Your Obsessive Pursuits Won't Heal Your Shame

Obsessiveness is a veil for inconvenient and difficult truths, both personal and existential. Those who struggle with obsessiveness often can’t articulate why they love what they obsess over or how having it and holding onto it would make them happy. Obsessiveness as a distraction manifests in the pursuit of fame, romance, and financial success. It isn’t that these goals are inherently bad (they aren’t inherently good either); it’s that those who identify as perfectionists pursue them to add belt notches. Fundamentally, they turn out not to mean much of anything to them.

It’s true that perfectionists struggle with black and white thinking and, thus, devalue anything they possess after idealizing it. But, there’s something deeper here. Perfectionists have a tendency to treat most things as means to ends. For example, engaging with a stranger at a party implies the possibility of approval, which, in turn, may increase one’s self-esteem. Whether or not the stranger is compatible is of little concern. Since many obsessive-compulsive types are preoccupied with their image, rejection generally feels devastating. So, the fact that they may not have even liked the individual rejecting them feels irrelevant.

Here, the obsessive pursuit of affection hides one’s shame, feeling unwanted and unloved. The individual pursued is then thrust into the role of a levee, a bland object meant to protect the perfectionist from a rising tide. Existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom famously asked a patient, “What are people for?” But we can broaden his question to ask, “What makes something, whether a relationship or a personal goal, worth pursuing?” Is its purpose merely to sustain a sense of emotional security or to make you like yourself? Perfectionists, in part, devalue what they have because one achievement, whatever it may be, can’t imply anything meaningful about who one generally is (unless it can somehow, every second, effectively remind you that you’re special, without you, at some point, growing bored) and because the process of achievement in itself is hardly ever full of joy.

The obsessive is always waiting—waiting for something to prove to them that they matter, waiting for something to unburden them, and waiting for something to cause them to stop obsessing. But, in reality, to stop obsessing, the perfectionist would need to address the host of issues underlying their relentlessness. The external world can do little to fix your sense of self; it can’t provide you with objective meaning (only make you feel like you “should” be pursuing something); it can’t inform you what happiness consists of for you; and it can’t help you learn to tolerate being aware of your mortality. At bottom, obsessiveness is a paradox, a mixture of both hyper-independence and codependence—the perfectionist singularly (in both meanings of the term, by themselves and to the exclusion of other goals) chases a life wherein they’re taken care of, one full of material and philosophical provision.

And in that chase, the perfectionist fails to ask if there are alternatives that can make them happy, especially those more mundane and less influential. The cliché question we ask younger people is, “What would you do if you had a million dollars?” And we can tailor this to the perfectionist, asking, “What would you do if you had your utopia?” Would you still chase the approval of strangers who may not share your interests, concerns, or values? Would you continue to be preoccupied with your social standing? And would you engage in your usual activities?

Learning to tolerate one’s shame may feel like a contradiction, as we often implore our patients to deal with their problems head-on. But shame and existential dread are often best addressed by immersing oneself in one’s life and thinking about its meaning less. Trying different and even difficult activities can help you discover what you like doing most. Engaging with different people can help you discover who you like relating to most. Instead of the underlying question being “What does this say about me?” you can ask yourself, “What does this make me feel in the moment?” Is what you’re doing making you excited and curious? Would you continue to engage if the activity were not instrumental, leading to something better? And what would you do if you accepted that there’s no permanent solution to your shame and fear?

Despite providing an exceptional amount of hope, obsessiveness tends to be a dead-end, even if one achieves everything they wanted to. The existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard encapsulated this truth when he wrote, “Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.” In the end, all we have are our experiences and the emotions they help elicit. But the key is that we have to actively choose them, without the expectation that they’re somehow going to solve all of our problems.