Perils of Perfection
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An overachiever’s high-stress lifestyle was causing a whole complex of stress-related issues: migraines, backaches, heart palpitations, and climbing blood pressure. Alarmed, her doctor told her she needed to slow down and learn to relax.
The overachiever asked, “Like do yoga, meditate, take long walks, vacations, that kind of thing?” Her doctor nodded.
“Fine,” answered the woman impatiently, “Just give me a schedule of all the things I need to do, and I’ll start right away.”
This person seemed to suffer from what the late psychoanalyst Karen Horney called, “the tyranny of the shoulds.” People who are perfectionists feel a tremendous compulsion to fulfill the many shoulds on their endless lists of tasks to be done.
They may think there are right and wrong ways to do things. For instance, when Joe, a retired Marine Corps drill sergeant, takes his boys fishing they have routines for getting ready, for fishing and for cleanup. It is all time-efficient, neat, and very, very organized. The boys think the “fishing ritual” is overdone and they resent having to comply. As the daughter of a former drill sergeant, I get it.
Or, take Jean, a 29 year-old woman terrified of doing something (anything) wrong. She thought people would think less of her if she ever made a mistake. One time when her boyfriend invited her to meet his rather intellectual family, she quickly became worried about saying something dumb among them. She felt tense and defensive all week beforehand. Ironically, she then found it hard to concentrate at work, resulting in silly slip-ups like she’d feared making. Her anxiety then led her to stammer and stutter her way through the gathering at her boyfriend’s house. Again, I sympathize. My father-in-law is an x-ray astrophysicist.
Now, we all may feel natural anxiety in certain social and family situations. But for perfectionists this burden is more than a heavy workload; they believe their entire worth is wrapped up in not only what they do, but how well they do it. I know this personally; I’ve been one for most of my life.
We perfectionists, like the ones in the stories above (borrowed from the online pages of Psychology Today) have great fear of failure, of making mistakes, of disapproval. (So you better love this sermon!) Perfectionists typically have all-or-nothing thinking, believing they are worthless if their accomplishments are not perfect. And, since being perfect is impossible, deep down, perfectionists feel worthless.
Perfectionists tend to have anxiety and low self-esteem. Perfectionism is a risk factor for obsessive-compulsive behavior, eating disorders, and clinical depression. Perfectionists usually learn early in life that people value them because of how much they accomplish. Love, in some way, is conditional.
We perfectionists tend to procrastinate, because we want to know the “right” way to do something. Some perfectionists may never have what looks in the world’s eyes like high accomplishments, because they may be too paralyzed even to begin. In fact, I couldn’t possibly have started this sermon until what I deemed was the perfect book arrived from amazon.com: Perfecting Ourselves to Death. I waited for it. I kept waiting for it. Finally, I checked the website, to find I had merely looked at the book, but failed to put it in my check-out cart before placing an order. So much for being perfect!
Perfectionists are driven by both a desire to do well and a fear of the consequences of not doing well. Some psychologists believe there is a healthy, adaptive side to perfectionism—think of a brain surgeon or Michelangelo’s art. I want my brain surgeon to be as perfect as possible.
But there’s an illusion that drives the pursuit of perfection. It’s a secret fantasy that if only this next thing goes right—this report, this job promotion, this wallpaper, this sermon—then everything will be okay. People will like me. I’ll be at peace with myself. I’ll never know financial insecurity. Etc. Things will be OK if only… If only I file my taxes perfectly, remember to feed the parking meter, scour the kitchen until it’s spotless, then I could stop worrying and relax.
The dark side of this fantasy is the corollary: if I don’t do this job well enough, if the kitchen isn’t clean, if my taxes are audited, if I don’t get the promotion, I will be a failure. No one will love me. I’d be worthless.
Given this tremendous pressure, perfectionists may avoid letting others see their mistakes, and then other people never perceive them as human. Anne Lamott says in her book on writing, Bird by Bird:
Now, a person’s faults are largely what make him or her likable. I like for narrators to be like the people I choose for friends, which is to say that they have a lot of the same flaws as I. Preoccupation with self is good, as is a tendency toward procrastination, self-delusion, darkness, jealousy, groveling, greediness, addictiveness. They shouldn’t be too perfect; perfect means shallow and unreal and fatally uninteresting. I like for them to have a nice sick sense of humor and to be concerned with important things, by which I mean that they are interested in political and psychological and spiritual matters. I want them to want to know who we are and what life is all about. I like them to be mentally ill in the same sorts of ways that I am; for instance, I have a friend who said one day, “I could resent the ocean if I tried,” and I realized that I love that in a guy.
Me too. And I am not alone. I know you perfectionists are reading this. And the good news is that we’re in excellent company. Martin Luther was a perfectionist. He wrote:
I tried to live according to the rule with all diligence, and I used to be contrite, to confess and number off my sins, and often repeated my confession, and sedulously performed my allotted penance. And yet my conscience could never give me certainty, but always doubted and said, “You did not perform that correctly. You were not contrite enough. You left that out of your confession.”
Perhaps some of you think Luther was nuts, and now you have proof. His drive certainly is seen in his high quality writing. But it was his faith that offered him a transforming experience. Later he wrote,
Sometimes it is necessary to drink a little more, play, joke, or even commit some sin in defiance and contempt of the devil in order not to give him an opportunity to make us scrupulous about small things. We will be overcome if we worry too much about falling into some sin…. What do you think is my reason for drinking wine undiluted, talking freely, and eating more often if it is not to torment and vex the devil who has made up his mind to torment and vex me?
The peril of perfectionism is idolatry.
It is the belief that our lives, our world, and our very selves are ultimately in our control. It’s the worship of an illusion, with our hopes hanging on the tyranny of the “should.” In a life that is largely insecure, we may cling to what little control we have. We may try to control things that are out of our control, but ultimately, a power greater than ourselves is at the helm.
Perfectionism is a religious issue.
But our faith tradition gives us mixed messages. As Unitarian Universalists, we’ve long stood on the side of works rather than faith in our own salvation, supported by the American mythology that we must pull ourselves up by our bootstraps in an indefatigable feat of self-reliance. The Bible tells us that we are earthen vessels, but it also tells us to “Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.”
When we look more closely, however, the Hebrew word translated as perfection is tamim, which means to “bring to completeness.” This implies a process, living in right relationship with God and with others. So perhaps it should read, “Bring yourself to completion as God is bringing God’s self to completion.”
Ultimately, our faith is the antidote to perfectionism. We believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person. But do we believe that of ourselves? Are we people of just as much worth if we lose our jobs, if our mortgage is foreclosed, if we never finish school? I’m here to tell you a counter-cultural message: we are. Love isn’t contingent upon accomplishment. Accepting—and even loving—our very flaws is how we reach out to one another and have a satisfying life, a life worth living.
May we have the courage to be real—bare seams, imperfections, tears, warts and all. May this be the place where we love one another into all of our realness, all of our humanity.
- Stronger in the Broken Places - September 1, 2017
- Perils of Perfection - May 1, 2015
