Perfectionism tends to involve the belief that regardless of your problems, you’re always the problem.
In the past week, there’s been much discussion around cutting people off and whether or not we ought to be more tolerant of those with differing cultural and political beliefs. So, those struggling with perfectionism specifically and social anxiety more broadly are stuck between competing perspectives, both based on a strong sense of responsibility.
Yet, hardly, do we ask: But what do you want?
And just as rarely do we ask ourselves if we’re demanding too much from those who’ve already given much. In cognitive behavioral therapy, we note the cognitive distortions, patterned conclusions skewed by poor reasoning, people tend to engage in. One of them is personalization, or taking too much responsibility for outcomes. Sometimes, we believe our decisions are more influential than they are. At other times, we believe some outcome to be inevitable due to some essential feature of ours, like when we think we failed a test because we’re stupid instead of external factors that may have contributed. This entails a high degree of self-importance. Thus, the recent narratives around the election only helped fuel dormant tendencies in many of us.
In difficult relationships, perfectionists tend to fluctuate between the strong desire to fix the other, believing they can save them if they work hard enough, and the equally intense desire to fix themselves, to become more tolerant, even Buddha-like. Now, thrown into the mix, is the perspective that cutting people off is the only moral solution. Being pulled in different directions by competing loyalties, anxiety tends to foster shame for being indecisive and subsequent avoidance.
Are you too soft for ending a relationship, too uncaring or cruel? Or are you an enabler by hanging on? The problem isn’t in picking the wrong choice; it’s in using present circumstances to justify an ingrained tendency. So, if you’re used to cutting people off, this will be just another reason to, and the same can be said for people-pleasers. There isn’t much thought given. In treatment, I often ask my perfectionistic patients to consider what they hope to gain from their decisions, exploring the likelihoods of fantasized outcomes. Remaining in relationships mainly because you believe you’ll change hearts, even your own, is likely unsustainable; none of us are that important. And ending them believing you’re serving some greater good through punishment likely won’t change much either.
Personally, as with so many other perfectionists, I maintained relationships with incompatible others because I clung to my childhood and childish fantasy of being liked by everyone. More than anything, I wanted to feel safe in a broad community. At bottom, my motivator for tolerance was selfish because I couldn’t handle conflict or much discomfort. So, while on the surface my intentions may have seemed good, in reality, I avoided pain through a misperception of love.
In a similar vein, many cut people off abruptly to manage their own guilt and sustain a sense of self-righteousness, exhibiting loyalty to their own party. To be clear, it isn’t that any of these reasons are bad or wrong; it’s that everything we do, even when we believe we’re acting from a place of duty, is, in part, self-preserving. When automatically moralizing our decisions, we often fail to account for what’s practical through blinding vanity.
Knowing myself, I resolved to begin cutting people off because I knew how much I could handle. After repeated attempts to persuade, the individuals I no longer speak with continued to maintain their regressive views, even trolling me with them when they weren’t outright denying them. When I minimized my self-importance, I asked myself: How much love do I really want to give, knowing how little of it there was for me? For those who want to continue going above and beyond: you’re allowed to do so. And for those ready to give up: I get it.
There are no concrete answers on how to approach difficult friends and family members, but I can tell you with a reasonably high degree of certainty that personalization, ego, self-importance, whatever you want to call it, makes us erroneously believe we’re special when we aren’t. Those rigidly arguing for a specific stance tend to lack humility and seldom change the world because, fundamentally, they’re like the rest of us — confused and insecure. We play our parts, we make mistakes, we adapt, and we try again. That’s all that our country can ask of us; that’s all that we should ask of ourselves.
