“Ok. I am pretty tired from what I’m doing to myself (as are my friends and loved ones). So, what do I do?”
In their book Reinventing Your Life: How to Break Free From Negative Life Patterns Young and Klosko give some suggestions that recovering perfectionists can work on in the comfort in their homes. These are:
1. List the areas in which your standards may be unbalanced or unrelenting.
2. List the advantages of trying to meet these standards on a daily basis.
3. List the disadvantages of pushing so hard in these areas.
4. Try to conjure an image of what your life would be like without these pressures.
5. Understand the origins of your perfectionism.
6. Consider what the effects were would be if you lowered your standards about 25 percent.
7. Try to quantify the time you devote to maintaining your standards.
8. Try to determine what reasonable standards are by getting a consensus or objective opinion from people who seem more balanced.
9. Gradually try to change your schedule or alter your behavior in order to get your deeper needs met. (Remember, what the world wants from us is not always compatible with our what our body needs. We can learn to be more mindful of what our body needs—respecting ourselves—and make adjustments accordingly.)
Combatting the False Promises of Perfectionism — Refusing to Hustle
Besides these suggestions above it can be helpful to enlist the aid of family, close friends, or trained professionals to help with the more long-term work of exploring the heart of the problem—and discovering where those seeds of perfectionism were first sown.
Most brands of perfectionism come from deep-seated feelings of “not being enough” and having to purchase love and approval by our perfectionistic behaviors. Perfectionists don’t feel safe until things are done a certain way. It often comes from not feeling good about ourselves at our core. It comes from not feeling safe in the world we live in and thus needing to relentlessly pursue the illusion of control. That’s what Brené Brown refers to as the “hustle”. Our perfectionism is a way to scamper around and “earn” what deep down we feel we are missing.
Brown teaches that perfectionism is seductive because it suggests that we can do things in a way, or live life in a way, where we will escape people's judgment. Where we won't have to live with embarrassment. It promises us that if we try hard enough then we can live without criticism and failure. And these are all false.
Perfectionism comes from fear. It takes perceived mistakes, failings, and shortcomings and and turns them into threats.
We need to be more comfortable with the idea of failure. And maybe reframe failure as really the only way to get to where we want to be.
Perfectionism is the “dark side” of striving. Perfectionism ties achievement to love and approval. Often, the driving force behind the behaviors of many perfectionists is the fear of failure and, ultimately, the fear of rejection. Many perfectionists have a hard time truly accepting themselves and thus assume that the world does too and therein try to barter a perfect result for acceptance.
In some ways it is helpful to think about perfectionism as an addiction. And like all addictions, there are secondary gains. We get something out of it (or we wouldn’t do it in the first place). But the cost of perfectionism, like any other addiction, is high. Our relentless pursuit of the Perfect Result inevitably sabotages our relationships, health, and overall well-being.
Perfectionism is attractive because of the false promises: If you keep going at it you will achieve control; If you get this perfect people won’t notice this other areas that you feel you’re failing in; More importantly, if you keep going in your endless cycle of perfectionism you won’t notice your failings—because then you would have to recognize them and accept them.
If we struggle with unhealthy perfectionism we need to discover what has caused, or is causing, us to feel that we need to perform a certain way before we can feel worthy, safe, or that we belong. We need to explore why we don’t feel ok until things are exactly a certain way. We confront our darkest fears by answering the question: “What bad thing(s) will happen if I don’t do this exactly right?”
Ultimately, those things that help us feel a sense of worthiness, belonging, and self-compassion attack perfection at its very roots, destroying it; and become a preventative measure against future perfectionistic tendencies.
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