Perfectionists encouraged to re-think strategies

Perfectionists encouraged to re-think strategies
(May 2009 Issue)

By Ami Albernaz

In recent years, psychologists have given more attention to perfectionism - not the striving for excellence that characterizes top athletes or artists, but an often painstaking avoidance of mistakes that leads to lost time, anxiety and sometimes strained relationships with others.

Perfectionists are driven by a need to stand out from the crowd - a trait that serves some people well, but that in its maladaptive strain, can co-exist with depression, social anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder or eating disorders. A difference between adaptive and maladaptive perfectionists, says Randy Frost, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. and a pioneer in perfectionism research, is that the latter tend to base their self-worth on performance - and those who do so to a greater degree are more likely to suffer.

"The extent that people try to hide their mistakes and appear perfect to others seems to determine psychopathology," Frost says.

Perfectionism seems to be equally distributed among the genders, says Jeff Szymanski, Ph.D., executive director of the Obsessive Compulsive Foundation in Boston who led a therapy group for extreme perfectionists at McLean Hospital's OCD Institute. Although parents are thought to stoke perfectionism, Szymanski found that most of the people in his groups didn't attribute the trait to their parents.

"If I ran a group of 15 people, I might hear two people say their parents put pressure on them," he says. "In fact, sometimes parents would tell them to pull back."

Perfectionists tend to pride themselves on their sky-high standards, so that they often interpret challenges to their perfectionism as a questioning of their intentions. It's therefore important, Szymanski says, to separate intentions from maladaptive strategies, such as applying equal effort to all tasks, no matter how important or unimportant; rigidly following rules; and constantly revisiting tasks to make sure they are completed perfectly, which often results in missed deadlines.

Getting perfectionists to rethink their strategies is a gradual process, yet once they begin evaluating the costs - the low probability of perfection actually being achieved or, as Szymanski puts it, whether their "rule matches the outcome" - they can begin exploring new methods.

"I would tell the group, 'You're the most uncreative bunch ever,'" Szymanski says. To challenge perfectionists' belief that they had to follow rules and do things a certain way, he would encourage his group to approach tasks differently or to make small changes in their routine, such as taking an alternate route to work.

Cognitive-behavioral approaches seem to be helpful in treating perfectionists, Frost notes. A key component of therapy, he says, is to "focus on that contingent self-worth, to look at how they're evaluating themselves and determining their self-worth."

Szymanski would try to lead his groups in taking steps toward a more adaptive perfectionism. These steps would include prioritizing tasks and deciding from there how much effort to expend on each; learning from conscientious people who accomplish tasks more efficiently, and without as much distress; and taking risks and allowing others to witness small mistakes.

The last of these recommendations is perhaps the scariest.

"People felt that without their perfectionism, they'd be Homer Simpson characters, that they'd be lazy," Szymanski says. "They never looked at the spaces in between."