Perfectionism Won't Cure Your Fear of Uncertainty

Perfectionism is strongly associated with the fear of uncertainty—being a Band-Aid for it. Existentially speaking, many, if not all, of us struggle with cultivating a meaningful life. Our philosophical maps are meant to keep anxiety, regret, and emptiness at bay. We tend to create long-term goals and pursue their short-term constituents daily. It feels as though we’re engaging in meaningful work. And we often tell ourselves that perfecting a skill or art will engender unlimited success, love, and adoration.

Perfectionism Is an Eraser

I was asked on a recent radio interview if I believed perfectionism could be harnessed and used in smaller doses; I noted my skepticism, even though it’s obvious why people would hesitate to rid themselves of perfectionism altogether. However, once we understand why perfectionism exists in the first place, it becomes evident that perfectionism isn’t about any specific skill or activity; it’s an eraser. Perfectionism, as we meet it in treatment, is a prescription of magical pills. One pill alleviates shame. The next submerges traumatic memories. Another for the fear of regret. And the last for one’s awareness of an objectively meaningless existence. Perfectionism is so intoxicating because it makes everything matter. But, as a double-edged sword, when everything matters, mistakes feel intolerable. At its core is the sheer terror of uncertainty. Will I ever overcome my shame? Will I always feel like a loser? Is my life fundamentally meaningless?

Thus, perfectionists tend to be preoccupied with discovering the “right answers.” Due to perfectionism’s association with obsessive-compulsive disorder, many perfectionists obsess over “root causes,” believing that fundamental insights inevitably foster magnificent lives because they clarify options. So, like archeologists, they go digging for answers—hence, why they often end up in therapy. Yet, therapy provides too few. And, it seldom leads to their desired outcomes. If perfectionism is an escape from life, therapy is a plunge into the mundane. Focusing less on the right answers, treatment shifts the spotlight onto the unwillingness to tolerate mistakes, exploring their meaning and the expectations entailed.

Winners and Losers

Rooted in black and white thinking, the perfectionistic map divides up the world between winners and losers, with some more special than others. The losers have no recourse to cope with their traumas, while the winners manage to completely subdue them. When their achievements are compared to those of others, perfectionists quickly note that their goals aren’t ordinary, nor should they be. Thus, their mistakes are also not ordinary ones. To them, mistakes ruin lives.

Acceptance, rather than change, is the more significant part of therapy for them, as it aids to partially liberate the patient from their own standards and expectations, allowing them to trivialize their mistakes and even appreciate learning from them. While perfectionism allows one to believe they’re inching closer to heaven, on the other hand, acknowledging its limitations allows one to finally rest. So, while I argue for what’s known as relative perfectionism, the perspective that, like much else in nature, we evolve to better fit our environments, I also believe it’s important to note that I struggle to view perfectionism, for the most part, as anything but harmful, as it merely provides the occasional, yet deceptive, glimpses of hope; perfectionism is an inability to feel satisfied. (With relative perfectionism, obsessive personalities often attempt to speed up the process of “adaptation,” because they’re preoccupied with becoming perfect.)

Taking a Break From "Shoulds"

Rather than resolving what the “right decisions” are and what you “should” do, it might be more helpful to explore what you would do if you weren’t full of fear. Would your life be different if you took a break from your shoulds? Would you make different choices if you weren’t burdened by the beliefs that you need to actualize and make the best use of your talents? How about if you weren’t terrified of dying with significant regrets? Additionally, you can explore the consequences of your mistakes, asking how you’re certain that they preclude you from having a much better life. For many of us, our successes hardly ever create the desired and sought-after outcomes. Thus, our failures, logically speaking, hardly ever steal them from us.

The magical thinking of perfectionism tells us that we aren’t good enough now but can be later. Imagine, then, having to accept the regret of a life put off and sacrificed for better days. Psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams wrote, “Where both thinking and doing propel someone psychologically, in marked disproportion to feeling, sensing, intuiting, listening, playing, daydreaming, enjoying the creative arts, and other modes that are less rationally driven or instrumental, we may infer an obsessive-compulsive personality structure. Many highly productive and admirable people are in this category.”

So, the fundamental question of treatment is this: Will we regret not having enjoyed our lives because we were so preoccupied with answering unanswerable questions? The hindsight bias, which is the belief that a past event was predictable (despite us not predicting it) when it wasn’t, contributes to an obsession with the right choices. Underlying that belief is a strong need for certainty and the accompanying conviction that it’s attainable for that individual. Letting go of that fear, to some extent, can open up a new world, one that’s more ordinary but less intense.

There’s a significant difference between being special and important, even though we’ve confused the two. The former is impossible in any meaningful way; the latter, deeply affecting and mattering to others, is.