Healing Perfectionism With IFS Therapy

In my prior article, Journal Prompts to Cope With Perfectionism, I began a discussion about perfectionism.

In the current article, I'm discussing perfectionism from an IFS therapy perspective (see my article: IFS is a Gentle, Evidence Based Therapy).

Healing Perfectionism With IFS Therapy

In the next article, I'll discuss how IFS Therapy can help with overcoming perfectionism.

How Do Defensive Parts Develop?

From an IFS therapy perspective, defensive parts usually develop at an early age.

In IFS these parts are known as proactive and reactive parts.

When you're faced with trauma or adversity, some of the internal parts of yourself are forced to take on extreme, rigid roles to protect you from pain. This usually occurs when you have had experiences as a child of rejection, failure, loneliness, conditional love, abuse or childhood emotional neglect.

The Core Self: 

From an IFS perspective, the Core Self is not a part. 

Everyone is born with a Core Self and a natural ability to heal. However, when there is childhood trauma, the Core Self can get blended with your defensive parts (both proactive and reactive parts). That can make it difficult to access the Core Self. 

Your IFS therapist can help you to discover your Core Self which helps with the healing process (see below for explanations about the proactive and reactive/defensive parts).

The Core Self and the 8 Cs

The Core Self is composed of the 8 Cs:

• Curiosity: Wanting to learn about your thoughts and feelings without judgment
• Compassion: Feeling kind towards your inner struggles
• Calm: Feeling steady and peaceful inside--even during rough times
• Clarity: Seeing your situation clearly without emotional fog
• Courage: Feeling able to face hard truths and uncomfortable emotions
• Confidence: Trusting that you can handle what comes your way
• Creativity: Opening up to new ideas and flexible ways of thinking
• Connectedness: Feeling a deep sense of belonging within yourself and with others

The Wounded and Defensive Parts:

This is the usual sequence of how wounded and defensive parts develop and how IFS healing process:

• 1. The Wounded Child Develops First During Childhood Trauma: Before the proactive or reactive parts develop, a vulnerable child part is wounded. The vulnerable child part is not a proactive or reactive part. It's the part that holds the trauma. As an example, a child might be rejected, yelled at or abused by a parent when she gets a bad grade at school. The child internalizes the parent's attitude towards her and believes "I'm unlovable" or "I'm powerless". In order to survive, the child's system buries the memory and painful emotion deep inside, which creates the exiled wounded child part.

• 2. The Perfectionist Part Steps Up to Prevent Pain (Proactive Part): Once the wounded part is buried, the internal system realizes it can never allow the wounded part to be triggered or exposed again. The proactive part emerges to police your life and prevent future pain before it can happen again. This part's strategy is, "If I can be perfect and never make mistakes, no one can ever reject or hurt me again."  This part takes over your consciousness and establishes impossibly high standards. This might work reasonably well for you as a child and you get praise from relatives and teachers, which reinforces this survival strategy. 

• 3. The Inner Critic Develops a Preemptive Shield: As life becomes more complex, maintaining 100% perfection becomes impossible. To protect you from the crushing blow of external judgment, a harsher manager called the inner critic, develops after the perfectionist develops. The inner critic believes that beating you up first (before you get external criticism) provides a safe shield. The inner critic's logic is, "If I criticize you for being lazy or messy before anyone else notices, I'll force you to fix it before others are able to hurt you." The inner critic often adopts the same words, attitude and tone of the critical authority figures from your past (parents, teachers and critical others). The inner critic learned that those voices are what define "safety" and "correctness".

• 4. The Parts Freeze in Time: The primary reason why these parts continue to be problems is that they are frozen in the past. Your perfectionist and critical parts often don't know that you are no longer child. They still believe you are that fragile child that couldn't survive without them.  

• 5. The Parts Take on Healthy Roles: As part of IFS therapy, you learn to have a dialogue and a relationship with these parts of yourself to help them to understand that you now have adult resilience.  As you develop a trusting relationship with these parts, they usually realize for the first time that you are no longer a fragile child that needs protection and they can relax instead of staying in exhausting roles. This allows them to take on healthy functions. For instance, instead of obsessively criticizing and striving for perfection, they might encourage you with a sense of healthy motivation.

Conclusion

For the sake of simplicity, I have described an inner world that has one wounded part, one proactive defensive part and one reactive defensive part. 

In reality, there are usually many wounded, proactive and reactive parts to heal.

Although I have focused on perfectionism, the IFS step-by-step process is the same for any other problem.

In my next article, I'll discuss how IFS therapy works to heal perfectionism.

Get Help in IFS Therapy

If you have been trying without success to work through your problems, you could benefit from working with an IFS therapist.

Get Help in IFS Therapy

IFS therapy can help you to heal your problems so you can be live a more fulfilling life free from your traumatic history.

About Me

I am a licensed New York psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, IFS, EFT (for couples), Somatic Experiencing and Certified Sex Therapist.

Over the years I have helped many individual adults and couples.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

I provide a 10-15 minute free phone call before setting up an appointment.

You can reach me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or you can email me.

Also See My Articles:

What is Somatic IFS? 

How Does IFS Therapy Help You to Understand Yourself? 

How Can IFS Therapy Help With Anxiety? 

Journal Prompts to Cope With Perfectionism

As I discussed in a prior article, Journaling to Relieve Stress and Anxiety, journaling is a powerful tool when you want to make changes in your life.

