Ever find yourself stuck chasing perfection? You spend hours worrying about a project being perfect, losing sleep, stressing, and yet it’s never enough. No matter how hard you try, you can’t quite reach perfection. Or if you do, when the project is over, you are hit with a sense of emptiness, so you find a new project to begin to perfect. Why do you do this? Let’s dig deeper.
Many times behind the need to be perfect is a deep-rooted feeling of not being good enough. The thought of not being good enough is usually not in the forefront of your mind but in your subconscious. This requires digging deeper and getting curious. If you are not perfect, what will happen to you?
Tina is in a group project at school, and it’s her job to create the PowerPoint. She spends hours making sure it’s perfect. Her classmates think it looks great, but she still thinks it needs more tweaking, so she spends more time on it. She even has stress dreams about it. To get curious with Tina, we need to sit in our emotion brain.
- Why might she feel the need for it to be perfect? She wants a good grade.
- Why? So she doesn’t fail the class.
- What will happen is she fails the class? She will have to retake the class
- Thinking with her emotional brain, what does she feel like will happen if she fails the class? Her parents will be very disappointed with her
- What happens to Tina when her parents are disappointed in her? She feels like a failure, and nothing she does is good enough for them.
- Has she felt this before? Yes, her parents put a lot of pressure since she was a small child to get good grades and would become very angry with her when she did badly in school.
- What did that feel like as a child? It felt like she wasn’t a good child, and her parents didn’t love her when she didn’t perform to their standards.
If we look through an attachment lens, we see that our behaviors are learned through our main caretakers (in many cases, our mom and dad). As children, we want to have a happy mom and dad, and we want to be loved by them. Children are essentially tiny people pleasers. Our parents are our means of survival. If they are happy, we get to survive. When our parents are misattuned to our feelings, we learn to adapt. One of those ways is perfectionism. We learn to be perfect so that our parents are happy with us and they keep us alive. This seems very drastic in the adult brain, but if you put yourself in your child’s mind, it’s not. Happy parents = survival.
So you learned to be perfect as a means to survive your childhood. You grew up, and that perfectionism serves you well in some instances (like getting good grades), and in other instances, it comes at the cost of mental distress. As an adult, your perfectionism is an overcorrection for when you are feeling not good enough.
So what do you do about it?
When you notice to the pull to be perfect
- Pause and reflect. Ask yourself, why am I feeling this way?
- Remind yourself that you don’t need to be perfect
- Use an affirmation like – Progress not perfection, or I am lovable despite my flaws.
- Go to therapy to process the misattunement of your parents.*something to know is feelings of inadequacy are not always the deep-rooted feeling behind perfectionism. This was just one example that is pretty common.
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