Quotes About Perfectionism

You're healthy," it said. "Your development is exactly right. I can't find any flaw in you." And

However, sexual anorexics do have a definite profile that separates them from the larger population of those having difficulty being sexual: They are often extremely competent people who are committed to doing things very well and have a fear of making mistakes and being human.

I hate nothing so much as doing a thing badly.

Quite possibly, this depressive illness was the familiar sort that grew from perfectionist expectations.

People who do good work often think that whatever they're working on is no good. Others see what they've done and think it's wonderful, but the creator sees nothing but flaws. This pattern is no coincidence: worry made the work good.

Compulsive workers tend to be overly sensitive and suffer from intense emotions including depression and anxiety.

They may vacillate between over-involvement and neglect, depending upon their moods and emotional needs at the moment. They may only pay attention to the children when the kids are doing something to meet the borderline parents' needs. Some parents with BPD try to cope with their own feelings of inadequacy by demanding that their children be perfect. Children may then feel worthless when something goes wrong.

Remember, to someone with BPD, making a mistake means being a mistake.)

It was one of his qualities that most frustrated me, how once you had a black tick in his book, you were pretty much done for.

I also like to apply "good enough" to other concepts such as a good enough job, a good enough try, a good enough outing, a good enough day or a good enough life. I apply this concept liberally to contradict the black-and-white, all-or none thinking of the critic which reflexively judges people and things as defective unless they are perfect.

Many children appear to be hard-wired to adapt to this endangering abandonment with perfectionism. A prevailing climate of danger forces the child's superego to over-cultivate the various programs of perfectionism and endangerment listed below. Once again, the superego is the part of the psyche that learns parental rules in order to gain their acceptance.

Self-esteem cannot be reclaimed while perfectionism prevails. Self-esteem is in many ways the opposite of perfectionism.

Perfectionism also prevents us from letting in the love of others, no matter how abundant and genuine it is. When we are preoccupied with our deficiencies, we are often untouched by the nurturance others offer us. How tragic that so many of us are convinced we only deserve to be loved when we are happy or excelling.

When we become lost in this process, we miss out on our crucial emotional need to experience a sense of belonging. We live in permanent estrangement oscillating between the extremes of too good for others or too unlikeable to be included. This is the excruciating social perfectionism of the Janus-faced critic: others are too flawed to love and we are too defective to be lovable.

I have worked with numerous "well-therapized" people who were relatively free from perfectionism, but still seriously afflicted with the critic's addiction to noticing potential danger. Said another way, I have seen survivors eliminate much of their perfectionist, self-attacking thinking without realizing that the critic was still flooding their minds with fear-inducing thoughts and images.

This is how that reactivity takes place in a flashback. A survivor wakes up feeling depressed. Because childhood experience has conditioned her to believe that she is unworthy and unacceptable in this state, she feels anxious and ashamed. This in turn activates her inner critic to scare her with perfectionistic rants: "No wonder no one likes me. I've got to get my lazy, worthless ass out of bed or I'll end up like that homeless, bag lady in the park!

Nowadays, many therapists attach the phrase "good enough" to concepts like friend, partner, therapist or person. This is usually done to deconstruct perfectionistic expectations of relationships - expectations that are so unrealistic that they are destructive to essentially worthwhile relationships.

The outer critic is the counterpart of the self-esteem-destroying inner critic. It uses the same programs of perfectionism and endangerment against others that your inner critic uses against yourself. Via its all-or-none programming, the outer critic rejects others because they are never perfect and cannot be guaranteed to be safe.

Perfectionism. My perfectionism arose as an attempt to gain safety and support in my dangerous family. Perfection is a self-persecutory myth. I do not have to be perfect to be safe or loved in the present. I am letting go of relationships that require perfection. I have a right to make mistakes. Mistakes