Are You Prisoners Of Perfection?
There are those who live in prison, incarcerated in a self-imposed cell whose keys they throw away, fascinated by the planning of an ideal world. And there, trapped, he scourges himself for not being able to finish anything that begins.
Even so, he is unable to stop living in a world full of projects which he formulates and reformulates from start to finish, but which is never able to finish, because no project reaches perfection. In this cell that he has created in his mind he isolates himself and suffers, because he is unable to change his way of obtaining a reward. Even if he knows the achievement of the goal, he does not know the praise.
The rigidity of his world and his inflexibility are also manifested in his relationships, from family to couple. He prefers to go away and live in solitude, avoiding intimacy with others, rather than giving up or changing his way of acting.
When nothing is enough
The way they see their person comes from work, but even in their work they are rigid and demand perfection, without tolerating mistakes. And they impose this need not only as regards their performance, but also that of their colleagues, which causes them a multiplicity of problems of adaptation to work.
Ultimately, they are the typical office colleagues who direct everything and who have the only correct and valid opinion on any subject dealt with. But this is not the worst aspect, as they are unable to deliver any project on time because they sacrifice punctuality in favor of the precision of every little detail.
They usually make the mistake of doing the same things over and over, they persevere in their ideas, even if what they do doesn’t give them good results. That is to say, they behave like chickens, they keep running, but they don’t reach their goals.
Changing their way of thinking or acting is very difficult for them, because we are talking about “a permanent and inflexible conduct, of internal experience and behavior that insulates itself accusingly from the expectations of the subject’s culture” .
For this reason, nothing is enough for these people, whatever they do. Perfection is their tyrant, their prison and, in the most serious cases, they need the help of a professional to better adapt to the circumstances around them.
Personality Disorder is not Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Finally, we need to differentiate the personality disorder we have just described from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Surely you have heard more often about the second anxiety disorder, characterized, above all, by obsession and compulsive behaviors.
Obsessions are intrusive, recurring thoughts that cause big problems. Compulsions, on the other hand, are mental behaviors or acts that the subject exercises to avoid the discomfort caused by obsessions. An example could be the following situation: “If I do not turn on the light in the house three times, a misfortune will happen to my family (obsession), so I press the switch three times (compulsion)”.
On the contrary, personality disorder does not have obsessive symptoms or compulsive behaviors as manifest as mental ones. However, as we have already told you, it is characterized by perfection and mental rigidity, characteristics that it shares with obsessive-compulsive disorder, but which are milder, since in obsessive-compulsive disorder they are closer to the obsessions and compulsions it manifests.
If after reading this article you have realized that you live imprisoned in perfectionism, contact a professional to be able to free yourself and to be able to realize that living in an imperfect world is possible and, moreover, it is a healthy alternative to the rigidity that surrounds you.
