as a perfectionist, you define perfection as a theoretical best. That’s exactly why you are never satisfied with reality as it is. The real world—the one and only world that there is at any given point in time—always pales in comparison with a better world that you can imagine. In any

You’ve come to equate the meaning of success with “not-failure” or “un-failure.” You are either a failure or a not-failure. If that’s the meaning you assigned to the notion of success, it’s no wonder you never really feel successful. You’re only someone who once again didn’t fail. So, of course there’s never any reason to celebrate or allow

Perfectionism can be an adaptation to a deficit of mirroring. Growing up with an insecure, possibly narcissistic parent, you might have lost your sense of self because you were compelled to serve as a mirror for your parent’s hungry ego.

constantly strive to meet everyone’s expectations and you essentially live in fear of others’ disapproval of you.

Accept and change: accept that at any given moment you are doing the best you can do and, having learned from the experience of this given moment, try to change and improve the next moment to the extent that you can.

Many perfectionists are pushed into therapy by family and friends to address the problems of anger and hypercriticism and to work on their control tendencies and their insistence on being right.

this shadow is a metaphor of your programming, a representation of your past. As a perfectionist, you are constantly projecting your vision of what should be onto what is. Your perfectionistic software, like your shadow when the sun’s at your back, is leading rather than following you. All of us have the experience of not wanting to say something

you don’t like the way reality is right now, change the future. You see, acceptance isn’t approval, it’s just an acknowledgment of what is (more about this below). If you don’t acknowledge what is, what will you be improving?

When there is no audience and nobody to narrate for, the narrator goes away and the experiencer steps in. Be patient. Your mind has been talking for years. It won’t stop on a dime. Give it time: maybe a few hours, maybe a whole weekend. A meeting with perfection is worth the wait. In the state of wordless awareness, you’ll discover that there is