The Harsh Truth About Perfectionism, About the Desire to Be an Ideal Person
Journal
Perfectionism is a useful quality when it is necessary to complete an important task at work. We all want doctors, teachers, rescuers, and officials to be perfectionists. But when this quality becomes part of your personality, and you try to be perfect in all areas of your life, it starts to create problems. For example, such as procrastination due to the inability to do everything perfectly, abandoning your ideas and projects, internal tension from constantly trying to control yourself and your life, fears that something will not work out, following other people’s dreams that do not make you happy, psychosomatic illnesses caused by chronic stress, excessive self-criticism or even self-hatred due to the inability to be an ideal person, and much more. Therefore, perfectionism should be limited only to those areas of life where it is truly important — for example, where the result of your work directly affects the lives of other people.
I will list several non-obvious hidden reasons behind the desire for total perfectionism, and perhaps you will begin to wonder whether it even makes sense to create so much internal tension in pursuit of unattainable perfection… Be careful — these reasons may be uncomfortable to perceive. So, what may be behind perfectionism:
