Perfectionism Is a Form of Self-Deception

Perfectionism is the ultimate form of self-deception. Perfectionists tend to fluctuate between believing they’re perfect, resisting the notion that they caused any meaningful harm (even to themselves), and believing they can become perfect, minimizing past harm with the excuse that they’re engaged in meaningful self-work. On the surface, perfectionism is a way to avoid accountability. At bottom, it’s a way to avoid a profound and chronic sense of shame.

This form of avoidance frequently appears in therapy. One refrain: “I just can’t get myself to do it even though I know it’s the right thing.” Another: “I believe that’s right, but I just don’t feel it.” Both comments help the patient evade uncomfortable truths about themselves. The former comment implies a sense that one values what they say they do, despite their actions. The latter indicates that “feeling” is preventing them from changing; this is the argument of “I rationally know this, but still feel otherwise.” However, as treatment progresses, several truths often emerge. The first is that the perfectionist absolves themselves of blame by externalizing it — it isn’t them at fault, but their mismatched thoughts and feelings or inability to self-motivate. The second is that self-preservation, frequently in the form of self-deception, is one of their highest values.

Since perfectionists are often people pleasers, it can be challenging for them to clarify what they want or what they believe in. Being sensitive to rejection, much of their time is consumed with adaptation, or having the right beliefs while cultivating the right behaviors. It becomes evident why self-deception plays a role in their lives. Wishing to be authentic and good simultaneously makes for an incongruent value system, a nuisance at best and emotionally destabilizing at worst. To the perfectionist, fewer things are harder to hear than the comment that they’re performing, even unknowingly.

However, our decisions are often the best highlighters of our values, indicating our value hierarchies in jarring ways. Perfectionists prefer to believe that their thoughts, essentially what they tell themselves they believe, only matter. It becomes easy to explain away one’s conflicting decisions since, after all, they’re trying their best. While that’s true in the sense that they want to act otherwise, and try to will themselves to it (that is, to become a different person), it’s also inconveniently true that they may not value something as much as they say they do.

In lighter examples, this may occur with respect to exercise. Some say they significantly value their health but fail to exercise consistently. In more poignant examples, they may say they abhor discrimination yet tolerate it from significant others, even without a power imbalance. Self-deception helps us maintain a skewed but positive self-image. Self-deception convinces us that necessary changes are either minor, or not-so-necessary, or completely unneeded. But self-deception, better known as denial, is unsustainable. For the most part, perfectionists enter treatment because shame continues to crop up in meaningful ways, despite using perfectionism in an attempt to weaken it in the form of depression, which they consider to be an external barrier. There’s often a sense that the “real me is hidden behind my apathy.”

Yet, the real you is, more often than not, not also the “good” you. This means that authenticity and people-pleasing are likely mutually exclusive, at least in meaningful ways. Our perfectionistic patients often enter treatment to find ways to become perfect (for example, create the perfect marriage of competing values and traits). Yet, almost as often, they find themselves questioning their purported values. While the question “Who am I really?” is largely unanswerable, we can make strides in coming to terms with our values and how we structure them. We say we deeply care about social justice, but maybe value passionate, romantic love more? We say higher education is important, but maybe we value freedom more. We say we want to cultivate some talent (say, musical or athletic), but maybe prefer the stability of a 9-to-5 job. Primarily, self-deception is based on shame. In these cases, one may feel ashamed of feeling “co-dependent,” being “lazy,” or being a “coward.”

For perfectionists, much of the associated depression and anxety stems from unresolved shame. None of this is to say that at their core, perfectionists can access some genuine self. It’s to say that as long as their decisions are misaligned with their professed beliefs, they’ll likely continue to experience unwanted symptoms. It’s a myth that therapy helps one find oneself; in reality, it helps one critically consider choices in the process of unmasking. Therapy doesn’t judge because its main goal is to help the patient seriously consider who they would become (within the realm of what’s possible) without their self-imposed barriers.

Self-deception may be a significant barrier to one’s chronic shame, but poorly managed and denied self-loathing has a way of becoming one’s own Trojan Horse.