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

by Katherine Morgan Schafler

What Beyoncé has mastered is not a sequence of dance moves or the memorization of lyrics sung beautifully—a lot of people can dance, a...

What Beyoncé has mastered is her ability to consistently access the power of...

Because Beyoncé is a master of presence, she could walk on stage in a bedsheet, stand still, look you in the eye, and you would still be captivated. Do you k...

Your presence is the epicenter of your power. Everything you need to be present, you already have.

For a perfectionist in an adaptive mindset, presence is the main priority. Whatever you’re doing, thinking, or feeling, you seek to be present first. Some people describe this level of engagement with the present moment as being “in the zone.” Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it being “in flow.”

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. The opposite of presence is absence. 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 to do.

The notion that you never have to try to be perfect because you already are perfect is foreign to those of us who have been taught to experience ourselves as broken, inadequate, almost there. There is no almost there. There is only here, now.

Every aspect of your perfectionism is a meditation. Each is a ringing bell that chimes when you need certain reminders:

The past is over, it may as well have been eight thousand years ago, and the future is not something you can control—choose presence.

You’re already whole and perfect; you don’t need to become someth...

You’re worthy of peace now; you’re worthy eve...

Your potential is endless, it’s calling you, and wouldn’t it be exhilarating to answer the call? After you internalize the reminders, your perfectionism goes, “Okay good, you got it—now let’s go have some fun!” You’re free to unleash the intensity of your striving in service of your highest potential and deepest desires. You become more of who you are, and you get more of what you want. When you learn to use your perfectionism to help you, you will love that you can’t shut that impulse off. You will love being a perfectionist. The takeaway here is that you have to consciously respond, instead of unconsciously react, to perfectionism in o...

Cognitive perfectionism involves being able to understand X perfectly. There are some systems and formulas that can be fully understood from a cognitive perspective—for

With regard to loss, consider the firm grip that the need to completely (i.e., perfectly) understand “why” can take—for example, trying to pin down the exact reason why a person left us or the need to know every point of logic behind why we didn’t get hired. That’s cognitive perfectionism.

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.

Cognitive perfectionism is adaptive when it’s driven by curiosity and learning without attachment to outcome. For example, a neurologist who dedicates their life to researching why we dream. At the end of decades upon decades of research, the neurologist may say, “I don’t really know why we dream.” They didn’t get an answer or closure, but they thoroughly enjoyed decades of meaningful work. The neurologist could re...

if you grow up in an environment of abuse, neglect, or conditional love, it’s nearly impossible to relate to the idea that someone could love you no matter what you do or fail to do in this life. When someone who is loved conditionally is told, “I love you,” what they hear is, “I love you for now, so don’t mess up.” Conditional love isn’t love, it’s a contract. We all know contracts include fine print and that contracts can be voided.

Developmental theories of maladaptive perfectionism all echo the same sentiment: when basic needs for love and belonging go unmet in a child, all the energy that would normally go into building a healthy sense of autonomy (exploring self-interests and building healthy relationships with others) gets redirected into trying to belong and earn love.[17] This appeal for connection can take the form of trying to be superficially perfect: I’m doing everything perfectly, so will you love me now?

Perfectionism as a response to abuse and neglect is not only about wanting to be loved but about surviving. Your caregivers aren’t just there to be your cheerleaders and give you hugs; they also give you food, shelter, and clothing—you’re totally dependent on them. When that primal attachment isn’t secure, being anything less than whatever the...

I started my career in social work; doing home visits to check on kids who may be living in abusive environments was part of my job. 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 k...

Children who don’t feel loved will do anything to earn that love. You need a distraction? I’ll become a project. You need to not be sad? I’ll be happy enough for the whole family. You need me to be less of a burden? I won’t even make a sound when I chew.

Everything a child who does not feel loved does is done to answer this question: Am I worth loving yet?

The child asks some version of that question indefinitely, but not forever. When the answer to the question continues to be perceived...

Oh, I’m not like other people who get to be happy and loved. I’m not worthy of lo...

An invisible switch is flipped. In the child’s unconscious mind, freedom to be who they are is no longer an option. It’s too unsafe and too destabilizing. With freedom off the table, two choices remain. The first choice is performance. They choose to play the part of someone who is worthy and hope to God no one finds out they’re pretending. The second choice is destruction. The...

For those who choose performance, the pressure to perform perfectly is everything. It’s sort of like how, when people are lying, they often add so many details to their false stories because the lie doesn’t sound true in their own heads. Maladaptive perfectionism operates in the same way. The perfectionist feels they’re telling a lie—they’re only pretending to be worthy, so they better get their st...

Unconscious patterns of performance and destruction continue until they’re disrupted by conscious intervention. Once consciousness comes into play, anything is possible.

