ACT for Perfectionism

My initial reaction is to advise going slowly. There will be a good reason why the inner experiences associated with failing are difficult for them to bear. Failure usually triggers feelings of shame, and this is an extremely uncomfortable and unwanted experience for most people. If your client is relying on being perfect or avoiding mistakes to feel OK, I’d encourage you to explore the origins of this shame further. The client will likely benefit from a focus on building the skills of self-compassion. If they can learn to be kinder to themselves at moments of struggle, they will have a greater ability to accommodate the feelings associated with failure and mistakes.

There is nothing wrong with having high standards. Many people value striving for excellence and feel a sense of accomplishment from achieving stretch goals. This is one of the more helpful aspects of perfectionism and is often called healthy striving. The good news is that you do not need to lower your standards to find a more healthy and helpful way of harnessing perfectionism, but problems can emerge in the way you work towards these standards.

The first problem emerges when you keep raising your standards. Many perfectionists quickly disregard their achievements, vowing to do even better next time. By continually raising your standards over time, they remain constantly out of reach. You then end up feeling like you are failing all the time, despite achieving outstanding results.

Another unhelpful pattern is approaching your standards in a rigid, inflexible way. When doing well at school becomes “I must get an A+ on every assignment, for every subject,” the standard has become a rule. This causes immense stress, once again leaving you feeling like you are failing. Both problems can lead to chronic self-criticism; you just never feel like you are good enough.

When you use ACT for perfectionism, the goal is to learn to explore the way you define values such as achievement and view them more broadly. You then learn to approach your goals with greater flexibility, living according to your values but not limited to following specific performance rules. You also learn to be kinder to yourself, offering yourself compassion when you make a mistake or fail in some way. This stops the cycle of self-criticism and fear of failing.

Difficulty making decisions is a common problem in perfectionism. Perfectionists hold themselves to very high standards, and part of this can be aiming to never make a mistake. Making a mistake is deeply feared because of the shame you feel as a result and the way you can criticise yourself harshly if you were to do so. Making a decision inevitably means taking a risk that you could choose wrong and so triggers this fear of failing. This problem can become quite paralysing, interfering with daily life in many ways. If this is causing you major life problems, difficulty making decisions may also be part of a broader obsessive-compulsive pattern, and this is worth checking out with a licenced therapist.

My favourite metaphor is ‘The Passengers on the Bus’. It’s a classic ACT metaphor that describes the perfectionistic self-critic, and the decisions you make in your life can either take you toward a life that you love or hold you back from progressing down the road.

The metaphor goes something like this: “Imagine you are on a bus, and you are the driver. This is your bus and only you can drive it; you determine the speed and direction. Down the road is a life that you love: full of all the kinds of things you value, such as loving relationships, satisfying and challenging work, and helping others. On your bus are a bunch of passengers. These passengers are made up of your thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and memories, and they have all hopped on your bus at some point in your life. Some of these passengers are helpful and kind, and they happily come along for the ride. Unfortunately, you have other passengers that are much meaner, bossier, and louder. They tell you when to turn left or right, when to stop, and when to go. One of these passengers is your perfectionistic self-critic. This critic is always evaluating and criticizing your performance. Its voice is cold and harsh. It comes right up the front of the bus to lean in and insult you. This passenger is persistent and can be extremely loud.”

From here, you can explore a range of different problems, such as how you respond to the passenger and how doing what it says is interfering in your life. You can evaluate where you learned to speak to yourself in this way and whether you want to continue speaking to yourself this way. You can also explore the good intentions behind the passenger – it’s trying to help you succeed or keep you safe – and this opens the door for self-compassion.

It’s fantastic that you’ve made this realisation and are working on this. Failure is any unwanted outcome – of course you would want to avoid this as often as possible. So be careful that you don’t expect yourself to be perfect at accepting failure. This is one of the paradoxes of working with perfectionism – we can try to become less perfectionistic perfectly – and this doesn’t work.

I’d like to suggest a couple of adjacent areas for you to work on that will greatly help you with this. Firstly, I can reassure you that you can keep your high standards; however, you may want to explore how you define success. Check whether your standards have become rigid rules you must follow at all times. If so, try to broaden the ways you can succeed, noticing small successes and wins outside of what you normally consider success. If you have become very stuck on specific rules or things needing to be perfect to be OK, then you may wish to get some additional help from a licensed therapist. Perfectionism at an extreme can become obsessive-compulsive, and it might be worth checking this out.

The second area that will have a huge impact is building the skills of self-compassion. I appreciate that you may feel a long way from this right now. You may believe that you need to be tough on yourself, or else you’d be lazy and unproductive. However, there are other ways to approach success that don’t leave you running from failure.

Failure will always feel unbearable when you criticise yourself harshly for any tiny mistake. You can learn to treat yourself with more kindness, with greater warmth and from a non-judgemental stance, and this means that mistakes are not so painful. You can still work hard to achieve great things – just without being so mean to yourself. The Two Teachers Metaphor (https://jenniferkemp.com.au/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Two-Teachers-Metaphor.pdf) illustrates how you can be kinder to yourself while still holding yourself accountable.

There are a lot of resources available on building self-compassion. Check out the Baby Chick Exercise (https://jenniferkemp.com.au/resources/holding-a-baby-chick/) to start practicing this. Self-compassion is a skill set that can be learned, and it will make an enormous difference in your life. You can start by checking out other helpful articles on Psychwire from Kristen Neff (https://psychwire.com/ask/topics/21eyx9/ask-kristin-neff-about-selfcompassion) and Paul Gilbert (https://psychwire.com/ask/topics/11stdhk/ask-paul-gilbert-about-compassion-and-connectedness-in-a-covid-world).