feels like home when you’re in new and foreign territory. Familiarity can be ho...

You don’t need to abandon everything you’re comforted by in order to heal. You do need to differentiate between “good familiar” and “bad familiar,” though, because both are...

The more stressed you are, the harder it is to tell the difference between good familiar and bad familiar; all you register is comfort. When your stress response is activated, anything that’s familiar feels like, The...

Parisian perfectionists work harder to do more for other people at the cost of meeting their own needs. Intense perfectionists apply brute force to their work, clocking more hours with less rest alongside a disregard for the law of diminishing returns and the risk of complete burnout. Procrastinator perfectionists plan to make a plan about learning how to best make a plan. Messy perfectionists play Jenga with their goals, continuing to shift the top priority in a way that’s built to collapse. Classic perfectionists jam structure into every open space they see, including the places designed to be breathing holes.

Letting go of the immediate gratification attached to bad familiarity is only the beginning. You also have to let go of the outcome of your striving.

What these fears have in common is that they’re based on a future outcome. There are too many factors at play, factors you cannot possibly foresee, for you to ever be able to successfully manipulate every outcome in your favor. In other words, you cannot control the future. If you can’t let go of your attachment to the outcome, you will spend your life trading one fear for the other.

Operating from a chronic state of fear is useless. Fear-based lifestyles are a perpetual scramble, a dizzying loop, a ring of fire. To exit the loop, you have to enter the present moment. You enter the present moment by letting go of the future outcome and focusing on what you’re doing right now—otherwise known as engaging in the process.

initially feels like a distasteful apathy for most perfectionists. We don’t understand the alternatives—so we’re supposed to no longer care about achieving goals? That leaves us to do what, exactly? Replace our deodorant with essential oils and become one with nature? We think, No thank you, I’ll take the ring of fire, please.

Letting go of the outcome doesn’t mean you stop caring about goal attainment; of course you care. Goal setting isn’t problematic. The problem arises when you hook your joy onto a future outcome: I’ll be happy when I get this or I’ll be happy if I can keep this.

You will never experience the future; you’re always and only in the present moment. If you’re waiting on the future to feel joy, you will never feel joy. One big reason we resist letting go of the outcome is that we don’t want to fail. We don’t want to fail because we don’t want to be f...

You can’t control the outcome of your striving, but you do have the power to choose how you ...

When you allow setbacks, rejection, delay, or whatever you’re perceiving as failure to serve as a commentary on who you are, it’s hard to move forward because you stop believing in yourself. You lock yourself out of a growth mindset. When you’re in a maladaptive space, failure has the final say on what’s possible for you. When you don’t allow rejection, delay, or failure to serve as a commentary on who you are, it’s easy to move forward because you still believe in yourself. You step over the failure like a napping dog and you keep going. When you’re in an adaptive space, you don’t give failure any power. Not only does failure not have the final say; it doesn’t have any say.

To focus on the process, you have to start honoring the process. Honoring the process can be divided into two parts: acknowledgment and celebration.

Honoring the Process through Acknowledgment

The bad news is that achieving a specific outcome (an award, a promotion, a relationship, etc.) is not going to make you happy. Building meaning is what makes us happy, not desultory acquisition. The worst news is that blazing through the process makes you feel worse because you put so much pressure on attaining the goal as your singular source of happiness, but hitting the goal can never make up for the fact that you were disengaged and not feeling any joy or connection the whole time you were in pursuit of it.

When you focus on the process, you focus on the victories that are happening now. You focus on what’s ready to be enjoyed now. Acknowledgment gives you power because it widens your perspective, engenders positivity, and helps you broaden and build. For example, if we were to acknowledge the process you’re currently in, the acknowledgment would look something like this:

If you could go back in time and transplant your brain and all that you’ve learned into the five-years-ago version of you, it would blow your five-years-ago mind. What used to be your ceiling is now your floor. You float across waters that you used to flail and thrash in.

That sense you privately carry, that you still have so much work to do, that you’ll never be done, that you’ve been working on self-improvement for so long and yet it feels as if you haven’t even dented your vision—that represents your ambition, not your defeat.

Without anchors, we drift.

they’re all designed to help us announce how much a milestone (the very beginning or the very end of the process) means to us. But what about the middle points of a process? The middle is usually where we need the most connection, recognition, support, and encouragement.

The middle of the process is invisible, soundless. If you don’t add noise and visibility through celebration, the process goes by unnoticed. Not just unnoticed by others but also by you.

Leading a self-defined life means that you get to decide what success looks like for you, and you get to decide how and when to celebrate that success.

You’re trying to control the amount of joy you feel now so you can control the amount of loss you absorb later.

You can’t control grief by subtracting joy from your life. You can’t control grief, period.

Approaching joy from a position of power looks like recognizing that joy does not need to be notarized by some external marker before you’re allowed to officially feel it. The positive moments that are happening in your life now are real. Whether they stay or go does not make them less real now. Also, the positive moments don’t have to be achievement-themed; they can be as simple as being present to the first sip of a hot drink in the morning. Anything that’s on your “Like List” counts.

Get it out of your head that the only way to grow is through suffering. You can grow just as profoundly through joy. “Doing the work” is not solely about learning how to recognize and speak our sadness, our anger, and our angst. Doing the work is just as much (if not more so) about learning how to recognize, speak, and celebrate

When your instincts are telling you to give yourself more time before you make a decision, it can feel like you’re taking a passive role in your life. Patience is not passivity.

Move away from spending your time in ways that aren’t meaningful for you. Move away from spending your energy in ways that aren’t reciprocated.