Listening to your instincts when they speak to you quietly about small things is as critical as listening to your instincts when they scream at you loudly about big things. Your instincts don’t operate on a hierarchy. The more you honor your instincts, the deeper you heal.

Letting go of control and stepping into your power looks like trading the question “What should I do?” for “What are my instincts telling me about this?”

Intentions style your life. While a goal represents a clear demarcation of quantifiable achievement, an intention is more sophisticated. Intentions are expressed not through what you do but through how you do it, not if you do it but why you do it. Your intention is the energy and purpose behind your striving; your goal is what you’re striving for.

A key difference between adaptive and maladaptive perfectionists (what some theorists believe is the key difference) is that adaptive perfectionists find a way to enjoy the process of striving towards a goal, whereas maladaptive perfectionists don’t. Perhaps that’s because adaptive perfectionists set intentions and goals, whereas maladaptive perfectionists only set goals.

When you set an intention, you start winning from day one because you keep getting the opportunity to honor the intention.

People who don’t set intentions will do some cutthroat shit to achieve their goals, then call their behavior “ambition.” This doesn’t happen because they’re terrible people, it happens because they’re desperate for validation. Chasing your ambition and running from your desperation are not the same thing.

If an adaptive perfectionist cannot achieve the goal without honoring the intention, they don’t want the goal; it’s not worth it to them. Abandoning a goal...

There is no other way to rise towards your potential than on your own terms. Letting go of a goal that isn’t aligned with your values isn’t quitting-quitting, it’s power-quitting. It’s like when your best friend finally breaks it off with her appalling, disaster-show ex who slept with her roommate and stole all her furniture. She’s not losing; she’s winning. Doves fly out of the group chat upon hearing the news—behold the glorious day. Yes, she has left something that she could not make work. No, she is not failing.

Power-quitting is important. If you’ve never power-quit anything, that’s something to explore.

Adaptive perfectionists ask, “Am I living up to my intentions?”

Everyone needs compassion. You can’t control whether others meet you with compassion or not, but you have the power to meet yourself with compassion.

When you learn to be compassionate with yourself no matter what, you carry safety with you wherever you go.

Perfectionists find an emphasis on self-compassion to be superfluous, “Uh-huh, be nicer to myself; got it.” We’re ready for the real solution. Unconsciously operating under the false belief that we learn more through punishment and suffering than we do through compassion and joy, we don’t understand that self-compassion is the primary solution.

Again, feeling the FEELS with this. I'm thinking of a show I watched recently NAS4A2 where the protagonist, and her little child friend, are both sensitive, artistic kids in tough families, in a tough MASShole environment. And I felt visceral anger, sorrow, empathy, wanting to champion them etc. and that's what I feel for my past self. WHAT IF that child, that young woman, had had the nurturing, supportive, champions that she needed in her life. Damn. What a difference that might have made.

Self-compassion is not telling yourself, “It’s okay, it’s alright,” when things are not okay and things are not alright. I call that type of generic reassurance emotional petting. Emotional petting doesn’t feel good because we know it’s not the truth. Self-compassion is honest. Self-compassion brings real relief.

Dr. Kristen Neff is to self-compassion what Dr. Brené Brown is to vulnerability. A pioneer in her field, Neff wrote the book on self-compassion (several books, in fact) and was the first to examine self-compassion from an empirical standpoint. Neff begins her definition of self-compassion in this way, “Self-compassion entails being warm and understanding towards ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating ourselves with self-criticism.”[1] According to Neff, there are three critical components to self-compassion: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness.

To practice self-kindness, Neff says, instead of judging yourself, criticizing yourself, or feeling pity for yourself, you first need to recognize that you’re hurting. Instead of focusing on your mistake as the primary issue, acknowledge your pain as the primary issue. As Neff explains, “We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time.”

One of the most basic tasks for therapists involves offering simple permission statements: You are allowed to be angry about that.

As you’ll recall from the last chapter, you’re blaming because you’re contending with something that’s difficult to feel, and you’re trying to get rid of your pain. Paradoxically, giving yourself permission to feel your pain is what alleviates your pain.

Kindness is a powerful choice because it disarms your defense mechanisms and helps you broaden and build a path forward.

Emotionally mature people recognize that the way they treat themselves is a choice, and they take responsibility for that choice. If you don’t choose to treat yourself with kindness, what are you choosing instead?

Neff’s second component of self-compassion is common humanity, defined as “recognizing that suffering and personal inadequacy is part of the shared human experience—something that we all go through rather than being something that happens to ‘me’ alone.”[3] As the writer Anne Lamott puts it: “Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you would believe.”

Social media exacerbates our misperception to a dangerous degree—everyone