![]() ![]() Punishment is a dumb strategy and makes everything worse. Perfectionism is too powerful for the “eradication approach.” When you try to get rid of your perfectionism, all you’re doing is hemorrhaging energy at the opportunity cost of attending to your wellness. Trying to get rid of your perfectionism is like trying to get rid of the wind by whacking it with a broom. People who relate to being perfectionists tend to relate to that identity interminably. The noticing and the longing last a lifetime, hence the psychical constancy to perfectionism. Perfectionists never stop noticing the gap between reality and the ideal, and they never stop longing to actively bridge that gap. Thinking of yourself as a perfectionist is like thinking of yourself as an activist, an artist, or a romantic-it’s not an identity that you can just shake off. Perfectionism is experienced in a deep and visceral way. For example, a person may say something like, “I went through a depression after college,” but we don’t “go through” perfectionism. We don’t talk about perfectionism episodically because we don’t experience it episodically. The “eradication approach” will also never work because thinking of yourself as a perfectionist is an enduring identity marker. “Thinking of yourself as a perfectionist is like thinking of yourself as an activist, an artist, or a romantic-it’s not an identity that you can just shake off.” So, maybe it’s time for a different approach. Never in the history of the world has this approach ever worked, and yet it is a mainstay approach. Terrible pieces of advice that perfectionists often receive are “just lower your expectations a little bit” or “don’t sweat the small stuff.” Attempting to manage perfectionism by telling people to just not be perfectionists is like managing anger by telling people to calm down. The “eradication approach” simply does not work. You’re either trying to eradicate it, or responding to it with punishment. Your problem is how you respond to your perfectionism. Your problem is not that you’re a perfectionist some of the most joyful, extraordinary, fulfilled people in the world are perfectionists. Misidentify the problem, misidentify the solution. To unleash your gifts, you’ve got to stop solving for the wrong problem. ![]() But perfectionism, when managed well, is a gift. Perfectionism is a power, and like every kind of power-wealth, words, beauty, love-if you don’t understand how to harness it correctly, it will corrupt your life. As our understanding of perfectionism develops, we’re abandoning generalized representations of the construct. There was no distinction between the healthy fats found in avocados and the unhealthy trans-fats found in donuts. The way we currently approach perfectionism is like the low-fat craze in the 90s, when all fat was considered bad fat. This means that everything you’ve heard about perfectionism isn’t actually about perfectionism itself, but about “maladaptive perfectionism.” “Maladaptive perfectionism” is the harmful and dangerous iteration of perfectionism and it’s stunning that we still don’t differentiate between these two aspects of perfectionism. However, this concept has yet to break through the seal of academia and into mainstream dialogue. Perfectionism can be expressed in healthy ways, hence the decades old concept of “adaptive perfectionism” or using your perfectionism to your advantage. In a world of commercial wellness, we continue to talk about perfectionism as if it’s an unnatural, exclusively bad thing, but it’s not. Persisting across time and cultures, the universal desire to actualize the ideals we imagine is as healthy as the impulse to love, solve problems, make art, and tell stories. With the capacity to be expressed both constructively and destructively, perfectionism is a natural human impulse that we animate through our thoughts, behaviors, feelings, and interpersonal relationships. The more we try to nail down what perfectionism is, the more we allow ourselves to see that perfectionism doesn’t fit inside the little box into which we’ve been trying to squeeze it. We are in the infancy of understanding the kaleidoscopic force that is perfectionism. We’ve been looking at perfectionism all wrong. Listen to the audio version-read by Katherine herself-in the Next Big Idea App. She earned degrees and trained at UC Berkeley and Columbia University, with post-graduate certification from the Association for Spirituality and Psychotherapy in NYC.īelow, Katherine shares 5 key insights from her new book, The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power. ![]() She was the former on-site therapist at Google. Katherine Morgan Schafler, LMHC, is a psychotherapist and speaker. ![]()
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