#1025 - Dr Paul Hewitt - Understanding the Psychology of Perfectionism

Speaker 1 Give me a

Speaker 1 better than most people, probably already have working definition of perfectionism.

Speaker 2 Well, first off, perfectionism is kind of a deeply ingrained personality style that people

Speaker 2 use to kind of navigate their path through life.

Speaker 2 So we talk about it as a way of being in the world, and

Speaker 2 it's kind of the sense that

Speaker 2 at the core, I'm not enough, that there's something that is flawed, defective.

Speaker 2 I'm just not enough either to have worth or to be acceptable

Speaker 2 to other people, to fit, to belong, to have a place in the world. And so

Speaker 2 it's a way of trying to navigate that because when we have that sense of being flawed and defective, or I don't fit, we don't just typically say,

Speaker 2 okay, that's the way it is. We try to do something about it, we try to rectify it.

Speaker 2 One of the ways that a person can do that, and they learn this often very early in life, is that if I am perfect or if I can appear to others as perfect,

Speaker 2 then I will be acceptable to them. I will be loved.
I will be cared for.

Speaker 2 I will belong. I will matter to other people.
And by virtue of that, I will have worth. It will repair this sense of being flawed and defective at the core.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 what it is, is

Speaker 2 this sort of way of navigating the world of trying to conceal imperfections, trying

Speaker 2 yes, to be perfect in

Speaker 2 tasks and activities and that, but really it's more of a drive not to be imperfect.

Speaker 2 So that's kind of what, that's kind of the way we understand.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 this typical sort of upbringing of somebody that grows up to be a perfectionist,

Speaker 1 is love contingent on performance?

Speaker 2 And that can be an element of it.

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 2 what we talk about

Speaker 2 in terms of the development would be a sense of, this comes from the attachment literature that people have probably heard the term before,

Speaker 2 but also some writing, soft psychoanalytic writing on the development of the self by Heinz Kohat.

Speaker 2 And it's the notion that very early on in our lives, we develop a sense of

Speaker 2 who we are

Speaker 2 and a sense of the way other people work in our lives. And so

Speaker 2 very often the very early kind of lives of individuals who develop this flawed sense of self or this not fitting is there's what we call an asynchrony or a non-attunement. It's that these basic,

Speaker 2 very human needs to have worth and to be acceptable

Speaker 2 or to fit and belong are not met.

Speaker 2 early in the person's life. So they have a sense that I'm just not enough, there's something wrong with me.
And they try to navigate that very, as I said, often very, very early in life.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 they do have a sense of

Speaker 2 caregivers or

Speaker 2 family members or people that are supposed to be caring for them as they're incapable of giving me what I need. They're don't care.
They're abusive or

Speaker 2 we just miss. We just don't connect.
So it's not to say that the parents are to blame or bad. It's just that

Speaker 2 somehow what the child needs is just not

Speaker 2 attainable in that interaction. That's kind of the essence of attachment.

Speaker 1 And what's the lesson from the

Speaker 1 burgeoning proto-perfectionist? What is the lesson that that child takes away that I am not getting what I need, therefore I need to be more than I am in order to get what I need.

Speaker 1 If I can be more impressive, less imperfect, then the world might support me and love me in the way that I want.

Speaker 2 Yes, but it's not that sophisticated at that very early age.

Speaker 2 It's a sense of

Speaker 2 I'm just not enough.

Speaker 2 There's something wrong with me. And try in some sort of fashion to try to deal with that.
And in a way,

Speaker 2 I mean, in a way, it's a very elegant solution to the pain of that because

Speaker 2 a child will learn

Speaker 2 this sort of sense. Well, if I am perfect or if I can appear to others as if I am perfect or conceal my imperfections, then all of these wonderful things are going to happen.

Speaker 2 I will be acceptable to others. I'll feel good about myself.
I'll have worth and I will fit and belong in the world. Now, it's a very childlike

Speaker 2 solution to the problem, but but it's very elegant at that sort of stage of development.

Speaker 2 And it grabs on with these people. Sorry, you were going to say something.

Speaker 1 It makes sense if you say that one of the key drivers in a child that is continued into adulthood of a perfectionist is I am not enough,

Speaker 1 then

Speaker 1 the value judgment is if I can be more,

Speaker 1 then I may be enough. And more is more perfect, better in terms of my performance, higher in terms of my achievement, less in terms of my error and my mistake making.

Speaker 2 All of those kind of things.

Speaker 2 But at the basis of it is this sense that,

Speaker 2 yeah,

Speaker 2 I need to be more.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it's a nebulous kind of concept, of course.

Speaker 2 So each person's perfectionism is entirely unique, both in terms of how they feel about or how they understand themselves, but also how they try to navigate that, how they try to be perfect or appear to be perfect in the world.

Speaker 2 So it's quite idiosyncratic in terms of what that kind of looks like for each person. So for some, it can be absolutely striving and driving and trying to do lots of things.

Speaker 2 For many people, it's a concern with that, but paralysis. They don't really do anything,

Speaker 2 but they have this internal sort of dialogue, this sense of this is what I should be doing. I need to be doing this in order to solve the problem.
But there's just paralysis that exists.

Speaker 1 What does it feel like to live inside a perfectionist's mind?

Speaker 2 Abusive,

Speaker 2 harsh, critical. I mean,

Speaker 2 there's a component of perfectionism that we call

Speaker 2 the intra-individual or the self-relational component. And the way to think about it is,

Speaker 2 Chris, just like you can have a way of relating to other people, and it's a stylistic way.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 you're open, you're kind, you talk to people, you listen carefully, and that's a style you have of relating to other people.

Speaker 2 Just like you can have that style with others, there's a style we have of relating to the self. And often we don't kind of think of it that way.

Speaker 2 But one of the ways to kind of capture the nature of the relationship a person has with themselves is by that dialogue that we have. So

Speaker 2 every day we have these conversations with ourselves. And most of the time, they're quite benign.
Brushing your teeth in the morning and you're thinking, hey, I've got to do this interview today.

Speaker 2 I've got to make sure I read that article before.

Speaker 2 And they're benign sorts of things. But every once in a while,

Speaker 2 a style can be triggered where the individual is

Speaker 2 evaluating themselves or anticipating some kind of performance. And this stylistic: oh, I've got to do this perfectly.
I've got to make sure I have all this covered.

Speaker 2 I've got to make sure I don't stutter. I don't mispronounce a word.
I don't look silly or foolish or my voice shit.

Speaker 2 This kind of dialogue. Or after an experience, why did I say that? I can't believe I was so stupid when I say that.
And it's this kind of relational thing. And

Speaker 2 if you took that dialogue and spoke it to

Speaker 2 your spouse, your child, and I'll ask patients this, like, what if you use that dialogue with your spouse? And they'd say, I would be divorced and I'd probably be arrested

Speaker 2 doing this thing.

Speaker 2 And I'd say, well, isn't that interesting that you could be that, you know, that abusive, you're not that abusive to loved ones in your life,

Speaker 2 but somehow you are to yourself. And when you put it in those terms with patients, very often it just makes an incredible amount of sense.

Speaker 2 And so inside the mind of perfectionistic people,

Speaker 2 that secret sort of

Speaker 2 world we live in that's only sort of there for us,

Speaker 2 it's pretty horrific.

Speaker 1 So I guess one obvious question is, how do you distinguish healthy striving striving and standards and ambition from toxic perfectionism?

Speaker 2 Well, absolutely. No, it's a great question.
I mean, it's confusing even in the literature because people use the term healthy adaptive perfectionism. And really what they're talking about,

Speaker 2 I believe, is an entirely different construct. And to use perfectionism

Speaker 2 the term is inappropriate. We're talking about achievement, striving, conscientiousness, having really high, difficult to attain standards, striving for those, absolutely healthy and adaptive.

Speaker 2 And some of the most wonderful things that exists in our world are because of that.

Speaker 2 When it's driven by this sense that there's something wrong with me,

Speaker 2 and the whole purpose in navigating the world is to correct that, to somehow feel worth, that's something entirely different.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 it's kind of at the basis of the motivation for the behavior. If the person is trying to correct themselves or correct this sense of fitting in the world, it becomes very maladaptive.

