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

by Katherine Morgan Schafler

effective healing unfolds without detection. Healing is less often big and bold and more often minute and silent.

Healing is a series of tiny evolutions, born from ostensibly negligible choices, carried out day after day; it’s most often expressed in moments that have no witness other than yourself. These invisible “nothing” moments are where the magic happens.

Healing is anything you do when you act on behalf of your most authentic self.

Healing requires an intense amount of work, but healing does not require that the intensity of the work be experienced in a consolidated fashion. Motivation, impulse control, support, vulnerability, self-compassion—none of this stuff needs to arrive via freight delivery on your front lawn before you can be ready to heal.

Radical anything sounds bold and sexy—it sounds like the thing cool people do. Meanwhile, incrementalism is not sexy, it’s not thrilling, it’s not trendy, it’s not exciting to talk to other people about (“Last night I drank half a glass of water before bed”)—it’s not even visible most of the time.

Incrementalism is a little-by-little, inch-by-inch, slowly-but-surely, entirely unceremonious affair. Incrementalism is a hard sell, except that it’s so effective. Healing is boring sometimes; no one tells you that. Amidst the tedium, we look for the shortcut, but I’ve never seen anyone take a shortcut to healing that worked in real life. Have you? As the expression goes, “Doing the work is the shortcut.”

The Difference between a Struggle and a Challen...

dealing with something that we don’t know how to do but we feel we have guidance and that someone understands us, it’s a challenge. When we’re dealing with something we don’t know how to do and feel we have no guidance and that no one understands us, it’s a struggle.

Challenges are energizing because, even though we’re doing something difficult, we’re connected. Connection builds energy. Struggles are exhausting because we’re isolated. Isolation drains energy.

Feeling “less in danger” is not the same as feeling safe. Safety requires connection. When you’re isolated and you don’t feel safe, you make every decision from a posture of defense. Subsequently, your decisions (and your life) become a reflection of fear instead of a reflection of your true, secure, whole, and perfect self.

Struggle does not guarantee resilience. A more accurate expression would be “What doesn’t kill you forces you into a position where you have to choose between connection or isolation, and choosing connection makes you stronger.” (Not as slogan-ready per se, but accurate nonetheless.)

It was never the terrible things that happened to you that made you stronger; it was the resiliency-building skills you engaged to process the terrible things. What doesn’t kill you can make you stronger, but only if you feel your feelings, process your experience (i.e., figure out what the experience means to you), and engage the protective factors around you—mainly, the power of connection.

“What’s wrong with you?” the field will ask, “How can we better connect to one another?” The field will ask the latter question because while struggle doesn’t automate resilience, it turns out that connection does.

connection is what builds resilience, not suffering. Connection carries what Dr. Perry refers to as a “buffering capacity” to trauma and stress.

“relational health” has more predictive power over your mental health than the adversity you’ve encountered.

“Essentially, connectedness—i.e. the nature, quality, and quantity of connection to family, community, and culture.”

What Perry is saying is that it’s not the degree of fucked-upness from your past that holds the final say on your ability to be joyful and thrive, it’s the quality of connections you build into your life now.

As perfectionists set their sights on complicated, ambitious goals, we’re also all working on some very, very basic goals. If you forget that simple isn’t always easy, or you never learned that in the first place, you have no understanding as to why you’re having trouble. You expect to do the simple things effortlessly.

When you conflate simple with easy, you don’t give yourself a runway of patience or self-compassion to take off from when approaching simple tasks.

Without patience or self-compassion, you’ll respond to the difficulty of simple tasks with self-punishment:

Because you’re in a punitive space, your thought-action repertoire will narrow, and your negativity will grow.

Because you’re not happy about what is, you’ll spiral into dysfunctional counterfactual thinking about what could’ve been.

Because what could’ve been seems so much more appealing, you’ll start to feel like a failure. Because you feel like a failure, you’ll feel justified self-sabotaging any good you previously opened yourself up to because it doesn’t make sense to y...

