I've been thinking about the price of perfection
BY RICK THYNE
In our first few therapy sessions, Louisa sketched out for me her remarkable credentials. Like her father and uncle, she’d graduated at the top of her class with an MBA from Harvard Business School and, as her mother wished, joined the two of them in the family’s investment firm. Her friends were thrilled by her success at Harvard, as they had been when she’d graduated at the top of her class from a prestigious private high school, and when she’d earned her Bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale. She accepted their tributes but felt none of the joy for herself. At every level of her education, being first had been what was expected of her: not a cause for joy but relief at having not failed.
What Louisa had noticed even before she came to talk with me was that none of her successes had made her happy - certainly not in the way her friends had been happy for her. The man she’d been engaged to for nearly a year had finally given up on his campaign to convince her of her own worth: no matter what he did, no matter how deep their feelings for one another, he could no longer tolerate her self-criticism that triumphed over any efforts he made to tell her how wonderful she was.
I already knew this much about people like Louisa. For perfectionists like her, their worth is based entirely on their performance; if you succeed, you’re simply meeting expectations; if you fail, your excuses, like you, are worthless. The message learned from parents and mentors is constantly echoed in conversations with themselves:
Not only have I failed yet again, but I am a failure. Failure is not just what I do but who I am.
The ways perfectionists talk to themselves are laid out in a paper authored by my psychologist friend and colleague Dr. Jeffrey Prater. His focus is on young people, but in my experience, his schematic applies well to perfectionists of any age, in any circumstance.
He noted these five differences between perfectionists like Louisa and high achievers (those who strive for excellence but aren’t consumed by the price of perfection):
High achievers are pulled toward their goals by a desire to achieve them, while perfectionists are driven toward their goals by a fear of not accomplishing them.
High achievers focus on progressive steps toward accomplishing their goals, on the distance between where they started and where they are now; perfectionists focus on the gap between perfection and their actual accomplishments, and view the mere existence of this gap as sure evidence of failure.
High achievers are motivated by hope; perfectionists are driven by a fear of failure.
High achievers can succeed, and celebrate that success or their progress toward a goal. Perfectionists can only meet expectations or, much more commonly, fail. Making the grade is no more than just a relief, not a reason to celebrate.
High achievers frequently engage in positive self-talk. Perfectionists engage almost exclusively in critical self-talk.
Jeffrey Prater, “Anxiety and the Pursuit of Perfection: Causes, Consequences, and Healthy Alternatives,” College Board Forum (November 8, 2019)
The emotional toll on such people is painful and destructive. Perfectionists are chronically disappointed. They surveil themselves constantly to find their failures, so they can preempt anyone else in pointing out their mistakes. Because they are never satisfied with their own self-monitoring, they live with a constant base note of failure’s sadness. They ache from their disappointment in falling short; they are seldom joyous or playful.
I learned from a young age that perfectionism was something I didn’t need to worry about. Early on in school, I was something of a discipline problem, often sent to the corner to stand facing the wall or (for more serious disruptions) sent to the vice principal’s office. By my mid-teens, my ability to abide by the moral code of the church I was part of was justifiably suspect, to me as well as to my ethical mentors. I had high-school teammates who were all-city basketball stars, a level not accessible to me no matter how driven I was to match their abilities. I graduated from high school with a C+ average. With all of these limitations in my academic, moral, and athletic achievements, by the time I made my way into and out of college, I settled into the belief that, at best, I was pretty good.
Throughout these earlier experiences and then a lifetime of being pretty good, I have always known that even though I fail time and again, I am not a failure. When I succeed and fail, I have people who love and accept me and never hold my failures up as evidence that I am a bad person. My inability to be perfect, and now my disinterest in being perfect, leave me content with being a pretty good person.
I have always known that even though I fail time and again, I am not a failure.
My gratitude for this understanding of myself gets punctuated every time I run into a new friend or a new therapy client like Louisa, for whom perfectionism is still an expectation and therefore their central goal. It shows up in school kids who have internalized parental expectations that there is no room for failure, which is defined as anything less than the highest possible grade. It shows up in the moral lives of people who show themselves little mercy when they lie or cross sexual boundaries or succumb to forbidden expressions of anger or violence. Moral consequence is either damnation or innocence, and they’ve failed once again to be innocent. It shows up in relationships in which a parent’s unhappiness or a partner or a child’s failure is taken as a personal failure: I’m responsible for making them feel good about themselves, which means I’m not only responsible for my own perfect performance but for the performances of those whom I’m expected to lead into some perfectionist righteousness. If they are unhappy or if they fail, it’s because I’ve failed them.
