Free e-Book
Understanding
Perfectionism
By Je nnifer Kemp
MPsych(Clinical)
www.jenniferkemp.com.au
What is Perfectionism?
"We can make ourselves miserable or we can make ourselves strong. The amount of
effort is the same."
- Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
Do you find it hard to make decisions, try new things or take risks because you
are scared you will fail or look stupid? Or do you have difficulty putting your
plans into action, procrastinating until the last minute and causing you a lot of
added stress?
Perhaps you present a perfect image to the world, yet underneath this glossy
exterior you feel anxious, tense, and full of self-doubt. Maybe you criticise
yourself constantly and harshly, never feeling good enough, feeling terrible
about yourself no matter what you achieve.
Perfectionism is a pattern of behaviours that are learned and is either
helpful or unhelpful for you depending on the outcomes it creates in your life.
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Unhelpful Perfectionism
Unhelpful perfectionism moves you away from what is important to you,
interferes with your work, study, and relationships, and creates problems
in your mental and physical health.
Despite many people assuming perfectionists are all driven over-achievers,
unhelpful perfectionism looks different in everyone. Some people have
good jobs, get impressive results, win awards, and gain recognition, yet
inside they still feel like they are failing. Others become frozen, unable to
start anything new, or work towards their goals because they are so
frightened that they will fail.
Let's look at the common behaviours you'll see in unhelpful perfectionism.
We'll then explore the five key processes that drive these unhelpful
patterns.
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The Characteristics of Unhelpful
Perfectionism
Unhelpful perfectionism looks different in everyone. On the following two pages are listed
some common unhelpful perfectionistic behaviours. Check any that apply to you.
Work and Study
□ Working excessively without enjoyment; feeling as if you must do things properly
□ Repeatedly checking your work for mistakes
□ Having difficulty being satisfied that work is good enough; trouble handing work in
□ Spending too long labouring over tasks that could be done quickly
□ Procrastinating and having trouble completing tasks within deadlines
□ Being excessively anxious about grades or work performance
□ Getting caught up in the details and having difficulty seeing the broader context
□ Having trouble making decisions; fear of making the wrong decision
□ Avoiding tasks or jobs that you aren’t certain you can complete to a high standard
□ Avoiding feedback and performance appraisals
□ Avoiding or intensely fearing situations where you might be evaluated
□ Passively avoiding opportunities that are challenging
□ Seeking reassurance about the quality of your work or performance
Home Life
□ Needing things to be excessively neat
□ Fearing other people will judge you harshly if things are out of place
□ Needing to present a perfect home life to others
□ Living in mess and clutter, or hoarding possessions
Family and Parenting
□ Expecting perfect behavior from your children
□ Having a low tolerance for mistakes or mess
□ Being irritable, losing your temper, or being critical of others
Health
□ Being focused on achieving perfect habits such as a perfect diet or exercise routine
□ Having difficulty starting or continuing with treatments or health routines
□ Avoiding health activities because you can’t do them properly
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The Characteristics of Unhelpful
Perfectionism
Relationships
□ Feeling fearful of saying something wrong or stupid
□ Always needing to say the right thing
□ Worrying about being a good friend and not offending or hurting people
□ Worrying about being judged negatively by others, or feeling anxious in social situations
□ Withdrawing from social situations because you fear making a mistake
□ Seeking reassurance that people like you
□ Being overly critical, fussy, or meticulous
□ Other people finding you difficult to please
□ Feeling constantly let down by others
□ People around you feeling they aren’t good enough for you
Appearance
□ Needing to look or present perfectly
□ Being overly critical or judgmental of your appearance
Hobbies, Sporting, and Creative Pursuits
□ Having a limited range of interests beyond work/study
□ Being reluctant to pursue interests because you can’t do them to your standards
□ Being anxious about your sporting, musical, or artistic performance
□ Putting yourself under excessive pressure to perform
□ Fearing failure and therefore not enjoying the activity
□ Completely avoiding activities because you can’t do them to your standards
Religion and Spirituality
□ Needing to pray, worship, or adhere to rituals perfectly
□ Being intolerant of your lapses of faith or practice or lapses by others
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The Five Processes of
Unhelpful Perfectionism
There are five behavioural processes that define unhelpful perfectionism:
1. Setting extremely ambitious, inflexible benchmarks for your performance
and tending to raise these standards over time
2. Intensely fearing failure or mistakes, including social mistakes, or not being
liked
3. Persistent, demoralising self-criticism and never feeling good enough
because you can never meet your criterion for success
4. Avoiding certain situations, places, or people so that you can avoid feelings
of failure and the self-criticism that comes with this
5. Much bigger problems developing in your life because of this avoidance
In the following pages we’ll look at each of the core processes of unhelpful
perfectionism in more detail.
