Addicted To Perfection Or Fear Of Losing Control

Behind perfectionism hides the fear of letting go, of getting out of control, of stopping being oneself. But excessive rigidity causes just the opposite: our personality shrinks and suffocates. Regaining our self will free us from this anxiety.

Generally, the will to do things well and being organized people are confused with control and the search for perfection.

Both things are not in themselves negative, since they are characteristics that can be related to people who are involved in what they do.

However, the ideal of perfection can become a problem if it becomes the sole and ultimate goal of our existence, an addiction.

The consequences of excess perfectionism

The effects produced by the perfectionist desire, the addiction to exaggerated order, are basically two.

1. Having to close the world more and more, make smaller plots to be able to control everything.
2. Permanently compare yourself with others. To feel perfect, the perfectionist seeks constant comparison, he needs to make sure that he is the best in everything he does. You can get into delusional situations such as this person competing on topics that, surely, do not even interest him.

The mistake in which addicts are perfectly submerged is to believe that, if they are and act in this way, they defend their personality.

They confuse the fact of having an identity with always behaving in the same way, with fixed schemes and following strict rules.

They feel that if they relax, if they “let go”, they will fail and their person will vanish along with the error. Anguish invades them as they lose their anchor points, located in the wrong place.

How can we disengage from addiction to order?

For this reason, the main task of many of the therapies that address this problem is to help the person to verify that they do have an identity, an essence of their own, which is nothing more than the uniqueness that exists in each one of us and that it has to do with with what we are passionate about, with a really own style of seeing and feeling things.

It is not, as the perfectionist believes, the opposition between following what is strictly established or falling into nothingness, but about rescuing everything that the person has been erasing from himself in the name of an ideal of perfection.

Gain inner security

When the person finds what is genuine in him, he perceives his authentic personality and security, and gains in ease and flexibility.

There is no longer fear that external conditions will change or that others will do different things, because you already know how to wait or look for the formula to feel good in any circumstance.

If before its main reference was located on the outside and how to control it, now it is placed inside, it will always be there.

The external is no longer destabilizing; now it serves as support.