No wonder perfectionists isolate themselves. They cannot be intimate, because this would require opening themselves to someone else; and what would they open up with? Their expectations and their chronic disappointment? To share either would expose them to judgment and thereby terrify them, so they retreat alone into silence. They avoid the candor that intimacy requires and live in emotional isolation; their unachievable aspirations metastasize into perpetual loneliness.
Disappointed and isolated, perfectionists disappear emotionally. They live behind the image of who they’re supposed to be, unable to own and display whatever might be their authentic self. Hence among perfectionists the high levels of eating disorders (my body disappears) and suicide (I’ll just leave completely), and all the stops on the way to these drastic resolutions: anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive disorders, even reduced life-spans. They do not know themselves and they dare not let others in on their pain, so emotionally and sometimes physically, they simply go away.
So deep are their disappointment, isolation, and emotional disappearance that these are by now near-indelible facts of life for perfectionists like Louisa. Even when they can see and feel that this mode isn’t working for them, the idea of moderating their aspirations or self-criticism is like suggesting that they change the color of their eyes.
The perfectionist is completely unable to separate her constant critical inner voice from her own authentic inner voice; they’re stitched together in the tapestry of her sense of herself.
As parents and friends, siblings and therapists, what can we do to help them? Frankly, I feel like I need to do something not only because of the pain my friends and clients are living with, but also because of the pain that comes from loving them. They cannot return my affection because they need to hide in their distance, they cannot enjoy my company because their disappointment blots out their capacity for pleasure, they cannot take my advice because I’m asking them to question the only safe way they’ve ever found to conform to their own and other’s expectations.
My temptation is to slip into toxic positivity, dismissing negative emotions and responding to that distress with pat reassurances rather than empathy. I’m full of details to prove to Louisa that she is not really a failure, that all she needs to do is adjust her expectations a bit and be content with whatever she can and cannot achieve. But the problem for her isn't resolved by a reality check or a re-framing her self-talk. She is completely unable to separate her constant critical inner voice from her own authentic inner voice; they’re stitched together in the tapestry of her sense of herself. No external voice could ever be as loud, as trusted, as certainly correct as that internal one that constantly reminds her that she just isn't good enough.
As her therapist, can I help her identify this critical voice, which usually comes from parents or religious leaders or rigid teachers or mentors? If she can identify this original voice that narrates her failings, can she also figure out why it remains such a threat? Why does she retreat to perfectionism to protect herself from that voice? What would it mean if she really did fail? From similar personal and therapeutic experiences, my guess is that the fear she faces is the expectation that, should she fail to fulfill the voice’s expectations, she will lose that person’s love and the relationship bond will be broken. The unspoken consequence of failure can seem monumental and world-ending for Luisa and other perfectionists; does this fear of the loss of love haunt any and every consideration?
What happens if I embrace your belief that you not only fail, but that you very well might be a failure?
As her therapist, my goal is to help her find freedom from these expectations and a comfortable relationship with who she really is. This revolutionary paragraph has been my touchstone for all my relationships since I first read it over twenty years ago, and helps particularly when I encounter a perfectionist. It reminds me of where to sit when I want to be of genuine help to someone.
A determined therapist does not strive to have a good relationship with his patient – it can’t be done. If a patient’s emotional mind would support good relationships, he or she would be out having them. Instead, a therapist loosens his grip on his own world and drifts, eyes open, into whatever relationship the patient has in mind – even a connection so dark that it touches the worst in [the therapist].
Thomas Lewis, MD et al., A General Theory of Love (Random House, 2000), p. 178.
So here’s how I try to relate to friends or clients who are perfectionists. I say, in my words and actions, I’ll sit with you in your disappointment with yourself, in your isolation, in your disappearing. You’re stuck here, I know, and I'll stay with you in your stuck-ness. I’ll embrace your belief that you not only fail, but that you very well might be a failure. I will NOT join you in hurting yourself or anyone else, but I will understand that you sometimes feel this destructive impulse. I’ll sit here as long as it takes for you to trust my company.
There is this difference, though, between myself and someone like Louisa: while she sits here in despair, I sit here in the hope that one day she’ll listen to my voice as an alternative to the critical voice that drives her to perfectionism, and allow mine to become a voice so deep and close that it blends with her own authentic voice. I’ll sit here with the hope that one day, hearing my voice as her own, her trust in herself will be strong enough for her to grab my hand, pull me up out of my chair, and venture out into an imperfect life as an imperfect person.