Perfectionism, people-pleasing, and chronic self-sacrifice imply a just world, one wherein merits, accountability, and humility are always rewarded. The irony is that for many perfectionists, these worlds are just ideals, with little to no basis in the realities of the past, especially within their childhoods. Yet, they possess an almost supernatural type of hope.
How many times have you sincerely believed that your efforts and determination held infinite potential? At bottom, perfectionism is a failure to adapt and accept one’s limitations—more often than not, personalizing failure as well. In part due to a preoccupation with rules, and the consequences of following and not following them, the world, to the perfectionist, feels neat and reasonable. And they make sense of it through their activities.
Yet, outcomes are multi-determined and, therefore, complicated. But, to the perfectionist, who tends to personalize (taking too much responsibility for an outcome), it often feels as though they aren’t. Perfectionism and idealism tend to go hand and hand, whereby perfecting oneself in some significant way in turn perfects one’s world. Children often do this when responding to an emotionally reactive and unpredictable parent. So, they internalize blame, fearing punishment for standing up for themselves. And many adults continue to live this way, believing they can avoid conflict and resolve their interpersonal problems indirectly, by just being good people. This mechanism is so unconscious that many perfectionists automatically shame themselves when they even appear to be at fault.
So, as you can imagine, they’re often exploited. Fundamentally, whether they’re defensive, denying some misdeed, or taking too much responsibility for one, perfectionists have a deep-seated fear of shame, especially when one feels shamed by another. When denying responsibility, shame is extinguished by some delusion, which is obvious and doesn’t often need to be said. But personalizing is the opposite unhealthy form of managing one’s distress around shame. In this respect, the individual unconsciously believes that shaming oneself preempts catastrophes; you take some now (while still believing you can improve) so you won’t have to accept more of it later, finding yourself in an impossible position wherein shame feels final and fatal (hating yourself beyond the point of no return). If one can reasonably show another that they’re working on becoming better by punishing themselves for their misdeed, the other may, in turn, feel sympathy for them. The perfectionist depends on that individual to recognize their effort and, thus, spare them from the truth of the perfectionist’s innate badness.
While deep down strongly believing in the reality of this badness, perfectionists, simultaneously, hope to and believe they can overcome it. So, perfectionism is the philosophy, the belief that one can and should be perfect all the time or at least with respect to meaningful traits, and masochism, defined as self-punishment, is the enforcement of it. In writing about the self-defeating personality style, Nancy McWilliams noted that “they may deny that they are feeling any particular discomfort and protest the good intentions of the perpetrator. “I’m sure she means well and has my best interests at heart,” one of my clients once remarked about an employer who obviously disliked him and had humiliated him in front of all his colleagues. How did you feel about her treatment of you?” I asked. “Oh, I figured she was trying to teach me something important,” he responded, “so I thanked her for her efforts.”
The message underlying people-pleasing is often: “Please don’t expose me.” Some people feel ashamed of their success; some feel ashamed of being selfish or greedy; and some feel ashamed of possessing some desirable trait, internal or external. But while it’s true that more privileged individuals can always do more for others, some may benefit from asking if their chronic sense of guilt helps create circumstances in which they’re mistreated or blamed for something that wasn’t completely their fault. In the above example, the individual sees the good in another, in part, because it’s easier to believe in others’ innate goodness—again, to believe in a reasonable world. Yet, the obvious failure lies in adaptation, accepting the limitation of being unable to change another’s perspective; thanking his employer is unlikely to cause her to like him.
Learning to tolerate external shame, which can sometimes feel less manageable than its internal counterpart and can easily scare one due to its prospective revelations and general consequences, can liberate the perfectionist. In the just world model, perfectionists, like economists of the past, believe that others are reasonable, or at least can be in time. This model assumes that efforts are almost always never in vain.
Whether the root source is separation anxiety, as argued by McWilliams, or the accompanying shame, it’s clear that whether we fear disappointing our bosses, our parents, or our partners, we ultimately need to decide who we are in this moment. If we leave it to others, their whims, hatreds, and jealousies may and likely will inform their perceptions. And if we put off learning to do this until we’re perfect, we may, at best, never know ourselves as we are, and at worst, fail to live for ourselves. It’s true that we need others for self-knowledge, yet living and dying with the specific perspectives of some significant other is something else. We tend to gather multiple views because individuals, by themselves, tend to be wrong and, sometimes, willfully so. In treatment, many patients often return to the question of: “Am I a bad person?” Frighteningly, it’s our responsibility to answer it for ourselves, even if we have help doing so.