Speaker 2 If it's striving for pushing oneself or attaining really difficult standards or even trying to attain the impossible things Elon Musk is kind of trying to do through others,

Speaker 2 that's wonderful. That's

Speaker 2 very, very helpful. So the distinction is the way we understand it.
They're two very different psychological constructs.

Speaker 2 One is to repair the self, and another is to push the self and attain and accomplish different things.

Speaker 1 I think one of the challenges people will be thinking about here is, well,

Speaker 1 I am my work. in many ways.

Speaker 1 I feel

Speaker 1 existentially connected to the things that I do, the way that I perform, my sense of self, and my performance in my sport of choice, or my job, or my relationship, or how well the date went, or that presentation that I gave, or the most recent opera that I sang at, or whatever it is,

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 is bleeding into who we are. Who we are and what we do now don't have particularly well demarcated territories.
And by fixing,

Speaker 1 if you

Speaker 1 if you underperform in a sports game the the world series is going on at the moment and uh if if you have a horrendous couple of games back to back

Speaker 1 well yeah your performance within the game right wasn't particularly great but we all know that well does that mean that I am not good as a person I am not worthy as a person

Speaker 1 I think a lot of people that are high performers and maybe this is just a selection effect that lots of people who end up being high performers have perfectionistic traits.

Speaker 1 I think that it, at least for me, when I think about it,

Speaker 1 trying to delineate between the two is really like to me, they are very much the same thing. We're very much sort of talking about the same thing that if I do well, I am good.
If I do badly, I am bad.

Speaker 1 And I think that, at least in my experience, knowing that I was going to have this conversation with you and talking to some friends about this,

Speaker 1 I think this is a very common

Speaker 1 interpretation where the difference between what you do and who you are, so the difference in

Speaker 1 improving and becoming more ambitious inside of the domain of your pursuit and trying to fix yourself because you are your pursuit

Speaker 1 is often seen as one and the same.

Speaker 2 You're right.

Speaker 2 And very perfectionistic people will do that. I will repair myself by becoming even better at what I'm trying to do.

Speaker 2 And in the clinical work I do

Speaker 2 with Olympians, with high performers all over the place, there is a distinction.

Speaker 2 And I think

Speaker 2 you alluded to it in one of the things you said that, you know, screwing up in two games in a row in the World Series.

Speaker 2 For those individuals, how do they continue? Well, it's because they can demarcate, this is what I do,

Speaker 2 but who I am and my being

Speaker 2 still has worth. So there's a resiliency that's there.
It's not about I'm engaging in play in the World Series in order to repair myself, in order to do something about this defective sense of self.

Speaker 2 So it's a

Speaker 2 you're right. On one level, there is this

Speaker 2 who I am constitutes a major portion of my identity. But

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 I work with Olympians, I work with artists, I work with professionals who are highly successful in their career, and it doesn't touch their sense of, yeah, but who I am really at the core.

Speaker 2 I'm just awful. I'm not good enough.
And people will actually make a distinction,

Speaker 2 you know, between,

Speaker 2 if I can use you as an example, Mr. Williamson versus Chris.
And Mr.

Speaker 2 Williamson can do all of these incredible things, you know, have a very successful podcast, interview people, connect with people in these amazing ways, the accolades.

Speaker 2 But then there's Chris, who is this

Speaker 2 person

Speaker 2 with a child,

Speaker 2 you know, is just this guy who's really

Speaker 2 not Mr. Williamson.
And I'm making this up with you, of course, because I don't know you at all.

Speaker 2 But when you make that distinction with people and with professionals, absolutely they understand that, especially when you're doing in a therapeutic context, that they'll say, yeah, absolutely, it's incomprehensible.

Speaker 2 When I sit back and think, wow, I actually did do all those things,

Speaker 2 but it really doesn't solve the problem of me feeling like

Speaker 2 I'm just not

Speaker 2 worthy enough. I'm just not acceptable.
I just don't fit.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I suppose that's

Speaker 1 an interesting part of this.

Speaker 1 Does

Speaker 1 achievement relieve perfectionism?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 That's an uncomfortable realization, isn't it? That's the fantasy for these individuals. The fantasy, if I am perfect, then that will solve the problem of my work.
And then

Speaker 2 pick a domain, find a domain, do something that you get some accolades, some attention or some interest in,

Speaker 2 and grab onto it with the belief that if I achieve these high, high

Speaker 2 standards or

Speaker 2 get these accolades, that's going to solve the problem.

Speaker 2 And it's just the wrong tool for trying to solve the problem. But grab onto the fantasy and maintain it.

Speaker 2 And it's particularly pernicious when you're thinking about perfectionism because

Speaker 2 you can have individuals

Speaker 2 decide that

Speaker 2 this is going to be the thing. If I can do this perfectly, or if I can conceal all my imperfections in this context, that will solve the problem.

Speaker 2 And they engage in this, and they could do a fantastic job. And then they come away from it, feel good for a few moments, and then, oh, I still feel this way.
It wasn't perfect enough.

Speaker 2 And then it ups the ante even the next time. And rather than saying, maybe this is the wrong tool for trying to feel worse or feel like I'm deserving of anything in this work,

Speaker 2 they up the ante

Speaker 2 and say, okay, it's got to be more perfect next time.

Speaker 1 So success doesn't touch the underlying belief of unacceptability?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 That's my experience.

Speaker 2 That's not the solution.

Speaker 1 Does a lack of success worsen the underlying belief of unacceptability? Yeah. Right.
Okay. So

Speaker 1 success doesn't relieve it, but failure confirms it.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's the wrong tool.

Speaker 2 You know, if you take, if you're trying to pound a nail in and all you have is a screwdriver, you can, you could, you can pound, you're usually going to make a huge mess, but the odd time it might actually get the screw, it might actually get the nail in.

Speaker 2 But there's a better tool to use that, that actually solves the problem.

Speaker 1 In other news, Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce companies. in the United States.

Speaker 1 They are the driving force behind Gymshark, Skims, Allo, and Newtonic, which is why I partnered with them, because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class.

Speaker 1 Their checkout is 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. And with ShopPay, you can boost conversions by up to 50%.

Speaker 1 They've got award-winning support there to help you every step of the way. Look, you are not going into business to learn how to code or build a website or do back-end inventory management.

Speaker 1 Shopify takes care of all of that and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product.

Speaker 1 Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that I use with Nutonic on Shopify.

Speaker 1 Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com slash modern wisdom or lowercase.

Speaker 1 That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom to upgrade your selling today.

Speaker 1 It feels to me like perfectionism self-perpetuating then.

Speaker 1 Achievement doesn't relieve this sense that I'm not enough.

Speaker 1 In fact, it reinforces in many ways, oh, I must be more perfect.

Speaker 1 It's not playing in front of 500 people, it's playing in front of 2,000 people. It's not achieving this job title at work, it's achieving the C-suite.

Speaker 1 It's not getting a master's degree, it's getting the doctorate degree, it's getting the residency, it's continuing to up the ante.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 success is never sufficient, and failure is always confirmation of your insufficiency.

Speaker 2 And it's always failure.

Speaker 2 It's always failure.

Speaker 1 Even a special kind of success is a type of failure because it didn't fix the problem.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I can

Speaker 2 tell you about a patient I had.

Speaker 2 I write about this in one of my books. It's a fellow who was very perfectionist and very suicidal.
And

Speaker 2 I started seeing him. He was a university student in a particularly challenging program.

Speaker 2 And I started seeing him just at the end of the school year after he had been discharged from hospital, actually.

Speaker 2 And he talked about in his program, there was this one course that was a definitive course in the program.

Speaker 2 And if you did well in the course, it was going to essentially say, well, yeah, you're going to do well in this field.

Speaker 2 And if you didn't do well in the course, you essentially, well, you should just leave this field and go.

Speaker 2 So it's a very definitive course. And he talked about,

Speaker 2 I want to do really well in this course. I have to get an A.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I want to have the highest mark of any other student in there. And so I had just started working with him.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it had maybe been four weeks, I think, that we had been together. He came to a session when I knew he would have been given feedback and gotten the mark for the course.
He was very depressed and

Speaker 2 more depressed than I had seen him actually over the course of that time. And he said to me,

Speaker 2 well, I got the grade,

Speaker 2 I got the A plus and I actually got the highest score in the course.

