Here's why perfectionism is your feminist superpower 

A New York psychotherapist wants us to change how women look at perfectionism. Rather than seeing it as a negative trait, she says they need to harness it for their benefit

Katherine Morgan Schlafer

Before a big day — in psychotherapist Katherine Morgan Schafler’s case, her wedding — the received wisdom is that you might want to relax the night before. Lie in the bath, that kind of thing. Instead, between 10.30pm and 2am Schlafer walked her dog, did a workout, answered emails, filed clinical notes, rewrapped her bridesmaids’ gifts, and edited her vows.

“It was the perfect night,” she remembers. She is a perfectionist who regards her perfectionism as a superpower. It is also a feminist issue.

“Perfectionists are not balanced people, and that’s OK,” she writes in her new book, The Perfectionist’s Guide To Losing Control. “Subscribing to packaged notions of balance and generic wellness when they don’t fit who you are isn’t being healthy, it’s being obedient.”

Perfectionism is not something to be stifled, ‘balanced’, or overcome, but to be harnessed, in a self-compassionate way (adaptive perfectionism, rather than maladaptive — we’ll come back to that). And, predictably, “the push to curb perfectionism and to be ‘perfectly imperfect’ is directed towards women.”

Have Steve Jobs, Gordon Ramsey, James Cameron ever been told they are perfectionists and should try to be more balanced? No — they are exalted as geniuses, she says, while “women receive an eternal fountain of directives every day about how to be less.”

Speaking on Zoom from New York City, Shafler says society’s messaging to women is always to ‘balance it’: “Women are always portrayed with competing demands. Themes of childcare, cleaning, work, trying to make yourself look good, and then the word ‘balance’, as though it were anything to do with recalibrating our energy or equilibrium.”

The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control

She adds how we have “hacksawed the definition of balance to mean being good at being busy, which has nothing to do with health.”

Being a perfectionist — if you are a woman — means you are not ‘balanced’. 

“What do we mean when we say balanced, and who are we telling to be more balanced,” she wonders. “Who is experiencing the most competing demands and is expected to balance them? Women, women, women.”

To be more ‘balanced’ and less perfectionist, while directed at women, means to be less ambitious, she says. 

“When men are called perfectionists, it’s not even a blip in the radar of explaining who they are. It’s just integrated into their identity — they don’t have to explain their perfectionism. We don’t expect them to — that’s just the way they work. It’s what’s expected of them. They have standards. They’re professionals.”

Schafler gives the example of Martha Stewart as a female perfectionist who is “allowed and permitted” to be so, because “her interests stay within the realm of what is acceptable for women to be publicly ambitious about” (home décor, food, weddings etc). She cites top tennis player Serena Williams and Vogue editor Anna Wintour as consummate perfectionists who often get bad press; I’d add Madonna.

Of Wintour she says, “You can be a leader if you’re woman, but you must be maternal, you must be soft and warm.”

The dominant cultural message for women, she continues, is that we can take on leadership roles, but only if we abide by societal rules. If we preface our requests with smiles, charm, self-effacement.

“I struggled with this myself,” says Schafler. “Every time I assert myself, if I don’t do it smilingly, in a very particular manner, I don’t get what I want — I get pushed back and penalised. For a long time I internalised it, but these are cultural disorders.”

Until we acknowledge this, she says, we are going to continue looking at mental health “through the lens of individual pathology” rather than through cultural context.

The perfection paradox

Meanwhile, perfectionism has a bad name. We think of a perfectionist, says Schalfler, as “someone who wants everything to be perfect all the time and gets upset when things aren’t perfect.” 

Everyone has perfectionist tendencies — it’s “the desire to bridge the gulf between an ideal and reality.”

In the research world, the study of perfectionism is in its infancy — there is no standard clinical definition of the term. Schafler outlines five kinds — emotional (being in a perfect state of being), cognitive (having perfect understanding), behavioural (performing a role perfectly), object (external things to be perfect) and process (external happenings to be perfect). 

However, telling perfectionists to stop being perfectionists “is like managing anger by telling people to ‘calm down’.” It doesn’t work. The trick is adaptive perfectionism, that is, to use it to your advantage, and view it as a superpower and a strength.

She urges us to appreciate the perfection paradox — to know you already are perfect; then you can crack on with your life, without becoming ensnared in not-good-enough. 

“Think outside the box,” says Schafler. “And then throw away the box.”

Maladaptive perfectionism is the kind we are most familiar with — nit-picky, hyper-critical, nothing ever being good enough, having impossible standards. This kind of perfectionism is unhelpful, and can lead to procrastination, dissociation, people-pleasing, interpersonal turmoil, or arrested development, depending on how the perfectionism manifests, says Schafler. And it is always self-punishing rather than self-disciplined.

“When we are in healthy perfectionism, we realise these things are already inside us, that we are already whole. Then you can enjoy it. 

"But because mental health is fluid, sometimes we forget, and we try to hustle and earn our way to something that already belongs to us, which is our own sense of wholeness.”