What Causes Perfectionism?

Perfectionism is a personality trait characterized by high standards, rigid expectations, and specific ideas about how to achieve a desired outcome The more attached a person is to these expectations, the harder it can be for them to manage their perfectionism and accept reality, especially during times when they make mistakes or when things don’t go as planned. This can lead to unhealthy forms of perfectionism that feed anxiety, insecurity, and patterns of self-criticism. Perfectionists tend to be driven, organized, and reliable but can also become overly anxious and critical when their expectations are unmet. By becoming more open, adaptable, and tolerant of mistakes, perfectionists can use this trait in ways that are helpful and positive.

Perfectionism may be learned in several ways such as observing and modeling behaviour in others with these tendencies or developing them in response to specific experiences and interactions. One of the strongest predictors of perfectionism is parenting style. Children who have demanding, harsh, critical parents or caregivers are much more likely to develop perfectionist tendencies. Sometimes these are the result of neglectful or abusive parenting styles and other times can be the result of well-intentioned parents who had high expectations.

Strong parent-child bonds can partially buffer the harmful effects of overly strict parenting styles. When these bonds are not securely formed, children are more likely to interpret rigid expectations as conditions for love and acceptance. This can also occur when people experience trauma or adversity in childhood. The combination of a poor child-parent bond and a harsh parenting style is most likely to result in the development of perfectionist traits in the child. Children often make sense of traumatic experiences by developing negative beliefs or schemas about themselves. For example, its highly common for abused children to develop the belief that they are bad or unlovable rather than attributing the abuse to their parents. People with high levels of perfectionism tend to report schemas related to emotional deprivation, abandonment, mistrust, social isolation and defectiveness. These underlying negative beliefs lead to heightened fear of failure and rejection – therefore perfectionism can develop as a mechanism for coping with these beliefs.

Having perfectionist tendencies is not inherently harmful but certain expressions of these traits could lead to secondary consequences on a person’s mental health, functioning and overall quality of life.

Types of Perfectionism –

1. Self- oriented: this is the tendency to have unrealistically high expectations of oneself and an inability to accept your own mistakes and faults.
2. Other -oriented: these folks are often unable to delegate tasks to others for fear of being disappointed by a less-than-perfect performance. They also might have issues with excessive anger and relationship stress as they are overly demanding, hostile and harsh.
3. Socially prescribed: this is a tendency to assume that others have high expectations of you that are impossible to meet, this has been internalized by the person. These expectations can come from parents, friends, society at large. This tends to lead to self-doubt, lack of confidence, social anxiety.

What does this look like in daily life?

In situations, where your beliefs are arbitrary and subjective rather than based on evidence or hard facts – the more inflexible your beliefs and opinions are the more you are to run into problems! For example – the belief that one should not drink and drive is consistent with statistics showing that more than half of car accidents involve alcohol. On the other hand, the inflexible belief that people should only listen to classical music and that all other types of music are inferior might cause problems if you are surrounded by other people who are not classic music lovers.

People who are perfectionist tend to have specific patterns of beliefs that help to maintain their perfectionism. Example – someone who is perfectionist may believe that there is only one way of washing the dishes. In reality there are many different ways of washing dishes, but if one adheres too rigidly to beliefs about how tasks should be done then he/she will run into problems with other people who also have strong opinions about how things should be done.

Perfectionism can affect your interpretations – that’s the wrong way to wash dishes, which in turn affects your emotions – Now I’m irritated. Usually, we are unaware of the thoughts and interpretations that lead to our intense reactions to situations. Often these thoughts occur so quickly and automatically that they are outside of our conscious awareness.

With practice identifying perfectionist beliefs will become easier, one way of doing this is to notice situations in which you experience a negative emotion like anxiety, sadness, anger, frustration or a feeling that “something is not right”. Once the emotion has been identified and labeled it sometimes becomes easier to identify the thoughts and interpretations that are contributing to the negative feeling. These may even be contradictory beliefs leading to a mixture of emotions.

Everyone likes to be correct. Hence, people tend to seek out experiences that confirm their beliefs, in other words, people tend to seek information in a biased way – in an effort to support their assumptions and thoughts. Unfortunately, this tendency to seek out information that confirms one’s beliefs can sometimes get people into trouble. Example – a person who has a fear of flying is likely to pay extra attention to stories in the media about airline crashes, compared to the attention paid to all the airplanes taking off and landing safely; people who are feeling depressed are more likely to remember all the mistakes they have made in the past, rather than their successes.

Perfectionists are in danger of paying more attention to events that confirm their beliefs than to information that contradicts their beliefs.

Stay tuned for our next blog in which we look at healthy ways of coping if you are a perfectionist!