The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control

I don’t know one balanced woman. I know a lot of women who are two extra days in a week away from feeling balanced, or one professional housecleaning service away from feeling balanced, or one generous extension on the deadline away from feeling balanced, or three entire days of their children in someone else’s loving and competent care away from f

A perfectionist in a maladaptive mindset feels as if they already “lost” at being whole, good enough, or acceptable as they are. Maladaptive perfectionists strive to achieve goals (including interpersonal goals like people-pleasing) in the hope that others don’t feel empty-handed in their presence.

The cliché of it all bothers me still—I never realized how attached I was to control until I started to lose so much of it.

Women receive an eternal fountain of directives every day about how to be less.

the Association for Spirituality and Psychotherapy

Love can build relationships that are healthy and toxic. Wealth generates philanthropy and exploitation. Beauty inspires art and objectification. Intelligence eliminates communicable diseases through vaccines to save mass human life and builds atomic bombs to destroy mass human life.

In the same way that a joyful person can contagiously lift the mood of a room, intense perfectionists can exude a powerfully dense energy for people in their orbit.

The primary challenge in a psychologically liminal space is to allow yourself to feel empty. In a liminal realm, your emptiness and your potential are the exact same thing. When you block your emptiness from existing, you block your potential from developing. Lao Tzu’s famous quote reflecting this truth was the title I gave to the very first blog p

Before we seek to understand, we seek to diagnose. Instead of saying, “Let’s figure out what’s happening here,” we say, “Let’s figure out what’s wrong with you.” The elemental pathologizing embedded in the field of mental health is also why we’re so confused when we hear the phrase “mental health.”