Perfectionism Is a Way to Avoid Feeling

Obsessive-compulsive personalities, who are also perfectionists, tend to completely devalue feelings. To them, feelings aren't only useless; they're also harmful. Thus, their lives are, to borrow a phrase from psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams, "organized around" barricading themselves from emotions that contribute to a sense of vulnerability, including joy. (An aside: Success is seldom enjoyed due to an intense fear of complacency and loss, so further pursuit is called for.) Obsessive-compulsive individuals tend to rationalize in order to avoid. Comments such as "This isn't going to work out, so why should I waste my time?" and "They're never going to change" arise frequently. Here, we witness rationalizing as a form of self-sabotage, and a brilliant one too. The problem isn't that they're often wrong; it's that they don't ever allow themselves to take emotional risks.

Reason, at the expense of feeling, becomes the guide. Yet, unbeknownst to the obsessive-compulsive, reason is frequently ruled by fear. Returning to McWilliams, she wrote, "Obsessive-compulsive individuals idealize cognition and mentation. They tend to consign most feelings to a devalued realm associated with childishness, weakness, loss of control, disorganization, and dirt." It's as though if I devalue and degrade my feelings, like a child transforming a feared but imagined creature into one less threatening, I'll thereby extract their vitality. Yet, as decades of psychology have indicated, we can't escape our feelings. In treatment, our patients may use all sorts of defenses to avoid their feelings. They rationalize, as noted above. They express anger, feeling mature and righteous, which performs the task of pushing others away (or justifying distance). And they project, finding fault completely within another.

When our patients list their accomplishments (a compulsion, which is another defense), they give themselves the sense that their lives make sense, as they've been working toward happiness, which normally means a state free from criticism, shame, fear, and sadness. The philosopher David Hume, who was an expert on human psychology in his time, wrote that "reason is and ought to be the slave of passion." He meant that our desires, largely outside of the realm of reason, are our guides; we merely use reason to fulfill them. To the obsessive-compulsive, feelings can and ought to be subdued. There's the underlying belief that the pursuit of success, with its series of goals, creates a predictable and manageable simplicity. Output; input. The more I do, the more I achieve, with the result being a widening of the gap between sorrow and self, a distance from chaos.

McWilliams also wrote, "The obsessive-compulsive uses words to conceal feelings, not to express them." So, instead of saying, "I'm hurt," a patient may say, "I don't care." Associate this with "What's the point?" and, again, you're in the realm of denial. The perfectionist, who's often ashamed of caring for and feeling anything about someone who's mistreated them (or didn't love them enough) believes they can talk themselves out of their feelings, again minus anger. Instead of conceiving of their emotions as normal, they single themselves out as weak. So, arguably, their relationship to their feelings is the fundamental problem, rather than the feelings themselves.

In treatment, perfectionists may learn that no amount of success will engender a utopia, the world isn't divided between the weak and the strong, their reason has been fundamentally ruled by their emotions, their shame around their love for others can be addressed, joy doesn't necessarily lead to doom, love of self isn't cultivated independently, their reasons for avoidance (while rational individually) create an avoidant life, and they can live with the sense of "foolishness" for doing the right thing.

Hyper-rationality, a preoccupation with results, creates a life of limited risks, which means that we may act ethically only if doing so entails a desired outcome, we may love only if we're certain we're loved in return (which we obviously can't be), joy is met with cynicism because of cherry-picked past experiences, and love is avoided until one discovers how to love oneself so much that they're never harmed again by another's neglect.

In this respect, simplicity becomes emptiness. As goalposts are moved, regret is accumulated and ignored. To quote McWilliams one last time, "Some people feel so bereft of clear family standards, so unsupervised and ignored by the adults around them, that in order to push themselves to grow up they hold themselves to idealized criteria of behavior and feeling that they derive from the larger culture. These standards, because they're abstract and not modeled by people known personally to the child, tend to be harsh and unbuffered by the humane sense of proportion." The belief around them may be: If I can become what's expected, maybe then I'll become normal. The translation: Normalcy is reached by becoming super-human.