I recently interviewed clinical psychologist Dr. Ellen Hendriksen, whose book How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists comes out tomorrow January 7th. 

We talked about perfectionism and how it impacts our relationships. I’ll release Part 1 of the interview today, and next week, I’ll release Part 2.

Dr. Marisa G Franco (MF): What are some hidden signs that people might exhibit perfectionistic tendencies? 

Dr. Ellen Hendriksen (EH): Perfectionism is a misnomer. At the anxiety specialty center where I work, nobody has ever come in and said, “You know, Ellen, I’m a perfectionist. I need everything to be perfect.” People come in and say, “‘I feel like I’m failing.’ ‘I feel like I’m falling behind.’ ‘I have a million things on my plate, and I’m not doing any of it well’”. Sometimes you’ll get a little narcissistic flavor of, “‘I’m not reaching my full potential’ or ‘I’m not optimizing my life,’” but it’s the sense of not being good enough. And I think that’s something that many of us can relate to. 

In fact, I would say the majority of my clients have perfectionism, at the overlapping Venn diagram center of their problems, but almost never do they self-identify as perfectionists. 

MF: It sounds like there’s this rigidity of self that I have to be a certain way to be valuable, so I therefore, cannot fully express all these different parts of me and the result is a narrowed way of being, or a decrease in overall expressiveness. 

EH: For sure. It’s the idea that worth is contingent upon performance.

MF: Something I deal with in the realm of friendship for worth being so attached to performance, [relates to] romance and marital status. Oh, I need to have a romantic partner to be acceptable in modern society, and even if I have these friends, they don’t count as, a legitimate community, because, they’re not what monopolizes the definition of what’s perfect. 

EH: Absolutely,  I mean in perfectionism, we orient to rules. That doesn’t mean that the rules have to make sense or have to be even within our values.  So I think it’s easy to absorb this message from society that, romantic love is the ideal, and to not see all the platonic love around us. 

I once had this potential client email me and say that she wanted help with perfectionism so we set up a first appointment, and that morning, she emailed again, and she said, “Ellen, I’ve looked at my schedule and I’ve thought about my bandwidth, and I really want to wait until I have time to work on this really hard.” 

There’s a sense that rolling back perfectionism has to be a total overhaul. And I want to emphasize that, if we do roll back perfectionism, we might not do anything differently at all. We don’t have to change anything. It might be just that we start following our values, as opposed to the rules, what is really important to me? What does make me feel connected or loved or accepted, or what do I enjoy? 

We might enjoy hanging out with our friends, but be chasing that romantic relationship, because we think that’s the rule. But, when we move from rules to values, we might still love hanging out with our friends. What we do day to day might not change at all. 

It’s just a different mindset driving it. You don’t have to do anything different. 

MF: It sounds like, as you’re describing it, being perfectionistic is, antithetical to being attuned to yourself, what you value or find important, and that’s a loss. 

In the society that we live in, it’s easy to be vulnerable to assimilating to things that may not be good in the first place. But by doing so, you lose out on the ability to critically evaluate, like, Hmm, is this something I want to take on as a value or not? And you might just get caught in, well, I have to be the best at this thing, because there is status to it. 

EH: Exactly. In the book, I tell the story about a client of mine, who I call Carter. He was in his first year of college, and all his life, he had been told by his parents and his teachers that he was smart, so he said, “Okay, if I’m smart, there are certain things I have to do; like I need to study for a long time. I need to not ask stupid questions. I need to memorize the study guide so I don’t get any questions wrong.” And it was this exhausting treadmill of proving himself–every exam, every quiz– his label of smart was always on the table, and if he did poorly, then it went from all to nothing. 

We worked hard to try to reorient to the value of learning and choosing the thing that’s meaningful or important and running towards that, rather than kind of mindlessly doing all this stuff to maintain the label, and again, to the point of you don’t have to do anything differently. He still studied for a long time. 

On the surface, nothing really changed, but running towards learning, lowered the pressure, and lowered the fraughtness of trying to maintain this label of smart. 

MF: It sounds like, as you’re describing it, too, that perfectionism is about avoiding certain emotions, such as shame, or feeling bad or wrong. There’s the inability to metabolize those emotions, so you just have to consistently run from them. That sounds tiring. 

EH: There is a term called emotional perfectionism, and that is, either feeling or demonstrating, only the good stuff. So I only allow myself to feel happy. If sadness or shame comes along, you squish those to only demonstrate certain emotions—no matter what we have to put on a happy face or be excited or perform the positive emotions, regardless of what we feel. I think a lot of us are raised that emotions are dictated by the situation at hand as opposed to how we truly feel.

MF: Yeah, that sounds counter to vulnerability. 

