Perfectionism: Keeping Your Enemy Close
Perfectionism is a mindset, a thought habit, often informed by your childhood and societal lessons. A belief that you are anything other than completely perfect and worthy of love exactly as you are. This thought habit can keep you chasing your proverbial tail, always trying to prove your worth to the world and to yourself.
And can lead you to put off projects, goals, workouts, dreams, dates because you fear deep inside that it’ll all be for not. You won’t do it perfectly, someone may criticize it or not like it, why even try? So you procrastinate and spin in worry, strengthening that old thought patterns in your mind, body, spirit.
I used to be this way too. You can begin to shift your thinking, regulate your nervous system, and support your perfect inner child so you can begin to see the truth.
You’re already perfect, regardless of what you do.
And the good news is there are so many ways to work with and support ourselves, to loosen the destructive grip of perfectionism, to change the story. One of the first, and I feel most constructive, steps in learning to shift yourself out of perfectionist thought habits is to learn to befriend your perfectionism.
So befriending our perfectionism, and I literally mean, getting to know it, being its friend, holding hands, going to the movies, but this process of befriending allows us to see how our perfectionism has helped us to survive. It’s so important to acknowledge it in preparing to loosen its grasp on us, and this friendly relationship gives you a path to talk to those perfectionist parts of yourself.
First though, of course, I would recommend you start with supporting your nervous system. If perfectionism has led you to feel safe in your life, then you want to make sure to get your body on board. My favorite ways to do this are grounding and orienting.
Orienting helps you to locate yourself in time and space, and gives your brain an anchor for its machinations. Same too with grounding, though for folks with a lot of trauma or more recent trauma, or if you’ve been working through your trauma and it feels really present, I would start with orienting.
I want to also say just a little reminder, that if you start to do an exercise like grounding and feeling in your body doesn’t feel safe or is inaccessible, a beautiful option is to focus on something outside yourself. This has a similar effect. It helps your body calm because it gives your brain something to do.
The key to nervous system regulation work is titration, which means slowly adding more challenges and supports to your system with an encouraging, loving energy.
Never a pushing or shoving energy.
So, back to befriending that brilliant gift of survival we know as perfectionism. And here I want to remind you, this thought habit is a gift from your child self. It just no longer serves you now. Like your childhood sweater. So think of a sweater that you had as a little kid. It likely doesn’t fit your adult body now. That’s not a bad sweater and it kept you warm back in the day. It just doesn’t serve you now because it’s a toddler size three and you’re a grownup size.
So a good way to get to know your inner perfectionist is to imagine them again in vivid detail. You may want to draw them or write a bullet point of their characteristics, or detail them in your mind’s eye.
Get to know what your perfectionist sounds like.
Does it have a shrill insistent voice? Is it barky and demanding?
It is demure and cutting? What does it look like? Is it tall, broad-shouldered with menacing eyes? It is scowling with angry eyes? Does it wear anything but finely pressed suits? What does it smell like? Rotting bananas?
Once you have the picture of your perfectionist, you might ask them what they most need.
Often, the deeper answer here is that they need a friend. A person to be kind to them, a listening ear, understanding, compassion, to be told that they’re already perfect and don’t have to keep attempting to prove themselves.
See if you can imagine giving them some of that care. The truth is that our inner perfectionist can be and is your friend. Because all in all, this is just part of you and this part of you which is not all of you is really just looking to protect you and thinks it needs to earn love. And above all, it wants to avoid being rejected.
If you can remember this, you can develop tender feelings and a kind relationship to these parts of yourself.
Now that you are friends, even just acquaintances with your inner perfectionist, you have a better chance of changing your story about what it is that gets you motivated and what helps you to achieve what you want to achieve.
Remembering motivation is just a thought and it’s one that perfectionism can attempt to block if you’re not bringing your awareness to it. So you get to ask, what is the story that we – me and my perfectionist – are telling us here? Have you decided that you are a failure because you made a mistake, so that makes you some kind of bad unworthy friend, lover, boss, employee, cousin?
Have you and your perfectionist decided that you are a failure because you weren’t able to read someone’s mind and anticipate their needs? Making note, of course, that that kind of a thought is a hallmark of codependent thinking.