When you're struggling with trying to be "perfect", journaling can help you to soften your perfectionistic tendencies, including calming down your inner critic (see my article: The Cycle of Perfectionism, Procrastination and Paralysis).

Writing in a Journal to Cope With Perfectionism

Journaling can also help you to understand the root of your problem and also develop self compassion for the critical part of yourself (see my article: Making Friends With Your Inner Critic).

The act of journaling gives you a safe space to explore your feelings.

The other benefits to journaling about perfectionism include:

• Explore the Roots of Your Problem and the Triggers - Understanding the origin of your problem can also help you understand how perfectionism became a survival strategy and coping mechanism.

• Your Early Influences: Did your parents, teachers, mentors or other people in your life exhibit perfectionist behavior?

Writing in a Journal to Cope With Perfectionism

• Your Earliest Memories: What is your first memory of feeling the urge to be "perfect"?

• Your Current Triggers: What specific situations trigger your inner critic and perfectionist behavior (e.g., family, relationships, work, fitness etc)?

• Your Cultural Pressure: How do your cultural and social circles influence how you feel about past achievements and future aspirations?

• Your Past and Current Survival Strategies: How did perfectionism act as a survival strategy in the past and in current situations? How is it hurting you now?

• Have Dialogues With Your Inner Critic - Perfectionism often shows up in extreme ways of thinking, feeling and behaving. You can challenge rigid rules and reframe distorted thoughts and unhelpful feelings and behaviors:

• Define "Good Enough": What internal or external benchmarks do you use to decide if a task or project is "good enough" and complete? (Perfection vs. Good Enough).

• Expose the Hidden Rules: What unconscious rules do you live by that keep your anxiety and perfectionism high?

• Consider the Worst Case Scenario: If you were to fail at your current goal, project or task, what is the worst thing that could happen?

• Choose Alternative Self Talk: What is a harsh thought about yourself that you had recently? What is a kinder, more realistic alternative that you can tell yourself instead?

• Redefine Failure: What is your current emotional relationship with failure? How can you see it as useful information for you instead of failure?

• Release Control and Embrace Failure - Letting to of perfectionism allows you to focus and feel free about the process:

• Loosen Your Grip: Where in your life are you trying to control the outcome the most?

Writing in a Journal to Cope With Perfectionism

• Try an Experiment: What is one small thing you can intentionally do imperfectly this week just to see the outcome?

• Lower the Bar: Which of your deadlines or unrealistic self-imposed standards can you safely lower today?

• Learn to Enjoy the Mess: What would you enjoy right now if you weren't concerned about making it "perfect"?

• Reclaim Your Time: What would help the perfectionist part of yourself to relax and soften to give you some free time back?

• Celebrating Progress and Self Compassion - Shift your focus to the personal growth you have developed and not on what you have left to do:

• Focus on Past Desires: What do you currently do or possess that you wanted in the past? Ten years ago? Five years ago? One year ago?

• Focus on Boundary Wins: What demands are you now declining that you used to  accept out of guilt or shame?

• Recognize Unseen Achievements: Write down three wins from this week that have nothing to do with external productivity--no matter how small they are.

• Recognize Your Unconditional Self Worth: Aside from your accomplishments or hoped-for accomplishments and regardless of productivity, what qualities do you possess that make you an inherently valuable person?

Writing in a Journal to Cope With Perfectionism

Quick Tips For Journalers Who Are Perfectionists

People who have perfectionist tendencies often struggle with journaling because they get stuck in certain areas. This is usually because they:

• Want to pick the "perfect" book or online site to use to journal.
• Believe their journal should be "flawless" with no scratch outs or scribbles.
• Believe that whatever they write should be very insightful all the time.

If this sounds like you, you can try these quick tips to see if they're helpful for you:

• The "Ruin It" Strategy: If you're writing in a journal book, you can start your journal with a big intentional scribble to break the distortion in your thinking that your journal must be "perfect".

• Time Your Writing Sessions: Set a timer for 5 or 10 minutes and stop writing when the timer goes off--even if you are in mid-sentence. This can help you to overcome the habit that what you're doing must be completely finished.

• No Editing Allowed: Use a pen. Don't cross out mistakes. Don't tear out pages from your journal. Allow the journal to be messy.

Get Help in Therapy

These journal prompts and tips can help you to cope with perfectionism.

However, if you want to overcome perfectionism, you might need to do deeper work with a licensed mental health professional who can help you to overcome the problems that are holding you back.

Get Help in Therapy 

Rather than struggling on your own, IFS Therapy is particularly effective at helping clients to overcome perfectionism and other problems (see my article: IFS Therapy is a Gentle, Evidence Based Therapy).

I will write more about how proactive and reactive parts develop from an IFS therapy perspective.

About Me

I am a licensed New York psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, IFS Parts Work, EFT Couples Therapist, Somatic Experiencing and Certified Sex Therapist.

I have helped many individual adults and couples.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

I provide a free 10-15 minute phone call before setting up an appointment.

You can call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or you can email me.

Also See My Articles:

Overcoming Your Fear of Making Mistakes

Overcoming Recurring Patterns of Self Sabotage

Fear of Change 

What is a Growth Mindset vs a Fixed Mindset? 

What is Somatic IFS Therapy? 

Coping With Perfectionism in Relationships