Speaker 2 And he, and then for any of us, that would have been cause to celebrate and break out the champagne.

Speaker 2 But he said, you know, but I got that, but all it did is illustrate I had to work so hard to get it.

Speaker 2 That guy had to really work hard to get that. It just illustrates that I really am not capable.
If I had been able to get the course without working so hard, that would have, that would have done.

Speaker 2 And that is so slippery. It's so

Speaker 2 not unusual. It's not unusual.
Let me give you

Speaker 2 turn abject successes into abject failures.

Speaker 1 Wow. Let me give you my own personal example of that from when I used to run nightclubs back in the day.
So.

Speaker 1 My criteria for success kept on morphing to always move away from me. So first off, it was that the event needed to be successful.
We needed to be full.

Speaker 1 Then, not only did the event need to be successful, I had drawn

Speaker 1 a link between when I suffer, because I work very hard, typically the event does better.

Speaker 1 And what that resulted in was eventually landing at the point where if the event was successful, but I hadn't suffered, that meant that the success of the event wasn't quite as much or good or whatever as it should have been.

Speaker 1 And what I'd basically done was completely bypassed. So the event was a failure.
I was a failure. So that was one source of potential upset.
The event was a success, but I hadn't suffered.

Speaker 1 That was another potential source of upset. The event was a success and I had suffered.
That was kind of a source of satisfaction for me. But obviously I'd suffered.

Speaker 1 So I was unhappy at the fact that I'd, it was so slippery. And that kind of reminds me of the story that you were, you were talking about with your, your, your, ex-patient there.

Speaker 1 I also have this, I've been having this conversation at the live shows I've been doing around the US at the moment.

Speaker 1 This sense, is your presiding feeling when things go well, one of happiness or simply the abatement of fear? Is it joy or is it relief? And

Speaker 1 I feel like all of this sort of ties together.

Speaker 2 Oh, it absolutely does.

Speaker 2 I mean, one of the paradoxes of perfectionism is that striving for these successes, as you say, and getting the success, and as I just illustrated, turning it into a failure, or

Speaker 2 probably more commonly, is just not having a sense of satisfaction, a sense of celebration, a sense of, okay,

Speaker 2 I did do this, I did accomplish this.

Speaker 2 And they just

Speaker 2 don't experience a sense of satisfaction.

Speaker 2 So, again,

Speaker 2 the majority of us, when things go well, we evaluate and hopefully we have a sense in ourselves to sort of feel good about that, but also other people

Speaker 2 to celebrate and to share

Speaker 2 in that experience, which is something that's missing usually in perfectionist life all their life, the sense of sharing, shared pride in something.

Speaker 2 But just don't, they just, okay, that's done.

Speaker 2 It can be, thank God, that's over with, but it's okay, well, move on to the next thing. And it's just simply a progression,

Speaker 2 often

Speaker 2 upping the ante each time.

Speaker 2 I like the idea that I need to think about it a bit more, that if you suffered, I guess if you suffered in a successful thing, there was some comfort in that because I guess it let you you know, okay,

Speaker 2 I really did this. I was really pushing myself for the success.

Speaker 1 It's almost the inverse of what your

Speaker 1 patient had, right? Which I guess goes to show the idiosyncrasy of

Speaker 1 how this comes about. My British Puritan work ethic was was showing.

Speaker 1 But I can see how his mindset would be,

Speaker 1 the fact I had to work so hard shows just how not enough I am, that I've had to compensate for my not enoughness with all of my effort. I think at least a part of mine was

Speaker 1 things that are successful

Speaker 1 should be difficult. They should be hard.
And if you arrive at them without suffering and without challenge,

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 it belies a kind of laziness.

Speaker 1 There's a a sense of mailing it in. There's maybe a fragility or a tenuousness to your hold on this because, well, how much did you really contribute here? How much of this was fluke?

Speaker 1 Well, if you really hurt for a good while leading up to this, if you had two sleepless nights trying to make sure that the event was full or that, you know, you really, you know, made your mark, you put a dent in the universe by doing it that way.

Speaker 2 Makes some sense to me. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, what you're talking about is actually

Speaker 2 healthier,

Speaker 2 I think, than what than the kind of people that we're talking about in the library.

Speaker 1 I will take that as the oddest kind of compliment that I have ever

Speaker 1 reverse-engineered that into a compliment.

Speaker 1 I guess I'm interested if there's different types of perfectionism. I know that you've said it's idiosyncratic, sort of where it comes from.

Speaker 1 Each person is slightly different, but there must be chunks, taxonomies, categories, different waves that it shows. What are those?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's quite complex in some ways. So, there's three different levels that we sort of describe or define define perfectionism and one is um like a dispositional or trait level a consistent kind of

Speaker 2 need to be perfect if you like and

Speaker 2 you know very simply we can talk about individuals some individuals that will be characterized by i need me to be perfect and it it's comes from the self it's directed toward the self um and so i require perfection of myself and it's a

Speaker 2 it's a very autonomous kind of state for individuals. There's also another dimension, or

Speaker 2 I don't like to say type of perfectionism because they're all intertwined, but another dimension is where I don't need me to be perfect, but I need you to be perfect. I need my spouse to be perfect.

Speaker 2 I need my children to be perfect. I need anybody that I come in contact with or anybody that I have a relationship with to be perfect.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that's another, that's one kind still serves, it still serves the purpose of.

Speaker 2 Well, let me get to that in a second.

Speaker 2 I'll continue to talk about the different sort of dimensions.

Speaker 2 So there's: I need me to be perfect, I need you to be perfect, and then there's the sense or the perception that I have that other people need me to be perfect.

Speaker 2 And this can be my parents, my spouse, the world in general requires perfection of me.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 those are sort of foundational dispositional ways of kind of navigating the world. There's this other level where

Speaker 2 not only do we require this perfection, we express our perfection interpersonally. Most of the time, not most of the time, often we are interacting with other people.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it may not not be that I need to be perfect, but I sure need to appear to you as if I'm perfect. So I will promote myself for perfect.

Speaker 2 I'll tell you how wonderful I am, what amazing skills and abilities I have.

Speaker 2 That's one way to try to demonstrate my perfection to you or express my perfection to you. The other is I will never display any imperfection.

Speaker 2 So I know if I do this performance, you're going to see a flaw. So, if I public speak, you're going to see that I stutter,

Speaker 2 I stumble over words.

Speaker 2 And so, I will never speak in public. So, I will not display any imperfection.
And then,

Speaker 2 another piece of it is: in a relationship, I will never disclose any imperfection. I will not talk about things that don't go well with me.

Speaker 2 I will not reveal to you verbally anything

Speaker 2 about anything that I see as imperfect.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 it's getting complicated because there's this need to be perfect. I need me to be perfect.
I need you. I perceive it.
And then there's this, I need to appear perfect to you in these different ways.

Speaker 2 And then finally, there's this other piece that we have already talked about, this self-relational.

Speaker 2 expression of perfection is that this dialogue, this harsh, negative, critical inner relationship that we have. So those are all different,

Speaker 2 different

Speaker 2 facets of

Speaker 2 this way of being perfectionistic in the world, of trying to be perfect in the world. So it does get kind of complicated.

Speaker 1 What about

Speaker 1 sort of you, the self-oriented, other-oriented, and socially prescribed elements to this too?

Speaker 2 Yes. Yeah, the self-oriented.
I need me to be perfect, other-oriented. I need you to be perfect.
And socially prescribed is I have the perception that other people require me to be perfect.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay. And that shows up as in, I need to be perfect, as in, I need to not do anything which would risk me not being perfect.

Speaker 1 And I not, I need to not divulge to you anything that you would see as me being imperfect.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well,

Speaker 2 one is a driver of the behavior, the self, other social. And then these other pieces is

Speaker 2 like i can require myself to be perfect and you're kind of irrelevant to me but it may maybe that my perfectionism is about i know i'm not perfect i will never be there but i want to convince you that i am perfect and so i try to navigate the social context in teaching you how perfect i am

Speaker 1 so that's that's a distinction yeah it's interesting the difference between needing perfection and needing to appear perfect.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

Speaker 2 Think of a politician.

