I’m a perfectionist, you’re a perfectionist…is everybody?
By: Phinsky Moss
Tags: Mental Health, Perfectionism, Depression, Mental Illness, Ocd

Photo by Jonathan Hoxmark on Unsplash

I started this project being annoyed by so many people saying: “I’m a perfectionist.” Ironically, I consider myself a perfectionist, too. But I’m not necessarily the same as the others using the term. So I wondered: How can all these people call themselves perfectionists, yet be so different from me?

I found research that enlightened me as to how complex this topic of perfectionism actually is and how much more there is to it than just wanting things to be flawless.

Perfectionism: The best bad habit…

I don’t know whether other people had the same experience, but my husband and I (having gone to different schools) both have memories of school job training. This consisted of mock interviews with the task to convey one strength and one weakness to each other, so we would be prepared if we were confronted with this in real life. An overwhelming amount of teenagers stated: “I consider my perfectionism to be a weakness.” To which the teacher weirdly consented. As if to say: Yes, perfectionism is a valid weakness. We accept perfectionism as a weakness, because in the end, we don’t really care how you feel. If you have an inner demon inside of you that forces you to deliver outstanding work, we will welcome it with open arms.

If you think about perfectionism in a classical sense, in the sense of “I need to produce something that is perfect. And I will overachieve, because of it”, then I have to tell you something uncomfortable and confusing: The majority of perfectionists do not work like this at all. It is not a linear approach to a task and then the ability to complete that task without fail. It is more so the thoughts you have accompanying you while working towards completion and how they affect your ability to even complete the task to begin with.

Multidimensional Perfectionism

I want to introduce you to a term that will help you understand the complexity of perfectionism. It is called Multidimensional Perfectionism. In a research paper called “Multidimensional Perfectionism And DSM-5 Personality Traits” by Joachim Stoeber, it is explained that overall we have to split perfectionism into four different types:

Self-Oriented Perfectionism (SOP) Socially Prescribed Perfectionism (SPP) Other-Oriented Perfectionism (OPP) Rigid Perfectionism (RP)

These are typical statements related to each type:

“I demand nothing less than perfection of myself” “People expect nothing less than perfection from me” “If I ask someone to do something, I expect it to be done flawlessly” “Everything needs to be flawless, including my own and others’ performance.”

It should already become clear, that they are necessary distinctions to be made in order to correctly relay the type of struggle the specific individual is faced with. It should also become apparent that the differences portrayed here can have intense implications on how people go about their life corresponding with the type of perfectionism they struggle with.

My table of perfectionism

In trying to visualise these differences and similarities I created a table of Perfectionism. It is comprised of the traits I could find that are being named in the relation to the specific types of perfectionism. I made an effort to show from where I took which piece of information, which is why this table is rather colourful.