When faith meets fear: The hidden struggle of perfectionism

A couple of times recently, when I’ve asked my son to tidy his bedroom, he’s responded with some version of, “Why does it have to be perfect?”

The first time, I probably brushed it off. His room needed tidying. There were clothes on the floor and all the usual evidence that a child actually lives there. This year, he stepped into Year 7 (eek!), and I’ve been trying to help him develop greater responsibility for his belongings and environment. Tidy space, tidy mind and all that. But then he said it again, quite innocently: “I know you want it to be perfect, Mum.” This time, I heard something different. He wasn’t arguing with me. He was reflecting back his understanding of me.

I’m a recovering perfectionist. I wrote about perfectionism in my book Pressure Off, and I’d like to think I’ve become increasingly comfortable with limitation, mess and things being “good enough”. Yet here was my child holding up a mirror and making me wonder whether, somewhere between teaching responsibility and asking him to put away his football kit, I was communicating something I hadn’t intended. Was I teaching him to value order, or was he learning that things needed to be perfect?

We tend to think of perfectionism as wanting everything done exceptionally well. But psychologically, perfectionism is more complicated than simply having high standards.

We tend to think of perfectionism as wanting everything done exceptionally well. But psychologically, perfectionism is more complicated than simply having high standards. Researchers often distinguish between perfectionistic striving and perfectionistic concerns. Wanting to work hard, organise ourselves or pursue excellence isn’t necessarily problematic. The difficulty comes when mistakes begin to feel threatening, when our self-worth becomes entangled with our performance and when we become preoccupied with criticism, failure or falling short.

And this isn’t simply an uncomfortable personality trait. A meta-analysis involving more than 113,000 adults found perfectionistic concerns were associated with symptoms of anxiety, depression and OCD, while other research has associated them with burnout and poorer sleep. Perhaps most strikingly, an umbrella review of longitudinal research found that concern over mistakes (a core feature of perfectionism) emerged as a risk factor across depression, anxiety and eating-disorder difficulties. The pursuit of perfection can have implications for our health.

Increasingly, I’ve come to understand perfectionism as a protective mechanism, fear that has been given superhero armour. It doesn’t necessarily look anxious; it can look incredibly competent because the perfectionist is organised, prepared and dependable. She notices the details everyone else misses, she anticipates what could go wrong and makes sure it doesn’t.

The difficulty is that the armour works, until it doesn’t. Because beneath “I need to get this right” is often “I don’t know what will happen if I get it wrong.” The control that perfectionism offers can provide temporary relief from the discomfort of uncertainty. If I can organise the environment, anticipate every outcome, say exactly the right thing, make the right decision or keep everybody happy, perhaps I can protect myself from criticism, rejection, disappointment or shame. No wonder letting go can feel frightening! But holding on to an unsustainable standard is also exhausting.

When “perfect” sounds Christian

Faith can complicate this further. After all, Jesus himself says, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). For the recovering perfectionist, that sounds suspiciously like divine confirmation that our impossible standards were right all along. Except the Greek word translated “perfect”, teleios, carries a sense of completeness and maturity. Furthermore, Jesus speaks these words in a passage about love, particularly the uncomfortable kind that extends even towards our enemies. Christian perfection was never an invitation to flawless performance; it is an invitation towards wholeness.

In Pressure Off, I wrote that “it is impossible to move forward from where we think we should be, only from where we truly are,” and I’m still learning this. Perfectionism says: I need reality to become what it should be before I can rest, but grace meets me in reality as it actually is.

The incarnation itself tells us something about God’s relationship with mess, and as we prepare to turn our attention towards Advent in the coming weeks, there is an invitation here for those of us wrestling with perfectionism. Jesus enters a world of bodies, dirt, dysfunctional families, political turmoil, misunderstanding, disappointment and suffering. He does not wait at a safe distance for humanity to get itself together before coming near; he comes right into the middle of it. God doesn’t demand that everything be made perfect before he arrives; he chooses to meet us in things as they actually are.

What are we passing on?

Which brings me back to that bedroom. I’m still going to ask my son to tidy it, but the work for me is noticing what happens inside me when he doesn’t do it quite as I would. Can I teach responsibility without communicating that perfection is the price of approval? Can I allow him to complete a task differently from me without correcting it? Can my children experience mistakes as things we learn from rather than things we fear?

If perfectionism is partly an attempt to protect ourselves or those we love, taking care of ourselves – or them – won’t be achieved by trying harder to stop being perfectionistic. It begins with becoming curious about what our perfectionism is trying to protect us from:

• We might notice when “I’d prefer this” becomes “I need this to be this way”, and name what sits underneath that need. What am I afraid might happen if I get this wrong, or things remain unfinished?

• We can begin to loosen our grip in small, safe ways: leave the email without rereading it for the seventh time, let someone else do the job their way, resist correcting the tiny imperfection nobody else noticed. Not because standards don’t matter, but because our wellbeing cannot depend upon everything going according to plan.

• And finally, we can receive. Before fixing, organising, improving or achieving anything, let’s again receive the grace of a God who meets us in our mess, and whose love isn’t waiting on the other side of our performance.

Perhaps my son’s room doesn’t need to be perfect. And, as his innocent comment gently reminded me, neither does his mum.