Speaker 2 Do they need to be perfect

Speaker 2 in their work? Not particularly. Do they need to appear? Absolutely.
That's the emphasis of that domain.

Speaker 1 This episode is brought to you by Gymshark.

Speaker 2 You want to look.

Speaker 1 and feel good when you're in the gym and Gymshark makes the best men's and girls gymwear on the planet. Let's face it, the more that you like your gym kit, the more likely you are to train.

Speaker 1 Their hybrid training shorts for men are the best men's shorts on the planet. Their crest hoodie and light grey marl is what I fly in every single time I'm on a plane.

Speaker 1 The Geo Seamless t-shirt is a staple in the gym for me. Basically, everything they make, it's unbelievably well-fitted, high quality, it's cheap.

Speaker 1 You get 30 days of free returns, global shipping, and a 10% discount site-wide.

Speaker 1 If you go to the link in the description below, or head to gym.sh slash modern wisdom, use the code modernwisdom10 at checkout. That's jim.sh slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 10 at checkout.

Speaker 1 I imagine, have you found a crossover between perfectionism and narcissism? Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 1 I can see the lineage immediately, right? I can't see,

Speaker 1 nobody else must be able to see me at my weakest. I must pretend to be completely perfect, this unfettered 10 out of 10.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah, there is exactly those elements, especially in the interpersonal world is about, about, I'm going to show you how perfect I am.

Speaker 2 Where it is a little bit different is the perfectionistic individual knows

Speaker 2 they're flawed, they're defective,

Speaker 2 they feel that way, they feel they know that, and I don't fit in the world. And for the narcissism, it at times they can almost be delusional in the sense that, okay, I am perfect.

Speaker 2 But very similar roots, very similar pathways,

Speaker 2 but but they're divergent.

Speaker 1 So what other personality traits does this cross over with? I would imagine conscientiousness, neuroticism, maybe some depression.

Speaker 1 What else do you see typically?

Speaker 2 Depression for sure. And in fact,

Speaker 2 The depressive personality style,

Speaker 2 which is

Speaker 2 that's not a DSM category, that's a psychodynamic diagnostic systems category but a very depressive personality style

Speaker 2 there's some yeah neuroticism if you're thinking about the big five um conscientiousness actually not so much um that's more that healthier piece um and there's a actually there's a domain of research that um distinguishes perfectionism from what's called excellencism

Speaker 2 it's kind of hard to pronounce but this notion of striving for excellence versus striving for perfection.

Speaker 2 And when we talk about, when people talk about healthy and adaptive stuff, that's more in the domain of striving for excellence as opposed to striving for to perfect the self.

Speaker 2 So there's that component.

Speaker 2 You know, when we start looking at the outcomes of the perfectionism, and especially as we've kind of conceptualized it,

Speaker 2 there's psychiatric,

Speaker 2 psychological psychological problems that come from it. So it's overlapping with anxiety, depression, eating disorders, all kinds of difficulties.

Speaker 2 There's relationship problems.

Speaker 2 And as I probably delineated some of the perfectionism components, you could say that, yeah, if I have, if I'm perfectionistic for my wife, yeah, that's probably not going to go well.

Speaker 2 And indeed, it does not go well. But there's relationship problems that come from that, from intimacy problems to

Speaker 2 dysfunctional, intimate relationships to sexual problems, physical health problems.

Speaker 2 Perfectionism is associated with, it just, the perfectionism just increases the person's level of stress and everything that comes along with that, elevated cortisol, all sorts of hormonal stuff.

Speaker 2 And so there's physical health problems,

Speaker 2 most particularly, and this wasn't worked from my lab or my colleague Gordon Flettz's lab,

Speaker 2 where perfectionism is associated with early death.

Speaker 2 So, when you look at other risk factors for early death, perfectionism, self-oriented and socially prescribed, are associated

Speaker 2 and just associated with early death among people. So, the thought is that it just elevates the level of stress in people's lives to a degree that it will deteriorate physiological symptoms.

Speaker 2 So there's these all these domains outcomes of the perfectionism that it's been that have been associated with those kind of outcomes. So

Speaker 1 yeah, you had a perfectionism predict suicide even when controlling for depression.

Speaker 2 And hopelessness.

Speaker 2 Two factors that are historically

Speaker 2 predictive of suicide would be depression and hopelessness. And we've shown in several studies that it socially prescribed predicts beyond that.

Speaker 2 So, and you know, in some ways, it's it sort of dovetails nicely with some of the work that's been going on

Speaker 2 in terms of loneliness or alienation and the impact that has on physical health for people. And of course, suicide.
But if you have a process that ensures that you have this disconnection with others,

Speaker 2 that you can't connect with other people and you live a life of isolation and loneliness, yeah,

Speaker 2 suicide is an easy thing to kind of predict from that.

Speaker 2 And that's one of the paradoxes of perfectionism is you're striving for this connection with people. You're doing all this stuff.
to try to be acceptable, to be lovable, to be connected and fit.

Speaker 2 And your behaviors actually create the opposite. They push people away because you're distant, you're not genuine, you're prickly,

Speaker 2 and you push people away.

Speaker 1 That's a good, that's a good point. How do perfectionists come across to other people?

Speaker 1 If a big part of the drive for perfectionists is: I am not good enough, and I must be good enough, I would like to be enough, I would like to be accepted, wanted, needed, validated, seen by the world.

Speaker 1 How does the world typically see perfectionists?

Speaker 2 Well, if you think about if I meet you for the very first time, probably not in this condom, but face to face, and I say, oh,

Speaker 2 let me tell you how wonderful I am.

Speaker 2 I can do this and I can do that and I'm fantastic. And

Speaker 2 immediately, you're going to take a step back and say, get me away from this person.

Speaker 2 Or if I come across as KG, I'm not really revealing, you interact with me and you think,

Speaker 2 I'm not getting the whole story here. We also kind of pull back.
And so in trying to create safety for myself as a perfectionistic person, I'm not going to let you see who I really, truly am inside.

Speaker 2 I'm going to curate an image for you. And

Speaker 2 people pick that up. So they pull away.

Speaker 1 Surely there must be people who are such good perfectionists that they have realized that programming imperfection in is a way that other people will tend to like them more.

Speaker 1 Like the performative vulnerability, the performative imperfectionism, the downplaying, the modesty. Oh, no, no, I understand that you see me in this sort of a way, but no, not me.

Speaker 1 Because they're so desperate for that positive reinforcement.

Speaker 1 And if they've split-tested it enough times, they will work out, well, this seems to work a little bit more effectively at getting people to like me. And what I want is for people to like me.

Speaker 1 So I'm even going to downplay like the

Speaker 1 imperfect perfectionist, so perfect that they've even put imperfection in.

Speaker 2 That's very interesting.

Speaker 2 I think people would still pick up the lack of genuineness.

Speaker 2 I think it's kind of like when you watch,

Speaker 2 and I'm fascinated by this, when you watch certain actors in a performance and you think, oh, yeah, I recognize that's actor so-and-so doing that role.

Speaker 2 And then sometimes you watch an actor and you just believe

Speaker 2 they are the character, like there's a genuineness to it. So I might assume that really good

Speaker 2 professional actors might be able to do that. But I think in the in the real world and generally, we pick up,

Speaker 2 there's something missing here. There's a, I don't want to say a a creepiness to it, but I'm not, I don't have the full picture.
This is kind of making me uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So just going back to how deadly and dangerous perfectionism can be,

Speaker 1 I have to assume as well that perfectionists would probably delay seeking help for some

Speaker 1 admitting illness must feel like a failure.

Speaker 2 Absolutely.

Speaker 2 You hit it right on the head because that is revealing an imperfection um in many of the um many of the clinicians that i see in my practice uh it's very difficult for them to to seek help uh in that vein and it they forestall um so i had um

Speaker 2 i had a patient who had there was a newspaper back in the day when they actually had newspapers a newspaper article about some of my work and this was a he was a professional musician, a classical musician.

Speaker 2 And I didn't talk in the article about my musical background or anything, but I talked about perfectionism. And he had read this article, cut it out and put it in his wallet, thinking

Speaker 2 somehow this guy seems to know

Speaker 2 this world of what it's like for a distressed classical musician in this context, being perfectionist, carried it around for six months in his wallet until he had a failed suicide attempt.

