Perfectionism: the devil is in the details

Balance in life is striking a happy medium between opposites. The Greek philosopher Aristotle taught that virtue and happiness are the result of rejecting extremes. Courage, for example, is the virtue between excessive fear and excessive rashness.

Perfectionism is one of those problems where the devil is in the details. A surgeon who holds the balance of life and death in her hands needs a streak of perfectionism to get her job done, but a ninth-grader who writes the same essay 50 times trying to get it “right” is headed toward an academic experience of frustration and burnout.

The unhealthy perfectionist struggles with a great fear of failure and loss of love and esteem because of it. Albert Ellis, the psychologist who came up with Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, wrote this about perfectionists in his book, “Overcoming Resistance”: “Many people strive to be perfect (i.e. superhuman) in order to accept themselves as worthy beings. But since perfect human behavior is just about impossible, they damn themselves for not achieving it and then often desperately try even harder to achieve it – a common vicious cycle.”

Ellis makes three points here that are pretty interesting:

1. Perfectionism is really an attempt to be more than human. Humans make mistakes. We get the answer wrong, we play the wrong note, we go to the store for milk and come home with M&Ms, we sleep too late, we say the wrong thing. Perfectionists believe that their humanness makes them “less worthy” and they try to overcome it by not making mistakes.

2. Perfectionists “damn themselves.” Does anyone really want to live with a perfect person? Is the perfectly beautiful woman with the perfect house and the perfect clothes the envy of all the women who know her? Hardly. The perfectionist lives in a prison she herself formed.

3. Perfectionists are looking for something to like about themselves. They come to the conclusion that if they do A (perfect grades, house, hair, et cetera) then B (whatever B is – happiness, friends, attention, et cetera) will have to appear. It has to! Look how hard you worked for it! But as Ellis says, this ephemeral B never quite materializes and the perfectionist redoubles his efforts in a “common vicious cycle.”

How, then, can a perfectionist break out of this cycle? It may not be easy, but then, nothing of any worth ever is. If you struggle with the problem of perfectionism, you may need to sit and have a long talk with yourself. What are you so afraid of? Where does this fear of losing love and acceptance if you’re not perfect come from? (Check your family album for ideas. Perfectionists are made, not born.)

Perfectionism can lead to inertia and procrastination because the fear of failure means that you won’t even try. What do you think will happen if you start something and it isn’t perfect? And who decides what perfect is?

Finding a counselor who can talk your fears out with you can allow you to learn more about yourself and how you relate to others and open yourself up to being a human being who has vulnerabilities, frailties and problems like every other human being.

I found many Web sites that had checklists for the unhealthy perfectionist with things like “Give yourself a time limit on a project so you don’t obsess” and “Look in a mirror and tell yourself you’re okay the way you are.”

And if you still feel like a mess whose mind will never settle down to reason, stare at a tree and remember these words by Alice Walker, the author of “The Color Purple”: “In nature, nothing is perfect, and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.” It is possible to lose the perfect and find the beautiful instead.

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