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1) Excessive and Inflexible
Personal Standards
Do you set ambitious targets for your performance and treat these standards
as if they are unbreakable rules you “must”, “should” or “always” achieve? Do
you discount your goals as “too easy” once you achieve them and raise the bar
for next time, leaving your goals always just out of reach? If so, you probably
feel like you are failing much of the time. Setting standards in this way is likely
to lead to self-criticism and anxiety. You may even want to give up altogether.
Don’t get me wrong—there is nothing wrong with setting ambitious standards.
The problems start when these standards become excessive and
inflexible. It gets worse if you set these standards for other people too. Your
friends, colleagues or family members may feel like they are never good
enough for you, leading to tension and relationship breakdowns.
Fortunately, to transform your unhelpful perfectionistic habits into more
helpful behaviours, you may not need to lower your standards. Instead, you
might find more flexible ways to approach your objectives and make different
choices that address the long-term consequences of your actions.
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2) Fear of Failure
At the heart of unhelpful perfectionism lies fear of failure. By ‘failure’ I mean
any situation where you do not meet your expectations or those of others.
Failure can include:
Making a mistake in your work or assignment
Getting feedback on your performance
Forgetting something simple such as locking your keys in the car
Looking silly or embarrassing yourself
Saying the wrong thing
Not being liked or being rejected by others
Unintentionally hurting someone’s feelings
Not achieving any goal you’ve set for yourself
Fear of failure triggers feelings of shame. You experience feelings of shame
when something bad happens, you believe it is your fault and happened
because there is something wrong with you. Shame is an acutely painful
experience that humans try hard to avoid. It involves seeing yourself as
defective, broken, or inadequate and assuming others will judge you the same
way too.
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3) Relentless Self-Criticism
Self-criticism is one of the most invasive and debilitating perfectionistic
behaviours and leaves you feeling hopeless, worthless, and useless. You might
criticise what you do (“I never do anything right”), predict a bad future (“I will
never succeed”), or attack you as a person (“I am so useless,” “I am a loser,” or
“I’ll never be good enough”). These thoughts can hurt deeply. It’s remarkable
just how nasty we can be towards ourselves.
Many people feel that they must be hard on themselves to motivate
themselves to do better, believing that if they don’t, they’ll become lazy. Yet
self-criticism actually has the opposite effect, eroding your self-confidence and
filling you with self-doubt.
The antidote to self-criticism is self-compassion. Fortunately this is a skill
that can be learned. Self-compassion helps you steady and soothe yourself
when you are struggling in the same would offer support to a friend, with
warmth and encouragement not criticism. By learning to be kind to yourself
when you feel uncomfortable or afraid, you can take greater risks and feel a
deeper sense of calm.
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4) Unhelpful Avoidance
Whenever you make a mistake, you experience thoughts, emotions, and
physical sensations that are unpleasant, uncomfortable, and unwanted. You
might feel shame as a sinking, twisting or churning feeling in your stomach, or
anxiety as shakiness, restlessness, or tension. These experiences are so
uncomfortable that you naturally want to get rid of them.