Speaker 2 And his wife brought him to my office, finally saying,

Speaker 2 You either get treatment or we're gone, meaning the family.

Speaker 2 And it was so he knew

Speaker 2 he needed to seek help. He had seemingly found someone need

Speaker 2 that might actually be of a help to him, but still didn't seek out help until it got like he got right to the edge, almost literally to the edge. So it's very difficult for those folks to seek help.

Speaker 2 Once they do get in therapy, it's difficult. You have to navigate it very carefully because you're asking them to do something they've lived their life not doing,

Speaker 2 which is

Speaker 2 essentially tell me about, tell me about

Speaker 2 you and your imperfection and your flawed sense of that's what we're going to work with and that

Speaker 1 you have to work with kid glass uh with folks on that um yeah well look i i think um i'm kind of fascinated by the idea of recovery with a perfectionist mindset because I have to assume that pain pain and suffering is worsened by an all or nothing mindset.

Speaker 1 If recovery isn't total, then it's going to be worthless.

Speaker 1 If my recovery from some sort of illness or or shortcoming or failure or whatever isn't in its entirety, then there was no, even, even my recovery from an imperfection must be perfect.

Speaker 2 Well, hopefully you're working on the perfectionism so they don't have that judgment about treatment outcome. But the way to think about it is not so much about

Speaker 2 getting rid of the perfectionism. It's about dealing with those deeper issues about worth and about belongingness and connectedness with others.

Speaker 2 So in the therapy that we do with perfection, we don't really talk about perfectionism very much at all. We talk more about those deeper issues about worth,

Speaker 2 about needing to feel acceptable to other people, about connecting with other people.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it's also about

Speaker 2 growth. So the way to think about therapy is not as not,

Speaker 2 okay, we're going to reduce the person's perfectionism from this level to this level it's more about um the person being

Speaker 2 relieved of that personality style in order to navigate the world because

Speaker 2 that tool does not does not work to have worth or to feel connected with the world um

Speaker 2 and so it it's it's more about helping the person kind of grow um

Speaker 2 and develop new ways of of developing works and connectedness.

Speaker 1 In other news, Element's newest flavor, lemonade, sold out immediately, but now it's back in stock.

Speaker 1 This little thing here is like a grown-up lemonade stand in a stick with actual function behind the flavor. It replaces electrolytes that your body genuinely needs, sodium, potassium, and magnesium.

Speaker 1 It makes a massive difference to your brain function, your appetite, and your energy throughout the day. I've been drinking it every single day for years.

Speaker 1 And in the Texas heat or any workout, this lemonade flavor in a cold glass of water is unbelievably good. Best of all, they have a no-questions-asked refund policy with an unlimited duration.

Speaker 1 And who knows when this is going to sell out again? So, get it now. If you don't like it for any reason, they will give you your money back, and you don't even have to return the box.

Speaker 1 Plus, they are for free shipping in the US.

Speaker 1 Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors for your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com/slash modern wisdom.

Speaker 1 That's drinklmnt.com/slash

Speaker 1 modern wisdom.

Speaker 1 Is perfectionism a performance enhancer? I see the traits that you're talking about among lots of high achievers.

Speaker 1 And if it's if if your sole goal in life is to achieve this thing and you're saying, I'm happy to even completely blow up my own, the texture of my own mind and the enjoyment of the process and all of these things along the way,

Speaker 1 perfectionism might be less of a pathology and more just the price of being the best.

Speaker 2 Sure.

Speaker 2 Well, there's been some research done on perfectionism and

Speaker 2 performance

Speaker 2 in the workplace or in people's career

Speaker 2 with the assumption that

Speaker 2 in one very early study, they looked at this,

Speaker 2 how did they do this? The

Speaker 2 commissions, people who are in careers that they have commissions. So the better they work, the higher money, the higher the commission, the more money they make.

Speaker 2 And they found that perfectionistic individuals with the assumption that more perfectionistically would have higher income. No, it's the opposite.
There's another study we did looking

Speaker 2 at university professors. And

Speaker 2 one of the measures of success in university professors is number of publications, number of times your work is cited, and so forth, and looked at perfectionism in those university students, professors, to see if higher levels of perfectionism was associated with higher productivity.

Speaker 2 The opposite again.

Speaker 2 It interfered with their productivity. Now, having said that,

Speaker 2 there are many very

Speaker 2 famous people who are noted to be highly perfectionistic.

Speaker 2 Steve Jobs comes to mind for me, but also a lot of people in the music world who are kind of like that. And we can say, well, somebody liked this end of the perfection.
Look what they accomplished.

Speaker 2 And I think we can stand back and say,

Speaker 2 wow, those are great accomplishments that the person has.

Speaker 2 But if you look at the person's personal life or their relationships in America, it's often devastated.

Speaker 2 It's often really problematic. So I guess it depends on the perspective you take.
That perfectionism could be good.

Speaker 2 Sorry.

Speaker 1 Go ahead.

Speaker 1 I just, I think, I think you're so right. I got all excited because this is one of my favorite pet theories.

Speaker 1 A lot of the time we use the people at the absolute top of the tree as

Speaker 2 a

Speaker 1 blueprint for how

Speaker 1 people trying to get toward that should behave.

Speaker 1 We'll look at how Michael Jordan showed up. Perhaps this is how your Sunday League baseball team should look to conduct themselves.

Speaker 1 We'll look at how Steve Jobs built, you know, one of the biggest companies in the entire world and one of the most revolutionary products in history well you as somebody that's a founder of a startup new business perhaps that's the way that you're supposed to show up but you said that what are the personal costs that most of these people pay and

Speaker 1 Is that really something that you are prepared to sacrifice in order to achieve that thing? First off, you've got no guarantee that you're going to achieve that.

Speaker 1 There is only one Olympian in each category every four years.

Speaker 1 So in order to get that, and by design, that means that out of the whatever seven, eight billion people on the planet, almost everybody isn't even in the running for that, let alone the person that's going to be it.

Speaker 1 My point being, I think it's a dangerous

Speaker 1 strategy to use the

Speaker 1 blueprint and the playbook of people who are as far on the tail end of the distribution of outcomes as you can get, literally one in a

Speaker 1 human history of a Steve Jobs, to try and justify an approach that you, somebody who's falling much closer toward the middle of the bell cup, maybe you're up on the upper end of the distribution of success or outcomes or whatever it might be.

Speaker 1 But the price that you need to pay in order to be able to do that is one that you typically wouldn't foot the bill for.

Speaker 1 And maybe you can reap most of the rewards of excellence without having to blow your life up with the perfectionism.

Speaker 2 And maybe you can can feel worse

Speaker 2 and that you are lovable or that you are acceptable or that you fit in this planet in a different way

Speaker 2 one of the things

Speaker 2 one of the things you said made me remember and i i hope i can get this right um i think elon musk was being interviewed by somebody

Speaker 2 obviously somebody um And

Speaker 2 they said, I'd love to be able to think think like you or to be as creative as you. And Musk's response, as I recall it, was, yeah, if you lived in my mind, you wouldn't like it.

Speaker 2 It's not a good place to be. And I think that kind of captured, yeah, we can look at all this stuff, but what is what is it like to be inside that mind? And

Speaker 2 there's, I'm,

Speaker 2 again, I don't know him or anything, but from that comment, it just seemed telling that.

Speaker 1 I mean, I've got, he said, um, on Lex Friedman, most people think they would want to be me. They do not want to be me.
They don't know, they don't understand. My mind is a storm.

Speaker 1 Like, all right, that's pretty fucking apocalyptic.

Speaker 1 Well, you said it way more elegantly than I did. I just, I've, I've kind of become obsessed with that passage.
Um, so and it's for the same reason, presumably, that

Speaker 1 you have. So, okay, I guess

Speaker 1 I'm how much of perfectionism is about fear? Like this, this

Speaker 1 underlying fear?

Speaker 1 Is that a big part? Is it a sense of unsafety, ambient unsafety that's sort of permeating people's lives?

