Fears that drive perfectionism
Perfectionism is a cognitive pattern, with behavioral implications, that maintains many different responses leading to anxiety. Many perfectionists struggle to challenge their perfectionism because they’re afraid that it will lead to dropping their standards. They will no longer be striving for excellence. The most important concept here is: We are challenging the strategies you use to strive for excellence. We are not challenging the idea that you should strive for excellence.
When your strategies for trying to arrive at excellence are undermining your goals, then we consider that perfectionism. The goal is to be on the lookout for anxiety driven behavior that undermines your overall goals. It is not to make your work mediocre.
We’re still striving for productive work. We’re still striving for excellence. We’re just trying to use strategies that actually allow us to get there in the long term. When I’m thinking about clinical perfectionism, I’m going to start with the underlying fears that drive the compulsive behaviors.
We are challenging the strategies you use to strive for excellence. We are not challenging the idea that you should strive for excellence.
There are four main fears that I see most frequently as the drivers of perfectionism.
The four main fears are:
● Fear of evaluation
● Inflated responsibility
● Intolerance of uncertainty
● Perfectionism about the “just right” feeling
If your underlying fear is a fear of evaluation — either fear of failure or fear of success — then you might think, “I want perfect performance in order to avoid a judgment, rejection, or the feeling of embarrassment.”
If you have this fear and this thinking pattern, then the behavioral manifestations or implications of it would likely show up as checking and rechecking your work, getting reassurance from their co-workers, avoiding tasks, or doing tasks at the last minute. When you are doing tasks at the last minute, you avoid them up to the point where you have to do them, rather than having a priority-based effort that is not contingent on the deadline.
The next fear is inflated responsibility. The thinking for this one is more like, “If I make a mistake, will it harm someone? I want to avoid — I want to be perfect — so that I don’t harm anyone.” This might show up in behavior similar to fear of evaluation. It could be checking and rechecking work, getting reassurance, doing tasks at the last minute, or avoiding tasks altogether.
The difference would be the exposure we do in response to either of these thinking patterns. For inflated responsibility, you need exposure to the feeling of guilt and to the thinking of the possibility of harm. For fear of evaluation, you need exposure to the feeling of embarrassment and to thinking of the possibility of judgment and rejection.
The next use of perfectionistic strategies is to reduce uncertainty. This might sound like, “If I could just make the perfect decision, then I wouldn’t feel so uncertain.”
In this case, my response is, “No, no, no, the decision is inherently uncertain. For most decisions in life, there’s no clear right answer. The more that you try to be perfect the more uncertain you’re going to feel.” The exposure would be to try to see what parts of any given decision are inherently uncertain. Then you do the best you can to problem-solve the things that can be problem solved and let go of the things that you can’t control.
Finally, the fourth form of OCD perfectionism is seeking the “just right” feeling. In this case, exposure is not typically to a fear. You won’t be able to describe any type of catastrophe that you fear. You just want the “click” of a task feeling complete. I’ve noticed that people who experience this tend to feel ashamed of it or experience it as ego-dystonic, especially when it really gets in the way of their life. You might even notice that you have tasks where you either have diminishing returns or you’re not able to execute and complete things in a timely way, because you’re trying to get the feeling of it being complete. They think, “Why do I have to keep going? Even though I really want this feeling, I don’t like it that I have to keep going!”
A good way to get through this is to validate the skills and the values behind it.
For instance, people that have anxiety and OCD tend to value and behave in a detail-oriented, creative, persistent and conscientious manner. It is not anxiety and OCD that makes them this way. You still have all of these values and attributes without your anxiety and OCD. That said, you don’t have to do what your anxiety and OCD tells you to do in order to live these values. In fact, you can get control of these attributes by challenging your anxiety and OCD when it tells you that you have to finish something to completeness.
The way to challenge anxiety and OCD is to say, “I still am striving for excellence. I still want to be detail-oriented but I don’t have to get the “click” feeling. In fact, waiting for the click or the feeling of completeness is actually undermining my striving for excellence.”