Perfectionism is less about doing things well and more about staying safe.

It’s hard not to talk about perfectionism without talking about how it develops. I believe there are four major parts, and so many subcategories of perfectionism under these parts… It’s hard to cover in one go, but I’m going to give it a try.

The first two go hand in hand, along with the second two:

• Activated mind and body
• Underlying beliefs
• Symptoms
• Coping mechanisms

When you are performing in a perfectionist complex, oftentimes your body and mind are activated. Your body has created a trauma imprint from experiences that felt unsafe. When your body is triggered, it identifies an unsafe situation and alerts you through teeth grinding, body tension, nausea, headache, heart racing, and panic. Because of your experiences, you have developed underlying beliefs and roots around why you have to perform under the perfectionism complex. For me, these are both linked to childhood trauma experiences. I have fibromyalgia because of my consistent body tension, and I always need to protect myself. The narrative I’ve developed often says, “I need to prove my worth.” I have many written posts about these beliefs and roots, so I don’t think I need to go into them more here.

The other two categories that come out of these beliefs and activated body experiences are symptoms or effects, and self-preservation. Symptoms are less about what your body feels, and more about what your mind experiences, guilt, and perceived anxiety (there are more, but you get the picture). Self-preservation is the coping mechanism—the way we allow perfectionism to show up in our daily lives. These are the actions we take to keep ourselves safe.

The complexity is that it’s not one-sided—they connect in a feedback loop. For example, something we can all relate to is anxiety. I did a short deep dive into anxiety because, when you hear this word, it has been associated with many things. Breaking it down, anxiety is a physical reaction; your nervous system is being activated. You can have anxious thoughts, or rather what I believe are rumination, worry, or intrusive thoughts. These are stories you tell yourself—essentially, we make them up to make sense of our physical alarms going off. Allowing ourselves to cater to these thoughts can also increase or amplify our symptoms.

To help prevent these feelings associated with anxiety, we create coping mechanisms. We create routines, try to control our environment, prevent issues, avoid conflict or other life tasks, and people-please. We sometimes go so far into avoidance that we develop devices to help us hide. My device was food; I was always using it to cope with my beliefs and trauma imprint. While this only works a little to calm our nervous system and help us, it also creates more damage in the long run. What protects us can actually harm us—especially if you are using devices that are more harmful than food.

In time, I want to break these categories out and give them more attention in relation to my experience. For now, though, this is what you get. Thank you for following along with me.