Speaker 2 I think it's an existential fear about not fitting, belonging. Who am I? Where am I? So I think you're right

Speaker 2 that it is about fear. And one of the ways to quell some of that existential fear,

Speaker 2 because we're social, is to have connection,

Speaker 2 to fit, belong,

Speaker 2 to matter to people,

Speaker 2 to be loved, but also fundamentally to have a sense that I'm okay, I'm deserving, I'm good enough,

Speaker 2 that I have worth. And so, those deep basic issues I think are powerful there.
And what happens when they're not met is that what exactly what you're saying, it's about there's this

Speaker 2 fear.

Speaker 2 One of the more difficult

Speaker 2 stages to navigate in the therapy with folks with this is when they get to a place where they're kind of considering relinquishing this sense of if I'm perfect or if I appear perfect.

Speaker 2 As they start to relinquish it, the problem that they run into is, well, how do I navigate the world? And it's just just a void. So it's just the unknown.

Speaker 1 Because their previous motivation was so much, be perfect.

Speaker 2 So ingrained and so much a part of their life that there's just this void. And as humans,

Speaker 2 we don't navigate the unknown very, very well.

Speaker 2 And it can be terrifying if you just lose a way of being in the world and there's some other expectation. So within the therapy, we approach that,

Speaker 2 I don't want to say gingerly, but we approach it in a way that tries to help them with the fear of that and to get to a place that

Speaker 2 there's a different way of being in the world that can actually

Speaker 2 increase the probability of meeting those needs.

Speaker 1 Can you explain to me the other-oriented perfectionism? Because that feels a little bit

Speaker 2 more

Speaker 1 little bit more on the outside. I can understand how socially imposed and the self-oriented perfectionism,

Speaker 1 those two things, other people need me to be perfect. I need me to be perfect if I don't fall short.
But the I need other people to be perfect

Speaker 1 is still the same currency, but seems to be pointing in a very different sort of direction.

Speaker 2 Right, right.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 2 I would imagine, Chris, in your life, if

Speaker 2 you're out in a public content, you'll have people come up who will be very excited to meet you and they'll want to hang out. And

Speaker 2 you know, you're

Speaker 2 well, hey, I'm a person here. I don't really need this, but they're coming to you for a reason.

Speaker 2 And to be in the presence of somebody with high status, for example,

Speaker 2 it gives them status.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 if I need my

Speaker 2 wife to be perfect,

Speaker 2 it's because

Speaker 2 I can share in her perfection and it elevates me. I get status.
I get worth. I can borrow her identity and all the good things about her.
And people will see me

Speaker 2 and they'll connect me with this person and I will have status for that.

Speaker 2 One of the things that, and this is an overlap with narcissism, one of the things about

Speaker 2 people with narcissistic personality style or disorder is

Speaker 2 there'll be a business meeting and they'll walk into the meeting and they very quickly figure out who has the highest status in the room.

Speaker 2 And I'm going to sidle up to that person and connect myself with that person.

Speaker 2 And it's about borrowing the identity of the other person in order to feel a sense of worth.

Speaker 2 That's part of what's called borderline personality disorder pathology or borderline pathology.

Speaker 2 I don't have a sense of identity, so I'll borrow yours,

Speaker 2 essentially. And that's how that works.
So

Speaker 2 the ultimate goal is the same to try to elevate my sense of worth, but I'm going to use,

Speaker 2 I'm going to come to know you and I'm going to hang out with you so that other people can see me with you and say, oh, well, he must be pretty special if he's hanging around with this guy and it's that kind of mechanism uh and and that's how other oriented works when

Speaker 2 people fall short when my wife screws up

Speaker 2 oh my god um then

Speaker 2 what the you know then that voice that inner voice that's directed toward me with other kinds of that gets directed toward her harsh critical nasty

Speaker 2 Some people call it a narcissistic rage. And

Speaker 2 kind of captures that.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I have to assume that intimacy and romantic relationships for these people are very difficult.
Perfectionists generally.

Speaker 1 And also, if you've got the other-oriented stuff in, that's just an additional

Speaker 1 difficulty level on top. Yep.

Speaker 2 No, you're right. There's very good research.
There's lots of relationship problems. But in intimacy, in particular, and if you think about how intimacy evolves, it's this

Speaker 2 series of

Speaker 2 interactions of each of like one person taking a risk and revealing just a little bit more about themselves, and the other person recognizes, not consciously, but recognizes it and then also reveals a little bit more.

Speaker 2 And it's this over time, this revealing more and more about who we are.

Speaker 2 And so, couples that have been married 40 years,

Speaker 2 yeah, there's not a lot of secrets that kind of hang out and let it hang out,

Speaker 2 however.

Speaker 2 But brand new couples, no, there's still this, okay, just got to be careful here. And so, that intimacy evolves with these folks who can't reveal

Speaker 2 shortcomings, shortfalls, aspirations, emotions that are difficult, vulnerabilities

Speaker 2 in intimacy is really problematic.

Speaker 1 Also, if you are, I need my partner to be perfect, that's going to be very uncomfortable for your partner. Oh, that's true.
That's not a fantastic foundation to keep a loving relationship.

Speaker 1 Even your partner who may have come into this relationship feeling safe and feeling enough, your fear of not enoughness will begin to infect them.

Speaker 2 Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 2 The complaints when you

Speaker 2 for people who have other remote perfections don't come from the perfectionist, come from the other people in that person's life.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's where you see the

Speaker 2 distress show up. I mean, there's still distress in the perfectionist, but it can be, it can get pretty,

Speaker 2 yeah, it can get pretty awful. And it's not just partners, it's person's children, the person's subordinates in in their workplace.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 yeah, it's very problematic for those folks. So

Speaker 1 if imperfection is human, which it is,

Speaker 1 why does failure still feel so unbearable to so many of us?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I don't know that we

Speaker 2 imperfection may be common. I don't know that we embrace it

Speaker 2 in any sort of way. And I mean, even from religious teachings for thousands of years, it's been, you know, try to be more

Speaker 2 godlike,

Speaker 2 not become a God, but, you know, try to be more like Christ or try to be more like these

Speaker 2 deities that are there.

Speaker 2 And it's always talking about the imperfection, but somehow

Speaker 2 there's the promise of something

Speaker 2 when you attain perfection. And

Speaker 2 that somehow the route to good things happening or bad things not happening seems to lie in that domain. And whether it's from various religions that might be talking about it or philosophies

Speaker 2 or even

Speaker 2 children trying to...

Speaker 2 trying to navigate the world that they live in. Let me tell you

Speaker 2 a story about a patient who really,

Speaker 2 it illustrates a whole bunch of different things as we're talking.

Speaker 2 This was a woman who in her 40s was,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 over the course of therapy, became clear that she really had this need to conceal any imperfection, either showing it or talking about it,

Speaker 2 came to see me

Speaker 2 knowing she needed,

Speaker 2 things were just not going well in her life and hadn't been, came to see me. And it took quite a while before we actually, she would actually say what she wanted to be doing.

Speaker 2 But she would conceal, including from me, even

Speaker 2 you know, elements of herself that were emotional, that were difficult, that were vulnerable. And we began to work, and she

Speaker 2 told initially a story and then retold the story over the course of the dialogue of therapy over many months

Speaker 2 of having been adopted as a child, very early, like as an infant. And her parents

Speaker 2 went to the experts

Speaker 2 in a very loving way and said, okay, she's adopted.

Speaker 2 Do we tell her? Do we hide it from her? If we tell her, when do we tell her? And consulted with who I don't quite know who the experts were, but

Speaker 2 came to the conclusion that, okay, we need to tell her early on so she knows right from the start that she's so special. She's so lovable.

Speaker 2 And so they kind of told her this story is we went to the place where little babies don't have parents and we looked at all these babies and immediately saw you and we fell in love with you and we chose you and we brought you home.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 gave her that story, which sounds like an incredibly loving thing to do.

Speaker 2 And it absolutely was with the motivation out of this love and care.

Speaker 2 At the time, she was told,

Speaker 2 and it took her a while to kind of realize she had done this as we're doing therapy.

Speaker 2 She had the sense that mommy goes to the store sometimes and buys purses. And she'll bring the purse home and she'll have it for, then she starts not to like and takes it back to the store.

Speaker 2 So that's the model that this little girl understood.

Speaker 2 So if I can be chosen from this store that has babies, I can be taken back.

