The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

Your memories of perfect moments are memories of moments in which you were most present.

When you ruminate, you mistake replay for reflection. When you catastrophize, you mistake worrying for preparation.

You live with an attachment to a future outcome that generates chronic excess anxiety and you call that anxiety "hope.

You still love planning, you still love organizing, you still love making it beautiful-but you do it because you want to, not because everything will fall apart if you don't. You operate from a well of desire, not a pit of desperation. Your life may or may not look the same on the outside, but on the inside, much has changed. You stop working to curate a programmed experience. You allow yourself open access to all that you think and feel. You allow yourself to be free.

Maybe you are and maybe you aren't. A lot of perfectionists think they're driven by success when what they're really driven by is the avoidance of failure-two very different animals.

You will never experience the future; you’re always and only in the present moment. If you’re waiting on the future to feel joy, you will never feel joy.

Because balance doesn't exist, you're either operating under or over your energetic equilibrium. In other words, you're in the realm of being either underwhelmed or overwhelmed. Perfectionists reliably choose to operate over their equilibriums. For perfectionists, the risk of being underwhelmed is much scarier than the risk of being overwhelmed.

For so long, I honestly believed that whatever I accomplished didn't count if I had to ask for help along the way. I used to never ask for help, for anything from anyone.

The therapist version of "Live laugh love," is "Feelings aren't facts.

A part of her wanted to stop pushing herself, stop feeling compelled to rise to the occasion of being her best self. She wanted to figure out how to be her average self without feeling like a loser.

Being disconnected from your self-worth feels more like this: Okay, I’m almost there, I’m close, so I’ll be able to enjoy my life soon, as soon as I’m ‘done,’ as soon as I’m skinny, as soon as I make over X amount of dollars, as soon as I get the job, as soon as I get pregnant, as soon as I’m accepted into that school, or my children are accepted into that school, as soon as I make partner, as soon as I’m in a relationship, as soon as I can buy the person I love the present they want, I can feel good about myself as soon as I’ve earned it. When you’re disconnected from your self-worth, you think your ability to feel joy is won through goal attainment. I wonder if I wrote this entire book just to write this next sentence: You don’t earn your way to joy. Joy is a birthright.

You don’t heal by changing who you are; you heal by learning how to be yourself in the world.

Clients come to acknowledge that their desire was never to be perfect; it was only to be loved. To simply be seen, accepted, and embraced without conditions is what the child, who is now an adult, has been obsessed with-not perfect.

Joy holds tremendous power. It is impossible to live joyfully without your joy benefiting the world.

When you know success is just a matter of trial and error, you don’t mind the trial and you don’t mind the error. Not only do you not mind working on the puzzle; you also extract enjoyment from working on the puzzle.

Adaptive perfectionists are connected to their self-worth. When you know you’re already whole and complete (i.e., perfect) as you are, you’re operating from a mindset of abundance. You already have what you need, and you feel secure. For adaptive perfectionists, striving towards an ideal is a celebratory expression of that security. Maladaptive perfectionists do not feel whole or secure. They feel broken, and they operate from a mindset of deficit. Their striving is driven by the need to compensate, to fix what’s broken, and to try to offer substitutes for or try to hide what’s missing.

When you understand that closure is a fantasy, you have all the closure you'll ever need.

Sometimes you say a thought out loud to give it weight because it matters. Sometimes you say a thought out loud to let it go because it's trivial. Until you let the words hit the air, it can be difficult to tell which is which.

Where you worry you may be planting a seed, a large tree has already grown. -Dr. Stacey Freedenthal

Parisian perfectionists want to be perfectly liked, an “achievement” other types of perfectionists don’t prize. Even when everything else is going exactly the way they’d choose, when a Parisian perfectionist is experiencing difficulty connecting to someone with whom they want to connect, it can all feel for naught.

3. WE MISTAKE SELF-PUNISHMENT FOR PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY

Art is designed to be experiential. Any description of an artwork is an immediate reduction of an artwork; that’s what makes it art. Grief is the same way. Nobody fully understands art or grief because neither allows for perfect closure.

It was never the terrible things that happened to you that made you stronger; it was the resiliency-building skills you engaged to process the terrible things. What doesn’t kill you can make you stronger, but only if you feel your feelings, process your experience (i.e., figure out what the experience means to you), and engage the protective factors around you—mainly, the power of connection.

Procrastinator perfectionists who aren’t managing their perfectionism become self-loathing and critical. Not just self-critical, other-critical; they’re disparaging towards others who aren’t constrained by the same tendencies. Procrastinator perfectionists might publicly or privately declare all the ways in which they could’ve done X so much better—thrown the party, written the book, built the house, organized the conference, cooked the meal. And maybe they’re right. They probably could’ve done it better if they had tried, but they didn’t allow themselves to take the risk of trying. This haunts them.

A restored perfectionist understands that it's not that you long for some external thing or for yourself to be perfect, it's that you long to feel whole and to help others feel whole.

Humans have a special talent for complicating simplicity. We make a spectacle out of simple.

Letting go of whether you win or lose to focus on “the process” initially feels like a distasteful apathy for most perfectionists. We don’t understand the alternatives—so we’re supposed to no longer care about achieving goals? That leaves us to do what, exactly? Replace our deodorant with essential oils and become one with nature? We think, No thank you, I’ll take the ring of fire, please. Letting go of the outcome doesn’t mean you stop caring about goal attainment; of course you care. Goal setting isn’t problematic. The problem arises when you hook your joy onto a future outcome: I’ll be happy when I get this or I’ll be happy if I can keep this.

I met an old pastor’s wife who told me that when she was young and had her first child, she didn’t believe in striking children, although spanking kids with a switch pulled from a tree was standard punishment at the time. But one day, when her son was four or five, he did something that she felt warranted a spanking—the first in his life. She told him that he would have to go outside himself and find a switch for her to hit him with. The boy was gone a long time. And when he came back in, he was crying. He said to her, “Mama, I couldn’t find a switch, but here’s a rock that you can throw at me.” All of a sudden the mother understood how the situation felt from the child’s point of view: that if my mother wants to hurt me, then it makes no difference what she does it with; she might as well do it with a stone. And the mother took the boy into her lap and they both cried. Then she laid the rock on a shelf in the kitchen to remind herself forever: never violence. And that is something I think everyone should keep in mind.

You don’t earn your way to joy. Joy is a birthright. So is love, freedom, dignity, and connection.