I think about perfectionism as something that goes on within you, but is there also perfectionism that people apply to others— thinking people around me have to be perfect or I don’t [like them]? 

EH: 100%. Yeah. So there’s, there are three types of perfectionism. There’s self-oriented perfectionism, and that’s what we think of when we say the word perfectionism. So that’s being hard on ourselves. 

But then there’s other-oriented perfectionism, which is when we’re hard on the people around us, and ironically, is usually the people closest to us, like a partner or kids, you know, our direct reports at work. It’s the people we think reflect on us. 

And then the third type is socially prescribed perfectionism, and that is assuming that others will be hard on us. In a demanding society, that is the one that is increasing exponentially. 

MF: When you become this other prescribed perfectionism, you see people as a reflection of you? And you can’t see people in some ways then.

EH: Both self-oriented and socially prescribed [perfectionism] have a healthy heart of conscientiousness, which is doing things well and thoroughly, being responsible, and being diligent. My line is that it’s the least sexy superpower. But as far as personality traits go, [it is] the one to choose for a good life. 

But other-oriented perfectionism, which is being hard on others, is the only one not rooted in conscientiousness. It’s dubbed a dark form of perfectionism because it’s rooted in dominance and control and a little bit of narcissism. We all have controlling moments, nobody’s exempt from this, but it is driven by a sense of, I know the right way. And that could be from how to load the dishwasher to how to raise a child, and that other people have to do it my way, and that can get in the way of relationships.

MF: Yeah. I mean, it sounds like those are the people that are judging you. 

EH: Well, the people are trying to control you and tell you that you have to do it this way, or that’s wrong. I have a client who trusted me enough to admit that she controlled how her husband made mac and cheese. And she’s like, You don’t put the pasta back in and then put the cheese packet and the milk in. You have to make the sauce in the pot first after you drain it, and then put the pasta in. And she was like, “Oh, my, I can’t believe I did that.”  I think people have a sense that this is not who they want to be. 

Another tagline is the opposite of control isn’t being out of control. The opposite of control is trust. It’s like being able to trust the people around us, to be competent, to be capable. 

MF: It sounds like you’re asking us to head towards complexity, to head towards variability, to head towards, the messiness of multiple ways of being right? And being more okay with it.

It seems like wherever there are high levels of control, there’s potential for perfectionism. If you’re trying to really control something what is the perfectionism that might be underlying that?

EH: Yeah. And that could be self-control, control of others, or it could be putting our best foot forward so others can’t control us.

MF: Well, are there any other things that you feel are important to share that we haven’t gotten to 

EH: We haven’t talked about self-criticism. 

We don’t have to stop criticizing ourselves. In fact, we probably won’t, because self-criticism is the heart of human regulation. We criticize ourselves, to better ourselves, to keep ourselves in line with the tribe, and not get kicked out. If we try to stop criticizing ourselves, we’re fighting biology and evolution. 

Instead, what we can do, is to try to change our relationship to our self-criticism. And, you know, some brains are more optimistic or pessimistic, some are more introverted or extroverted, and some are just wired to be a little more self-critical, mine included. I have learned that this is just what my brain does. Whenever I do something involving a microphone, or if I’m sending my writing out into the world, I’m just going to think it sucks, and that’s just what my brain does. But I don’t have to listen to that. I can take it less seriously and less literally and approach it like the music in a coffee shop or the music that’s in the background at a grocery store. You can hear it, but you don’t have to dance along. I don’t have to change myself or talk to myself differently. I can just let it go by, you know, like sushi at a revolving restaurant. That’s just what my brain does, and that’s all. 

When you know [self-criticism] is part of the process, it helps you not fold to it because you’re like this is another wave in the process.

MF: Wow. So it’s like, self-acceptance isn’t about cheerleading yourself all the time, but having enough distance from your critical thoughts so you’re not constantly internalizing them. 

EH: A lot of people with perfectionism won’t try new things, and won’t take a risk because they don’t want to struggle or be bad at something. 

If you think oh this is how it works—I am supposed to fall on the bunny slope. I am supposed to stare at the blank page, having no idea what to write—[you’ll feel better]. Negative emotions are only a problem if we think they shouldn’t be happening. 

MF: On a podcast, you mentioned something about more Beatles less Frozen…

EH: I have a little bit of beef with [the idea that] you have to let your bad feelings go. That implies an unwillingness to have them. You need to make them go away. And so, yeah, the tagline is, less Frozen—you don’t have to let it go. More Beatles—let it be. It can just sit there. It can just be there. You don’t have to shove it down, because it’s just going to pop up like a beach ball pushed underwater. 

Let it be there and go run towards what’s important, meaningful, and purposeful for you.

MF: That sounds so anti-perfectionistic like you gotta live with it.

EH: Yeah.