Have you and your perfectionist decided that you are a failure because you experienced something difficult, something challenging, something that stretched you, pushed you?
And maybe the outcome of that event, that something difficult was not what you wanted.
If these are your thoughts, or if you have similar thoughts, it’s most likely that everything you think or feel or happens will bolster these thoughts. And what doesn’t fit or goes against these ideas of yourself will get tossed out, like when your mom says, “You’re so pretty,” and your brain’s like, “You have to think that. You’re my mom.”
So this perfectionism story needs to change. And the story can change because we are not our thoughts. Thoughts come and go like the weather. And just like we can easily let light, easy, simple thoughts go, through this work, we can let go of the thoughts that are emotionally heavy and create suffering.
First, we need to change our experience of these perfectionism stories as valid. This of course is not a one-time event, but challenges to our stories are ongoing because we are engaged in creating a new reality, a new relationship with ourselves. And we need new muscles to keep us in that new story, to keep us on the new track.
Remembering, of course, that a belief such as the belief that something is wrong with you, you mess everything up, you have to work harder, harder, harder, those are just old thoughts that you’ve thought again and again and again, so often that your brain believes them as fact. And this is the work of unfacting.
So we are unfacting here, reminding your brain that just because you’ve thought it a thousand times doesn’t mean that it’s a fact. Your perfectionism stories are not facts.
If the thought that you’re thinking is that you are anything less than complete perfection, it’s time to unfact that one.
Some challenges that you may ask yourself and your perfectionist, that inner perfectionist voice might be, does worrying really make us more successful? And if we turn away from worry, what can we do instead? Pro tip here, self-love and acceptance is the other option of what you can do instead of worrying.
You might ask, what would it mean to feel good about something we’ve done? What would that feel like, look like? How can I celebrate myself and everything I’ve achieved? How would it feel in my body to do that? You may ask how you could learn to take a compliment. How might learning to take a compliment, to accept that someone else thinks something good about me, bring me out of the familiar and often comfortable place of feeling bad about myself?
And how might this allow me to be closer to others and to show myself more love? What would it mean to not be good at everything, but rather, to be really good at what I am good at and to honor and celebrate that? I’ll share, for example, that I am a lousy pilot, having never tried it. I haven’t the first idea of how to even turn on a plane, but I don’t expect myself to be a phenomenal pilot and I don’t beat myself up for not being able to do it.
Instead, I focus on my strengths. Coaching, loving others unconditionally, having amazing hair, being hilarious. As you ask these challenging questions, know that you are already in the process of reframing and reparenting yourself into greater love and understanding and getting your perfect and possibly quite scared inner children on board with all of this change is so vital.
Take a moment to connect with them any time you feel those perfectionist thoughts coming up for yourself. When you meet those stories with love, that is the act of reparenting and it’s pure magic.
What do we do in a situation where your inner critic, your inner perfectionist is going all out on you?
First, we breathe. Orient yourself to time and space, ground yourself, perhaps do a quick round of watch that beast or feel that fabric. And then call out what your perfectionist is saying about what you’ve done or said or thought.
Ask yourself, is it a judgment, a scare tactic, an insult, a demeaning name, a conclusion, a prediction of a crisis? So in this moment, if I were to call her out, I’d have to say she was judging me hard. Shaming me, moving me into full crisis mode. Next, look for the actual evidence. Give your perfectionist a little love and then be in the evidence.
Is there anything you can see that might tell you you are not a failure and that other humans might make similar errors because we’re humans? Try to see the situation through the eyes of someone you love and trust, as though they were standing right in front of you or right to your side and ask yourself, what do they see when they look at me?
Perhaps literally ask someone you trust to tell you how they would understand the situation and what they would think of you. This internal and perhaps external scanning of evidence helps you to reframe the situation and frees you up to choose your thoughts with greater accuracy.
I may call in a beloved ally as a resource. If my best friend was standing in front of me, what would they say?
And just hearing that in my own mind, in my own heart, my thoughts and the thoughts and feels of someone I love really makes that perfectionist start to shrink. The next thing I would do would be to try to stay out of black and white thinking and to begin to move into the grey. Let yourself entertain the idea that it’s not one thing or the other. Success or failure. And challenge yourself to think that most of life is somewhere in the glorious grey.
