Up to 72% of women exhibit perfectionistic traits, with 63% of those traits being considered maladaptive, or largely harmful to one’s well-being (Muscemi et al. 2022). This means that many women are extremely afraid of failing or making mistakes, procrastinate due to immense internal pressure to produce perfect work, and internalize the belief that significant others may demand perfection from them (this is known as socially prescribed perfectionism).
From this, codependent relationships may develop. In treatment, a patient may say, for example, “He stopped telling me I’m beautiful, so I stopped feeling beautiful.” To unpack this: A married woman, who’s devoted both to her husband and her work, chronically struggles to feel competent in either her marriage or her career. She possesses what she believes are objective blueprints for becoming the best wife and employee, again, believing that others expect and demand that of her. She spends an inordinate amount of time both learning her craft and on becoming more attuned to her husband’s desires, including reaching his standard for female beauty.
The Need for External Validation in Socially Prescribed Perfectionism
However, here’s the rub: To fully believe and feel she met those purportedly objective standards for wives and employees, she needs subjective validation—permission to feel good about herself, permission to believe she’s enough. It’s like when a child feels unsure of the quality of their work and asks (and is expected to ask) their parent to check their homework for errors, before asking for permission to play. The socially prescribed perfectionist, even if espousing the virtues of independence and individualism, often carries the deep-seated need for constant approval. Their identity is a mere amalgam of introjects of important others’ perceptions of them, meaning they see themselves only as significant others see them, even if those perceptions are wrong.
Our fictitious patient who no longer feels beautiful may be challenged by her therapist to consider the validity of her belief that her husband doesn’t find her attractive. And she may, in turn, place the burden of proof onto the therapist, not only challenging them to prove to her that she’s wrong about her husband’s perception of her but, even further, to prove to her that she is, indeed, objectively beautiful, worthy of her husband’s praise. Perfectionism searches for more and more proof in an attempt to silence one’s distressing inner chatter. And while the pursuit of evidence is, usually, a good thing, like anything else, it can become excessive. The perfectionist, in reality, needs less proof and to try to make do with what they have.
Questions for Self-Validation and Rethinking Beliefs
Instead, they may consider whether they followed their blueprints. Did you do what you set out to do? Did you produce work that met your goals? And, the most important question in this line of inquiry may be: Can your work be objectively good if a meaningful other fails to acknowledge it? To tailor this question to our patient here, we may ask: Can you still feel beautiful even if your husband doesn’t tell you that you are? Often, our patients become angry after realizing they placed so much emphasis on a man’s opinion of them. Why should anyone else dictate how they get to feel about themselves? Why can’t they feel beautiful or competent because they allowed themselves to?
While keeping in mind that all of us need doses of validation from people we love and admire, we also need to remind ourselves that the truth is the truth, no matter who can or can’t see it. This means that, all being equal, if something is objectively true, we don’t always need someone else to prove to us that it is and if we do, if we can’t see it ourselves (with the evidence at our disposal), chances are that it isn’t true anyway.
Our social system is arguably designed to sustain those in power, but we don’t have to internalize its structure; we don’t have to continue to overly rely on perceived authority figures to tell us how to think about ourselves. So, while we can’t change a social system overnight, we can improve our own thinking and our degree of confidence around it. We can start by questioning social expectations and ask ourselves how many of them we want to meet and why, reconsidering our values. Then, we can consider our contributions and successes, asking ourselves how we can objectively consider them as such. And, if we were to go further, we can even try to embrace our apparent failures. Feminist icon Roxanne Gay remarked, “I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect.” Implied is the belief that one isn’t loved or lovable for being perfect and one may even infer that one isn’t truly loved if they are. Paradoxically, being a bad feminist is being a good one, because being a good one is to embrace what’s inwardly imperfect, to allow oneself to truly and fully be a human woman.
