Mental health counseling is rarely an easy thing. It can sound to an outsider like a fluffy luxury, but often our pain and “stuckness” is locked around things that are difficult to talk about, let alone challenge. Not only can difficult feelings emerge when we start counseling, we may retreat deeper into our most comfortable ways of coping.
One such pattern of coping that might interrupt seeking support and change is a mindset known as “perfectionism”. This might be the hard-working part of you that takes responsibility and seeks excellence. Perhaps you know it better as “attention to detail”, or “conscientiousness” or “actually caring”. It wears different hats and works a little differently for everyone.
While there is a close relationship between perfectionism and anxiety, they are not mutually exclusive. The idea of “high-functioning” anything is that it is often hidden in plain sight. It can seem like the way we handle life is working for us, both to ourselves and to others. This means we might miss the source of our emotional discomfort by looking past our current daily habits and patterns of approaching life. Let’s take a closer look at how a perfectionistic paradigm can be a source of chronic discomfort and make mental wellness more difficult.
- Unreal standards. It is typically considered a strength to have a personal standard of excellence. When a person has a vision, a passion and perseverance to reach a goal it can be met or surpassed. This takes a turn when the standards are literally impossible. This pressure might even extend to relationships and hobbies as well as work—you can see how exhausting that might become.
- Refusing failure. A very hard reality in life is that you will fail at something. You just can’t be the best at everything. The definition of learning means that effort and often loss come before solutions. Viewing “failure” as unacceptable creates not only pressure on the task but on the person. When we do not meet our expectations, or those we feel others have for us, our identity becomes threatened. Not always obvious, perfectionism ties our sense of worth to what we are able to accomplish.
- All or nothing thinking. A classic barrier to healthy change is the subtle twist of thinking that outcomes are either wins or losses. Incremental progress is often missed and small successes are easily dismissed. This can be a toxic mindset for growth. There are many wins to flexibility and working in the gray area that life often occupies.
- Patterns of procrastination. Strangely, procrastination is often a sign of perfectionism. The internal energy needed to meet enormous standards and expectations can create anxiety and even delay. There can be a sense of waiting for perfect conditions, the silent commitment to a set of circumstances that might never arrive.
- Obsessive attention to detail. A high focus on detail can often make jobs within jobs, tasks within tasks. Feeling that every step of a process or task should be at finished product level can require large amounts of time, or even drain resources and energy, stalling the entire journey.
- Strained relationships. Unfortunately, we often want from others the same effort we give. This can create strain in relationships when we hold people to our own impossibly high standards. This can lead to conflict, resentment and feelings of alienation from family and co-workers alike.
- Physical Symptoms. The body never lies. In extreme cases, perfectionism may manifest in physical symptoms such as headaches, muscle tension, insomnia, or gastrointestinal issues, as the body reacts to prolonged stress and pressure.
So what do we do? We go to counseling for help with anxiety but we feel let down. We want to relax and feel less stressed, but we don’t want to challenge our ideals. Some of the following tools can be developed within a therapeutic relationship that will help.
Challenging automatic thoughts and responses. The Cognitive Behavioral approach to therapy is a tried and true way to see around the distorted thinking that perfectionism might represent. It may look different for you than for someone else, but we all have deep beliefs and vows that drive our behaviors. Coming up for air and challenging them is a good way to make sure you are in the driver’s seat in your own life.
Building self-compassion. As cheesy as may sound, the same attitude that you experience with your therapist (or other healing and trusted relationship) should be the basis for how you treat yourself. This takes time and maybe even unlearning. The fabric of your family legacy or the way you were raised might tell you that it is dangerous to cut yourself too much slack. Research does show us that self-compassion is not the same as ego or selfishness. It reflects a congruence in the way we hope to receive love is deeply connected to the way we extend love and forgiveness to ourselves.
Acceptance. Another great model of therapy that can help is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Not as well-known as CBT, this model is so helpful for getting honest about the way we handle difficulty in our lives. A big part of weathering stress is realizing what is actual danger and what is just expected challenge. Learning that we can handle pain and disappointment can be a life altering skill.
Resilience. A fancy word for bouncing back, this approach in therapy celebrates and capitalizes on what you already have going right in your life. Learning how to actually approach stress in a new and adaptive way means we don’t avoid stress, we get smarter about how we travel through it.
It can take years of learning ourselves and direct feedback to face the realities of our perfectionism. A great first step is finding a friend, mentor or therapist with the intent of looking at your relationship to stress and to outcomes. Perfectionism will make it hard to hear that we are actually doing anything wrong, after all that is what we are trying to avoid. Amazingly there is freedom and more change than you would imagine on the other side of self-compassion.
