One of the areas that cognitive behavioral therapy is very useful for is addressing perfectionism.
So what do I mean by perfectionism? It really is a personality trait where people are striving for the absolute best. It’s more of that personality trait as opposed to a diagnosis. So as a result of this trait people tend to be very highly critical of them, of themselves. And they also tend to be sensitive to the opinions of others because they’re so critical about themselves in the first place.
Also with perfectionism, people tend to rarely feel that sense of accomplishment and at best they’ll feel that kind of good enough status. But that’s what I mean when I say perfectionism.
One of the most common cognitive distortions that are associated with perfectionism is All or Nothing Thinking.
So some examples of All of Nothing Thinking include it’s not enough. Or, I’m not enough. Or, I can always do better. Or, this person let me down, they failed me. These really extreme black and white, all or nothing thoughts or belief systems really are a good example of the all or nothing thinking that comes with that type of cognitive distortion.
And so why is cognitive behavioral therapy really good with this type of distortion? Because of the extreme all or nothingness, it’s very easy to identify the irrational belief or thought. To say something like, I’m a failure because I wasn’t able to do my absolute best in this meeting.
It’s when you pause and really start to break that down using a cognitive behavioral therapy technique, such as a thought record. One can really start to slow down the thinking and see that, okay, perhaps this isn’t as true as it feels like it is in the moment.
One personal example, where I worked with a client in the past with someone who was applying to med school.
And they really had this strong perfectionistic personality trait that had permeated throughout most of their schooling life. And as they were applying for med school, it really kicked into high gear because at that moment, understandably, they felt like the stakes were very high. As best as I could tell objectively, their scores were definitely good enough to get them in, but they were really convinced that because they didn’t get this idealized score on the MCAT that they would like to, they were not going to be accepted into any other programs.
A certain amount of this was living in the unknown, because when I was working with them they were in the application process. But while they were in the application process, we did a lot of, initially calming the body down, because when you calm the body down, you can work with this are nothing thinking much easier.
We calm the body down through deep breathing and progressive muscle relaxation mostly. But then using a lot of thought records to identify the collection of irrational thoughts that were popping up as a result of this all or nothing thinking really helped this person with their perfectionistic traits as they were going through this med school application process.
So that’s just one kind of personal example where we’ve worked with these types of personality traits here at Good Therapy SF. And if you’re interested in more, please feel free to reach out. Thank you.