Unhelpful perfectionistic behaviours develop as a way of protecting us
from uncomfortable experiences. Sometimes called ‘experiential
avoidance’, in the short term you avoid failure by repeatedly checking your
work, striving too hard, seeking reassurance, procrastinating, taking safer
options, or avoiding situations altogether. Unfortunately, your efforts to avoid
these uncomfortable experiences often cause many bigger problems. You end
up missing out on a lot. Consider how many University degrees have been lost
to procrastination.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a therapeutic approach that
specifically targets experiential avoidance. It can help you face your fears and
achieve your goals even though at times this is might feel uncomfortable. ACT
helps you show up to the full richness and possibilities of your life and live
according to what matters deeply to you.
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5) Bigger Life Problems
Both avoidant habits and self-criticism are likely to keep you stuck in a rut of
sameness, feeling exhausted, demoralised and defeated. It is no wonder then,
that perfectionism causes and maintains many mental health problems,
including:
Body Dysmorphic Disorder
Burnout
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Depression
Eating disorders
Generalised Anxiety Disorder
Hoarding Disorder
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Panic Disorder
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Social Anxiety
Suicide
If you are struggling with unhelpful perfectionistic patterns, it is important to
mention it to your therapist. Without help you might find that your mental
health problems return all over again, because the underlying processes
driving it have not been addressed.
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Transform Your
Perfectionism
Unhelpful perfectionistic behaviours can be
changed into something that helps you live a
fulfilling life.
To achieve lasting, meaningful change, you
don’t need to address every aspect of your
perfectionism—just dialling it back 10
percent is often enough to make these
habits work better for you.
By identifying your unhelpful habits and the
short-term rewards that keep you behaving
this way, you can face up to the long-term
problems your perfectionism is causing.
Transforming these unhelpful habits into
more flexible, helpful behaviours will involve
taking steps towards what’s important in
your life rather than away from what you
fear. This is made easier by learning to be
kinder to yourself through the skills of self-
compassion. And you can achieve this
without needing to lower your standards.
Kemp, J. R. In Press. The ACT Workbook for
Perfectionism: Build Your Best (Imperfect) Life
Using Powerful Acceptance & Commitment
Therapy and Self-Compassion Skills. Oakland:
New Harbinger Publications.
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References
Egan, S., T. Wade, and R. Shafran. 2012. “The transdiagnostic process of
perfectionism.” Revista De Psicopatologia Y Psicologia Clinica 17(3), 279-294.
Gilbert, P. 2009. The Compassionate Mind. London: Robinson.
Hayes, S. 2019. A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters. New York:
Avery.
Kemp, J. R. In Press. The ACT Workbook for Perfectionism: Build Your Best
(Imperfect) Life Using Powerful Acceptance & Commitment Therapy and Self-
Compassion Skills. Oakland: New Harbinger Publications.
Kobori, O., G. Dighton, and R. Hunter. 2020. “Does perfectionism impact
adherence to homework assignment? A preliminary pilot study of
perfectionism and procrastination of CBT homework.” Behavioural and
Cognitive Psychotherapy 48(2):243-247.
Ong, C. W., J. L. Barney, T. S. Barrett, E. B. Lee, M. E. Levin, and M. P. Twohig.
2019. “The role of psychological inflexibility and self-compassion in acceptance
and commitment therapy for clinical perfectionism.” Journal of Contextual
Behavioral Science 13:7-16.
Ong, C., E. Lee, J. Krafft, C. Terry, T. Barrett, M. Levin, and M. Twohig. 2019. “A
randomized controlled trial of acceptance and commitment therapy for clinical
perfectionism.” Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders
22:100444.
Silberstein-Tirch, L. 2019. How to Be Nice to Yourself. Emeryville: Althea Press.
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About Jennifer Kemp
Jennifer is a Clinical Psychologist who works with clients who are struggling
with perfectionism and the mental health problems perfectionism facilitates
and maintains. Jennifer is the author of The ACT Workbook for Perfectionism.
She integrates Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), behavior analysis,
exposure and Compassion-Focused Therapy approaches in her therapeutic
and consultation work. Jennifer presents internationally on the topic of
perfectionism and is available for public speaking, conferences, and
workshops. Find out more at www.jenniferkemp.com.au.
Page 13 | Understanding Perfectionism © Jennifer Kemp | www.jenniferkemp.com.au