When you have a true passion for something you’re not good at, that’s not the same as having a weakness; it just means you’re a beginner.

Refine the strengths you already possess. Leaning heavily on your gifts is what explodes your potential. Ignoring your gifts while you attempt to triage your shortcomings puts that explosion of potential on pause.

Harvard Business Review titled “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time”

Seth Godin says, “If it’s not a reason for everyone in your situation, it’s an excuse.”

procrastination is not a time-management issue; it’s an emotional-regulation issue. When we don’t focus on energy management, we’ve gone through the day with no boundaries and no recovery periods. By the time we get home, we’re so knotted up with unprocessed clumps of feelings and little mental ailments of every sort that we couldn’t possibly begin to untangle them.

Anything you do to protect, save, restore, and build your energy is productive. Productive activities include but are not limited to sleeping, listening to music, lingering in bookstores, taking a bath, washing your car, completing the work assignment, good conversation, cooking, redecorating, watching a movie, getting a manicure, playing

basketball, reading, walking, and singing in the shower.

Anything that helps you operate with premium ener...

Maintaining premium energy is what gives you the stamina for the never-ending task of rising to your potential. It’s great

that you think about productivity so much; now you get to enjoy being productive in dynamic ways instead of reducing productivity to a task-completion race.

Giving and receiving is what maintains energy just like inhaling and exhaling maintains breathing.

Don’t worry about getting so lost in your leisure that you won’t return to your work. You’re a perfectionist; the drive within you to excel is compulsive, so you won’t be able to help returning to your work.

productivity is anything that energizes you without hurting you. What energizes you without hurting you? How might your life change if you did more of that?

You grieve whenever you have to let go of something that you’re not ready to let go of.

Our desires and experiences as human beings are regularly diametric. We want freedom and security, indulgence and moderation, spontaneity and routine. We want everyone to be treated equally, and we also want status. We want to connect deeply to those around us, and we also want everyone to leave us alone so we can look at dumb shit on our phones in peace.

I don’t like it when people say things like, “Your freedom is on the other side of your fear.” There is no other side. Mental health is not a door you walk through; it’s also not a staircase, or a checklist, or anything designed to be completed. Experiences swirl around in spheres. When you demarcate healing with midway points and finishing lines, you make healing a race and something that ends. Healing is neither. Spheres have no sides.

Moving in the direction of your potential requires a perpetual loosening of your grip, a constant letting go. We’re all grieving something all the time.

looks like allowing your painful emotions to exist without trying to cookie-cut them into heart and star shapes. Pain isn’t supposed to be cute.

Your pain does not need a makeover; your pain needs permission to stay unkempt. Difficult emotions need to be allowed to lie there like a brick. They’re feelings, not who you are.

People who heal are not the anointed ones who’ve figured out how to tie up all the loose ends; they’re the ones who’ve pulled the string on something new. Your curiosity knows what you need to open yourself up to. Curiosity is the unsung hero of mental health. Curiosity is strong; it can pull you out of anything.

When you can’t transmute your pain into something beautiful and it just hurts, you can still have that “living inside of art” feeling if you remember that the point of art is not to be beautiful but to rouse a sense of connection within the person who’s encountering the art.

Swap “better or worse” for “different.” Happiness is experienced in three stages; so is stress.

A feather’s-weight more weighs a lot. The difference between a struggle and a challenge is connection. Simple isn’t easy.

Energy management beats time ...

How can we expect someone to give up a way of seeing and understanding the world that has physically, cognitively, or emotionally kept them alive? None of us is ever able to part with our survival strategies without significant support and the cultivation of replacement strategies. Dr. Brené Brown

active relaxation might include rowing, walking, cooking, indulging in your favorite part of your job, going to a party, painting, dancing, writing, making a playlist, attending a lecture, gardening, organizing, and getting dressed up.

If you only decompress, you end up feeling lazy, vaguely gross, and empty inside. If you only actively relax, you end up feeling like you’re trying hard to restore but your efforts just end up causing you more stress.