When My Perfectionism Makes Me Miserable

“Often perfectionists and efficient people

forget the importance of efficiency ”

(Ismael Diaz Lazaro)

You’ve probably dated perfectionists before. Their behavior seems curious and, at times, funny.

Perfectionists need to achieve perfection in everything they do.

At breakfast, the cup should not be even a little shifted to the right. They need her to be in the center, perfectly positioned. A perfectionist mind can reach such extremes.

Why am I a perfectionist?

There are many factors that can lead you to develop a perfectionist personality.

Moreover, the perfectionist is recognized as being a syndrome bearing the name of “Perfectionist Syndrome”, or “Obsessive Personality Disorder”.

Some experts believe that perfectionism may be due to a genetic predisposition.

On the contrary, for other experts, the most likely cause of perfectionism is various environmental factors:

• Your self-esteem depends on the amount of compliments that others give you.
• You were humiliated as a child and today you want to be accepted socially.
• Your parents were very bossy.
• You grew up surrounded by successful people, but you weren’t able to experience the same success as them.
• You have very little tolerance for failure. 
• You are aware of the fact that the company is highly competitive.

Since our birth, we are exposed to continuous stimuli that will mark us for the rest of our life.

If you have experienced one of the previously mentioned situations, then it has inevitably had its consequences.

The society we live in has its standards, its laws, its fashions, its way of seeing life, and pushes us to be better than others.

Being someone who fails is frowned upon. The company considers that true happiness lies in success.

But, can we really live under such pressure? This is when perfectionism starts to be a problem.

“Achieving success is learning to go from failure to failure without losing hope”

(Winston Churchill)

Perfection doesn’t make me better

Just being good at everything, doing things right, and sticking out of the way doesn’t make you any better. Think, for example, that the more you strive to be a perfect person, the less you are.

People are not perfect, and we have to see our imperfections as something that makes us unique.

Only by embracing imperfection can one achieve perfect happiness. It is not by forcing yourself to be someone that you are not that you will succeed in being happy. Such behavior will only frustrate and stress us out.

So what can the daily life of a perfectionist be like? First of all, a perfectionist has consistently low self-esteem, so even compliments from others doesn’t make them feel good about themselves.

Guilt, pessimism and obsession are three words that define her perfectly. Indeed, she will never get what she wants, since absolute perfection cannot be achieved.

As a result, she often unwillingly falls into depression, and disappointments and other frustrations follow one another.

The perfectionist therefore becomes very inflexible and just as little spontaneous.
She is no longer natural, and becomes someone rigid, without any charm.

Like many other syndromes, perfectionism can be overcome. For this, the person must be aware that such an attitude will not help him achieve happiness.

As soon as she is aware that this frantic quest for perfection is nothing other than the fruit of the pressure to which she is subjected, she will then be ready to take the step towards acceptance.

We all need to learn to be better, but not to strive for this terrible perfection.

We have to embrace imperfection and give all we have to do things the best we can, but without persisting in achieving something that in reality is not within our reach.