If we are being friends with our perfectionists, showing that little creature within some love, seeing them in a heart-focused way, we can give them the benefit of the doubt, and therefore we can say to ourselves that this part of our personality, this part of our psyche is trying to motivate us, but they haven’t learned how to do it in a supportive and loving way.
If your goal is to motivate you, what would a healthy, loving, kind, generous way to do so sound like?
Remember, intense self-criticism and worry not only diminishes our self-esteem. It throws our bodies into disarray, elevating our heart rate, creating tension in our muscles and our gut, which spikes our adrenaline, which leads to our cortisol going up, which pumps the blood more and more to the heart and lungs, heart and lungs, and not to the brain, which actually stops us from thinking clearly as we go into that well-worn path of sympathetic activation.
Take some slow deep breaths. Calm, center, ground yourself however you can.
When your perfectionist comes up, you get to keep asking yourself what the kind and considerate ways to help you reach your goal are.
Instead of thinking about the end, think about what small concrete step you can take next.
Therefore, you can take courageous action and do the next right thing. This is especially important if your perfectionist is pushing down on you so hard that you become avoidant, worried, fearful, or start to procrastinate.
My inner perfectionist is a part of me that loves me so much. And as often happens with dear friends, sometimes you have to call a hard no or say stop when they cross a boundary of yours. And you can also try to extend great compassion to them, and thus, to yourself.
Remember, you cannot hate your perfectionism away.
Shaking your little fist at it and saying, “Ugh, I wish I could just not be a perfectionist,” is unlikely to make it go away. Instead, you can reassure this protector part of you that you’re doing what you need to do. All is well, and that you’ll get it done as best you can, and that that is the true definition of perfect.
Finally, I would like to invite you to consider taking tomorrow thinking out of your vocabulary.
It’s a framework that’s super common amongst folks with perfectionist thinking, to procrastinate, to put off for tomorrow what’s scary to do today.
Because you fear, often subconsciously, often deep inside, that you’ll eff it up. Someone will criticize it, or worst of all, you’ll criticize you for it.
Remember, these mental scripts are rarely conscious. Few of us are walking around saying, “You know, writing that report for my new boss is really kicking up for perfectionist habits so I’ll just put it off until the last minute and then I’ll throw it together under intense pressure as a way to evidence to myself that I’m not worthy of my boss’s praise and support.”
We don’t exactly do that. Your brain just does what brains do when we’re not minding them, when we’re not managing them, when they don’t have out attention. So your brain buffers. It pushes away the challenging thoughts and makes you feel numb, distracted, unfocused, not in your body.
Again, the key here is to recognize and notice these thoughts and the feelings they create. Your nervous system reactions to them. So you can acknowledge and befriend them and thus begin to shift them.
Any time you feel yourself putting something off, saying, “I’ll do that tomorrow,” with that slightly anxious or very anxious energy, I want to invite you to pause, to breathe, and to ask yourself why.
Why are you putting it off, my darling? If it’s that your day is really well scheduled and you literally don’t have time today then that’s fine. Just put it on your calendar and come on back to it. And if perfectionism and perfectionist thinking is part of your world, then that’s not likely to be the real reason why and that’s okay. Dig a little deeper, talk to your inner children, your inner perfectionist, and start to get some clarity on your own thoughts.
Show yourself your mind. Coach yourself. So you can breathe and learn to manage your thinking, instead of letting that old cassette tape from your family, your culture, society, impact you as perfectionist thinking for another day. Don’t put off for tomorrow what you fear doing today. It doesn’t serve you, you perfect and amazing human animal.
Keep breathing, keep practicing these simple tools. Remember your thoughts create your feelings and if you’re finding yourself in thoughts like, “I’m going to eff this up, I never do things right, oh gosh, she’s not going to like this, someone’s going to criticize or judge me,” it’s just an old habit. That’s just perfectionism and that’s okay, my beauty. You are so wildly capable of healing and of change.
Thank you for taking the time to read Feminist Wellness. I’m excited to be here and to help you take back your health!
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