Perfectionism is a rigged game—here’s how to stop playing
Being a perfectionist is like playing a rigged carnival game. It’s presented as easy and within reach when it’s actually impossible and unattainable. People who are expected by others, or expect themselves, to be perfect are trapped in a nonsensical world where normal and difficult are confused with perfect and easy. Unable to achieve perfection, they’re bombarded with messages that they’re not thinking, feeling, or performing normally:
Everyone else manages to keep their house in order while working full-time and raising kids.
No one else has to work this hard just to get by.
None of the other moms have a hard time getting up with their kids in the morning.
Of course, we’re all shackled by perfectionism to some extent. Those last three statements were pulled from my own perfectionistic self-talk. In a world of carefully crafted profiles and photoshopped everything, developing an accurate sense of “normal” is an uphill battle. The constant distortion makes equalizing critical.
Equalizing shows someone that their reaction makes complete sense given their circumstances and how humans naturally respond. It’s essentially saying, “If I was in your shoes, I would do or feel the same.” It not only validates people’s reactions but also recalibrates their expectations.
My client, a physician I’ll call Lou, once came to session with a familiar problem: He couldn’t keep up with emails at his new job and he was struggling to complete his patients’ notes on time, partly because of the email overload. No problem, I thought. We discussed ways to streamline his documentation process and came up with a plan for him to speak with the director if all else failed. Well, all else failed, including his conversation with the director, who my judgmental mind desperately wanted to be cast as Cruella de Vil.
No, she told him, Lou could not get staff assistance in responding to patient emails; yes, all patient emails needed to be addressed by end of day; no, he could not get weekly admin time to attend to these tasks as is customary in most hospitals and could make up missed work on his own time. The director didn’t validate any of Lou’s concerns and instead seemed to suggest that he should get with the program. Still, the demands seemed unreasonable. How were any of the other doctors staying afloat? Lou didn’t know. The director wasn’t beloved by any means, but no one else was complaining about the expectations or workflow.
“Maybe it’s the OCD,” he said after months of not being able to make it home in time to put his kids to bed. Lou had a history of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which manifested in excessive checking. When we started working together, he would check to see if the oven was off, then recheck to ensure it was off, then recheck just to be positive, then . . . you get the point. At work, he used to compulsively go over orders and prescriptions he’d submitted, driven by the anxiety that he’d made a mistake. But that was all in the past. Lou responded positively to treatment and had been symptom-free for years.
“Are you checking again?” I asked. He didn’t think so but was starting to doubt himself. I reminded him of the unrelenting anxiety and obsessive thoughts that drove his compulsions. He admitted that the mafia goons were noticeably absent. But if it wasn’t the OCD, what was it? Lou’s situation was growing increasingly Kafkaesque. He began looking for other jobs.
Then one day his director was gone. Fired or quit, Lou wasn’t sure which. There was a new director, and the first thing she did was to ask the doctors for anonymous feedback about their needs and pain points. Then she scheduled a meeting with them, which focused primarily on acknowledging the concerns everyone had raised about managing emails. It turns out Lou wasn’t an outlier after all. He was part of a silent majority. His burnout and hopelessness weren’t abnormal reactions to reasonable demands; they were normal responses to unrealistic expectations. Even though the new director didn’t have any immediate solutions to the email problem, Lou abandoned his job search. He no longer felt overwhelmed with hopelessness and self-doubt; his oxygen mask was firmly in place.
Perfectionism thrives in isolation, where we can’t see that others struggle too with the same impossible standards. Equalizing brings these hidden struggles into the light, normalizing our very understandable responses to unrealistic demands.
Adapted with permission from Validation by Caroline Fleck, published by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Caroline Fleck.