Speaker 2 And that was terrifying for her. And so from a very early in life, she made sure she was never going to do anything

Speaker 2 to be disposed of or to be taken back

Speaker 2 to the absolute

Speaker 2 store.

Speaker 2 And every relationship she had, including romantic relationships, was this incredible fear that at any moment,

Speaker 2 if I reveal any imperfection or any piece of who I am that's flawed or whatever,

Speaker 2 I will be taken back. And it's just a model of the way the world works for her.

Speaker 2 And it took a while to kind of get to that under that understanding. So

Speaker 2 I can't remember what your original question was, but somehow it was connected to

Speaker 2 romantic relationships and relationships with people.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and this concern about imperfection being

Speaker 1 so unbearable, the sort of failure being unbearable. I think as well, you know,

Speaker 1 the fact that we glamorize perfection so much in art, sport, entrepreneurship, as you said, religious ceremony,

Speaker 1 media, you know, a flawless performance, even some of the language that we use.

Speaker 1 And the fact, again,

Speaker 1 we are our work for a lot of people.

Speaker 1 We don't have particularly well-distributed identities. We don't hedge our identity.
You know, I am a businessman. I am a sports person.

Speaker 1 I am, it's very rarely, well, I'm a friend, and I'm a brother, and I'm a father, and I'm a this and I'm a that. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 And I have to assume that, you know, the more hedged that you are, the more you realize, well, opportunity cost and just straight up resource constraints means that if I want to be a better father, I have to be a worse business person.

Speaker 1 Ha, in there, like belies the fact that I cannot be perfect. So I need to adjust

Speaker 1 the deployment of my resources and my efforts in different ways. And that must be a little bit of a realization of, huh, there are trade-offs in life.

Speaker 1 And sometimes those make things a little bit difficult. Wow.
Like, you know, sort of your brain explodes thinking about that.

Speaker 2 Yeah. One of the things I'll do with some patients is

Speaker 2 say to them, on your deathbed in 50 years from now, as you're laying there,

Speaker 2 thinking about your life,

Speaker 2 what do you think you're going to regret?

Speaker 2 And usually it's something you didn't do. And what are you going to regret more?

Speaker 2 Another day at the office,

Speaker 2 connecting with your grandchild.

Speaker 2 And I just ask people about if they put themselves in that position,

Speaker 2 what are they going to look

Speaker 2 back on and feel like they might regret and say, well, those seem to be some of the foundational things that are important to you in your life.

Speaker 2 And it kind of tries to put that in perspective,

Speaker 2 some of those elements in perspective as well.

Speaker 2 I mean, you've said this a couple of times, Chris, that. you know, what we do is kind of who we are.
And

Speaker 2 I think that's very true.

Speaker 2 That may be kind of a cultural thing in North America and the Western world,

Speaker 2 that we define ourselves

Speaker 2 in that fashion. I think

Speaker 2 we catch up with some things at different points in our lives. So,

Speaker 2 you know, there's different stages.

Speaker 2 Like, often when people become grandparents, they have a very different way of relating to their grandchildren than they might have had when they had their own children.

Speaker 1 That's interesting. There's a degree of buffer between the two that relinquishes the

Speaker 1 like the ownership, the directness of your impact has been sort of removed a little bit. That's kind of funny.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I think there's just at different times, different things kind of become

Speaker 2 become more important.

Speaker 2 And I think as we get older, relational pieces,

Speaker 2 I'm just guessing here because i don't really know this work but i it seems relational pieces seem to evolve so the concept of generativity it's the the older folks want to give more they're not so much involved in their own um success but they want to mentor people they want to teach people um and i think that's a part of we just develop more relational

Speaker 2 we pay attention to more of those relational needs at that time.

Speaker 1 So in your experience, can perfectionists ever truly let go of those patterns? It seems to me like the perfectionists

Speaker 1 that are listening will just say, Well, this is just who I am. It's ingrained.

Speaker 1 It's given me some things I want in the world, and maybe there's some suffering, but this is just part of the source code of me.

Speaker 2 Sure.

Speaker 2 Well, I guess the question is: what cost are you willing to pay for it? I mean,

Speaker 2 it can come down to that.

Speaker 2 Most of the people that that I see in treatment are pretty desperate and

Speaker 2 it's pretty painful for them. So in the training of especially my graduate students to learn to work with these folks is

Speaker 2 to prepare them a little bit for once you

Speaker 2 open the door for these folks where they can express the emotional pain.

Speaker 2 pretty breathtaking and pretty powerful. So

Speaker 2 there can be a lot of pain that people kind of live with. But I guess at the end of the day, it's always, okay, you're paying a price for this.

Speaker 2 Everything has a cost and a benefit. And those shift and change over time in different contexts.
And it's just,

Speaker 2 you know, how much are you willing to pay? But it's helpful for people to know that they can make changes in that. They're not trapped in it.

Speaker 1 What are the steps out of perfectionism?

Speaker 1 How do people learn to get past this? I imagine that there are some evidence-based approaches.

Speaker 1 Okay, so take me through it.

Speaker 2 Well, the work we've done is from a psychodynamic, psychoalytic perspective of really trying to deal with the deeper issues that produce the perfectionism.

Speaker 2 So it's kind of the notion if you really hurt your knee, the symptom you have is pain. And hopefully, when you go to a clinician about your knee, they're not going to say, oh, the symptom is pain.

Speaker 2 Here's some medications. It'll take the pain away.
And then you go about your life.

Speaker 2 Hopefully the clinicians, and in truth, this is what clinicians would do is say, okay, the pain is simply an indication there's something wrong in your knee.

Speaker 2 We need to poke around in your knee and figure out what the cause of that is and deal with the cause. And then the pain just goes away.

Speaker 2 And so with perfectionism, the psychodynamic approach is the same thing. We try to work with what's producing the perfectionism.

Speaker 2 And in this case, it's these deep relational needs, the need for worth, the need to belong, the need to be acceptable to others. And that's where we work.
So from that perspective,

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 it's an evolved process, but it's also,

Speaker 2 at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is get the person to have some sense of acceptance of themselves as who they are in truth, just some acceptance of them, that there's nothing fundamentally flawed or wrong with them.

Speaker 2 They've learned that lesson well,

Speaker 2 but there really isn't the flaws that they have.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that there's an acceptance of other people, that other people are also flawed, and

Speaker 2 but there's still ways to kind of navigate a sense of fitting and belonging and connectedness with them. So it's about self-acceptance, and

Speaker 2 it's about finding a place for oneself.

Speaker 1 What are the most common interventions that you use to increase somebody's self-acceptance?

Speaker 2 Well, you would use

Speaker 2 in psychodynamic work, you use the therapeutic alliance and you form a connection with the individual to provide a place of safety that they can actually begin to

Speaker 2 put that flawed self on the table and will actually look at it in a really truthful, honest way.

Speaker 2 And it's usually it's not so flawed and not so defective. But we use the therapeutic alliance to create a place of safety for the individual to be able to do that.
We also

Speaker 2 work in that context on the kinds of things that people automatically do to avoid

Speaker 2 the deep pain, the emotional stuff to actually

Speaker 2 look at who they truly are.

Speaker 2 And so again, we use that therapeutic alliance that way.

Speaker 2 There's a domain of

Speaker 2 treatment that likes the notion of worksheets and practice and

Speaker 2 tell yourself not to be worried about making mistakes and that sort of thing.

Speaker 2 And I just, I find it, to be honest, I find it really silly. Like, I mean, one of the things when you work with perfectionistic people is they will say, can't you give me something to read?

Speaker 2 Can't you give me like homework?

Speaker 2 And the idea is,

Speaker 2 what we're trying to do is teach a person, it's kind of like learning to ride a bicycle. If you've never ridden a two-wheeler and you decide, okay,

Speaker 2 I'm 30 years old, I'm going to learn to do this. So I don't know, you phone up Lance Armstrong and say, I need a workshop.
Give me a lecture on how to ride a bicycle. And you go to the lecture.

Speaker 2 He provides all the information. You take notes, write the multiple choice exam, ACE it,

Speaker 2 get out on the driveway, get on the bike, and you promptly fall over.

