Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Achieving perfection is the most efficient way to discover how little it offers.

According to [Paul] Hewitt, this is one thing that distinguishes true perfectionism from a mere pursuit of excellence: reaching the goal never helps, whether it’s a top grade, a target weight, or a professional milestone. Achievement, he says, “doesn’t touch that fundamental sense of being unacceptable.” Perfectionism perpetuates an endless state of striving. It’s an affliction of futility, an addiction to finding masochistic refuge in the familiar hell of feeling insufficient. It might not feel good, but it feels like home…

In 1960, D. W. Winnicott put forward the theory that most people will develop a False Self that hides and protects a more essential self by complying with the expectations of others. In the seventies and eighties, Hilde Bruch drew upon her work with anorexic patients in framing perfectionism as a response to a deep-seated sense of inadequacy. “All her efforts, her striving for perfection and excessive thinness, are directed toward hiding the fatal flaw of her fundamental inadequacy,” she wrote of the typical patient.

The critic and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has written that the superego, with its relentless demand for perfection, is a “boring and vicious soliloquist with an audience of one.” If so, why do we keep listening? Phillips suggests that it’s because the soliloquist promises to “know us in a way that no one else, including ourselves, can ever do.” Any avid self-deprecator immediately understands this logic: if we believe that the worst version of ourselves is the true one, we’re protected from being ambushed by our own inadequacy. Better to overestimate our flaws than to fail to see them in the first place. But this strategy is fundamentally isolating, leading us to create a brittle carapace of a “perfect” self that doesn’t need anything from anyone. Perfectionism estranges us from everyone else, Phillips argues, and traps us in endless conflict with ourselves: “We continually, if unconsciously, mutilate and deform our own character. So unrelenting is this internal violence that we have no idea what we’d be like without it.”…

Hewitt told me that perfectionists are often acutely uncomfortable in his office waiting room; he sees it in their body language. It’s difficult for them to submit to a dynamic that continually obliges them to expose their vulnerabilities and shortcomings. Many also have an intense fear of relinquishing their perfectionism, which feels like the only thing that is holding them together. A lot of the time, what prompts a perfectionist to go to therapy is an issue such as chronic anxiety or depression, with perfectionism only gradually revealing itself as an important force. The precipitating incident may be a tangible failure that the patient is struggling to get past, but sometimes the larger problem is success—specifically, that success has not delivered the expected dividends of happiness and self-worth. For this reason, middle age is often a time of crisis in the life of a perfectionist, though the affliction manifests at all ages. “I even see patients in their nineties, still trying to please parents who are long dead,” Hewitt said.

Once a patient surrenders the notion that being perfect is a viable solution, another problem can arise: the patient may become perfectionist about getting rid of her perfectionism. She may try to be an exemplary patient, never showing unregulated emotions and coming up with insights that demonstrate how readily she has internalized the message. But exactly the opposite needs to happen: the patient needs to enact her struggle in the room, to be messy, irrational, resentful, out of control. Progress comes when the patient reveals her ugly imperfect side and learns that, as Hewitt puts it, “the therapist isn’t repulsed—the sky doesn’t fall.”

Hewitt can sense when a patient is letting her imperfect self into the room: she may preface whatever she says with phrases like “I’ve never said these words out loud before.” Such moments remind him of the sensation of singing onstage, the terror of going out there with nothing but your naked, human voice. Hewitt’s musical training has made him extremely attuned to shifts in vocal tone; he can detect when a voice starts to issue from a different part of the throat and finds that these shifts can be clues that something important is happening. He tries to instill this habit of close listening in his students. He’ll play back recordings of therapy sessions for them, and when there’s a shift in the patient’s tone he’ll ask, “Did you hear that?” He’ll play it again and again, until they do…

[Gordon] Flett has come to understand mattering as a counterpoint to perfectionism, a more viable way to arrive at a sense of self-worth. One doesn’t have to be perfect; one just has to matter to someone. Indeed, feeling invisible or undervalued—a feeling Flett calls “anti-mattering”—is often what fuels a perfectionist’s neurosis. Flett’s first peer-reviewed paper on mattering, published in 2012, reported a significant correlation between anti-mattering and perfectionism among hundreds of university students. Perfectionism may arise as an attempt to overcome a sense of insignificance, but it’s a poor strategy, because each step toward perfection is a step away from distinctiveness, from the flawed, messy unrepeatability that we crave in others and want others to witness in us.’ (from the New Yorker)