It isn’t an oversimplification to say that perfectionism, at its core, is about a deep and irrational need for emotional and often even physical security. As much as I dislike searches for abstract “root causes,” because causes tend to be complex, we can safely (no pun intended) conceive of the specific goals and specific desires in perfectionism as being in service of self-preservation, feeling protected from external and, thus, internal skeptics and critics. But there is a deeper story, one that doesn’t necessarily add a cause but helps explain the perfectionist’s preoccupation with security. This story goes back to the perfectionist’s childhood.

Many perfectionists are reared in homes full of emotional neglect and often even abuse. So, if we accept that all of us have cognitive biases, meaning that we take mental shortcuts to form conclusions about the world, this added environmental layer helps to prolong and may even worsen those mental tendencies. Perfectionists, inherently, struggle with paradox and, thus, with making sense of a complex and conflicted world. In large part due to black and white thinking, there’s a strong need for clarity and harmony, with the result being an obsession with rules. Associated with this strong need for regulation is an equally strong need for fairness. Fairness makes the world feel predictable, manageable, and, an idea we often return to, safe.

Importantly, the idea of what’s fair isn’t only imposed onto the present; often, it traverses time as the perfectionist attempts to corral the past, present, and future, boxing them together to be orderly and sensical. Therefore, they may spend a lifetime attempting to make up for the flaws and perceived debts of their childhoods. Unfortunately, many perfectionists remain stuck trying to answer the question of “Why me?” while simultaneously feverishly attempting to curate their present circumstances as a way of fixing, or making up for, the past. This tendency presents itself in romantic relationships, where we hear the popular labels “mommy issues” and “daddy issues,” and in relationships with one’s children. When one needs the world to make sense all the time and to always feel fair, others, especially those who are significant, become the casualties in one’s ultimate war against the world.

The perfectionist’s needs are a bottomless pit because not only is a complete state of security impossible, but so is the complete negation of one’s past. Feeling isolated and unprotected, a child may grow to develop a sense of hyper-independence not to meet their own needs in perpetuity but to eventually provide a life for themself in which others do. They may decide to sacrifice what bit of intimacy and approval they can get in order to pursue a grander state of admiration and/or comfort, which they often believe they’re owed for all of their suffering. Life has to pay the piper, especially for all of their toil. Ironically, the mindset itself is a contradiction, albeit largely unconscious: On the one hand, the perfectionist believes their diligence should result in this utopian existence (e.g., conditional love) and, on the other, believes they were owed it in childhood (e.g., unconditional love). The tragedy is that the perfectionist doesn’t generally know what they believe about themselves, the world, and, most importantly, love—“Is it earned or just given?”—ultimately hoping to validate their favored beliefs and discover existential truths at the end of their pursuits.

Perfectionistic parents may raise children to become surrogate parents to them, expecting to mold them into the preferred versions of their own parents. They may hold the belief that “my child will love me the way my mother/father couldn’t.” So, that kid is then held to an impossible standard, which the parent can justify with the argument that they’ve earned it. Feeling immense pressure to feel extraordinary gratitude and perform, the child of perfectionism may then avoid the perfectionistic parent, accepting the obvious impossibility of ever making up for the perfectionist’s poor upbringing, existential fairness being outside of the scope of their extremely limited power. In this respect, the perfectionist becomes god-like in order to create a god-like figure, who, in turn, hopefully becomes a god to them: “You can now become everything I ever needed.”

In romantic relationships, the perfectionist becomes the “perfect partner,” expecting the same in turn. There is no good for goodness’ sake, as each action is inspired by a hidden agenda. The partner tends to feel manipulated and wonders how much of their guilt is legitimate while trying to recall what exactly they signed up for. (They may consider if they’re being unfair because so much has been done for them, both by the perfectionist and others, and since they’ve lived the sort of life the perfectionist was cheated out of.)

Here, the perfectionist, to appropriate advice from existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom, “needs to give up hope for a better past.” And, we may add, to give up hope of discovering "why them?" as opposed to another. The added layer to this is the deep sense of specialness the perfectionist feels from being mistreated as a child, overcoming it mostly on their own (or at least that’s the belief), being disciplined enough to create their own form of justice (i.e., the life perfectly suiting them), and the optimism of their dogged pursuit. Giving up hope for a better past, outside of the obvious, also means giving up hope of someday proving you’re special and giving up hope of finding an explanation of your past that has you at its center, as though suffering is always founded on a benevolent (or at least sensical) grander plan. Thankfully, Yalom didn’t argue that one should give up hope for a better future, but, in this respect, one would have to decide to emotionally disconnect past and future, and to discontinue trying to create some profoundly unifying story. The perfectionist would have to see their prospects for love and success with clear eyes and try to make peace with the randomness and chaos of their past. Sometimes, doing so helps simply because that sort of narrative doesn’t fit the greater harmony and joy of one’s present and even future, which don’t necessarily need the past to make perfect sense.

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