Speaker 2 And the tool of intellectually learning what you need to do to ride a bike, contract this muscle, relax that one,

Speaker 2 is not going to teach you to ride a bike.

Speaker 2 But if you have, you know, if you think about how I assume how you rode a bike, much like me, you had somebody who was holding the bike, you got on, and they kind of pushed you, got you going, and they let go and grabbed on to you, and you wobbled and fell and got up again.

Speaker 2 And through the experience of that process,

Speaker 2 eventually you got to do this insanely complicated thing of riding a two-wheeler in traffic with lights.

Speaker 2 And if you think about how complicated that is, oh my God, it's the experiences that have taught you how to do that, not the information,

Speaker 2 not

Speaker 2 cognitive exercises to do that. And, and that's the best metaphor I have of what I, what I and other psychodynamic people are trying to do to teach people new behaviors.

Speaker 2 It's through the experience of revealing the self. It's through the experience of having

Speaker 2 being able to connect with somebody and to have them kind of

Speaker 2 care for you, accept you, see all the stuff that's bad, and try to be helpful to you. So that's the process of it.
So it's not, it's not,

Speaker 2 you know, session one, you do X, session two, you do Y. That's a very CBT approach.
And it's that approach in particular that

Speaker 2 we just published a paper which really pissed off a good bunch of people, which is great, kind of like doing that, to really show what the evidence is for a CBT-based approach for perfectionism and how it is not good.

Speaker 2 And well, when they wrote about this stuff, it was wonderful. But when we actually looked at it, we saw that the majority of people drop out from it, which means they don't tolerate.

Speaker 2 It's no good to have a treatment that people don't continue in.

Speaker 2 There's good evidence that for some parts of perfectionism, it will change post-treatment, meaning sort of at the last session, they can show these big changes.

Speaker 2 If you test them in a follow-up a few months or six months later, no, the changes disappear.

Speaker 2 So it's not maintained.

Speaker 2 There's

Speaker 2 very good evidence that only certain elements of perfectionism change from a CBT perspective, not

Speaker 2 the traits that we talked about, not the self-relational, those styles of expressing what those don't change. Those are the pernicious ones.
Socially prescribed doesn't change.

Speaker 2 And it's the one associated, well, along with self-oriented, but suicide, early death, anorexia, nervosa, depression, anxiety. So those pernicious pieces don't seem to change with CDT.

Speaker 2 In the work that we do,

Speaker 2 it's going to come as a surprise, I'm sure, but we try to deal with those underlying issues issues and show the changes in the more pernicious elements. And there's three different

Speaker 2 five different studies that have shown, yeah, there's changes that are made in that.

Speaker 2 The way we do the treatment research is, yeah, we've developed a treatment, we'll do a study and we'll show the effects.

Speaker 2 We then try to figure out, okay, well, how can we find it to try to get even better effects or longer lasting effects.

Speaker 2 So use treatment not as a way of saying, hey, look at the treatment we've got, it's fantastic. We say, Here's a treatment, it looks like

Speaker 2 it's pretty good or very good. How can we improve it even more?

Speaker 1 What would you say to somebody who has a perfectionist person in their life?

Speaker 1 How can

Speaker 1 those around perfectionists show up in a way that helps them to

Speaker 1 improve their worldview?

Speaker 2 I would encourage

Speaker 2 them

Speaker 2 to find somebody to work with them on it, to find a professional to work with it.

Speaker 2 I mean, as we're talking, you can see it's pretty deep-seated. There's a lot of pain.
There's a lot of outcomes with it. So it's not something that

Speaker 2 is easily changeable.

Speaker 2 But I would be encouraging people to try to find a therapist that they can work with, that

Speaker 2 they trust and that they could connect with to deal with those issues.

Speaker 1 What is the what is the school or is there an accreditation body that you guys ratify to say this person is perfectionism certified to be able to do this at a standard?

Speaker 2 We're in the process. We're in the process of doing that actually.

Speaker 2 Again, we're at a place now where we're pretty confident that the kind of the kind of approach that we do actually is helpful and not just helpful to change the levels of perfectionism, that it's clinically relevant, like the clinically significant change in people, and that it's actually in psychodynamic work, not only is the change maintained over

Speaker 2 period of time, if you do it right, the change continues after the treatment ends.

Speaker 2 And it's kind of the idea, like with your knee, if you fix the problem in your knee, As soon as they fix it, there still might be pain there. But

Speaker 2 as it continues to heal, you're not doing any treatments. As it continues to heal, the pain eventually kind of goes away.

Speaker 2 And in good psychodynamic psychotherapy, there's very good evidence that that's what happens. And it's just to know if you get rid of the cause,

Speaker 2 the symptoms kind of go away.

Speaker 1 That's interesting. What's the role of mattering in all of this?

Speaker 2 Mattering is

Speaker 2 one of the ways that those relational needs can show up.

Speaker 2 So some people,

Speaker 2 well, I think for everybody, it's kind of a foundational part of having a sense of worth is that I matter to somebody, that somebody communicates to me that I'm important to them, that I'm relevant.

Speaker 2 So generally mattering, but at an idiosyncratic level with people, it can be

Speaker 2 that can be manifest like I, you know, I have a voice that I grew up in a family where

Speaker 2 nobody cared. I couldn't say anything that anybody would ever hear or listen to.

Speaker 2 And the only way of understanding that was, well, if I was more important, they might actually hear my voice.

Speaker 2 And one of the ways to be to solve that is, okay, well,

Speaker 2 I can be narcissistic and tell everybody how wonderful, or I can try to be perfect in everything that I do. So mattering is

Speaker 2 one piece of the relational needs. But other people might need to be respected,

Speaker 2 to be seen, to be heard, not to be invisible,

Speaker 2 to be loved, and to have a sense of being lovable.

Speaker 2 Two different pieces there.

Speaker 2 So it all kind of fits in very generally.

Speaker 2 sort of some of the basic needs that we need to navigate the world.

Speaker 1 Are we becoming more perfectionist over time?

Speaker 1 Have you done any longitudinal stuff?

Speaker 2 There has been, we haven't done this work, but some colleagues of ours have actually looked at our conceptualization

Speaker 2 and looked at the scores over decades and show that indeed, yeah, perfectionism seems to be increasing over the decades. At least the trait elements seem to be.

Speaker 2 Those are the only ones that have been evaluated at this point. So that self-oriented, other oriented, socially prescribed,

Speaker 2 they're increasing.

Speaker 2 There's no, I don't know of any research that's done this, but

Speaker 2 you may know there are also rates of depression and anxiety, that sort of thing either seem to be increasing or people are more open to admitting that they have depression and anxiety.

Speaker 2 So, it makes sense that if a vulnerability factor for these problems is increasing, we may see an increase in some of the outcomes of those vulnerability factors.

Speaker 2 I haven't seen any work directly to address that, but it logically makes sense.

Speaker 1 Heck yeah. Dr.
Paul Hewitt, ladies and gentlemen, Paul, you're great. I really appreciate this work.
I think it's

Speaker 1 very of the moment. And, you know, for the sort of people that listen to podcasts, specifically stuff like this,

Speaker 1 I think many are going to feel seen.

Speaker 2 uh and

Speaker 1 accused today where should people go to keep up to date with your work

Speaker 2 um well i have a i mean, I have a, I have both a clinical website for

Speaker 2 with more clinically relevant information, but also a website at

Speaker 2 the University of British Columbia. So

Speaker 2 there is a website.

Speaker 2 We've published books. I just,

Speaker 2 my agent said I should do this. I don't know.

Speaker 2 We're just signing a contract with Norton to do a trade book on, Gord Flett and I are doing a trade book on our work over the years to

Speaker 2 make it less academic and more available to people so they can

Speaker 2 kind of see the way we think about it, understand it, the problems and

Speaker 2 how to deal with it.

Speaker 1 I think that would be good for the world.

Speaker 2 Paul, I appreciate you. Thank you very much.
It was wonderful meeting you, Chris. So you have very good listening skills.
I've done

Speaker 2 numerous podcasts where I get the questions and then the person is busy trying to figure out what the next question is

Speaker 2 rather than having a dialogue. So

Speaker 2 it's very nice that way. So

Speaker 2 I appreciate that.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 2 Okay.