It’s often said that we can’t love others until we love ourselves first. While this lesson fails to account for a basic human need, needing others to help us understand and appreciate ourselves, it’s true on another level — ultimately, making sense of the data and forming an identity from it is our responsibility. While we should seriously consider others’ perspectives, they can’t instill self-esteem in us. This reality clashes with perfectionism, a state defined by hyper-independence, hyper-dependence, exaggeration, an extremely poor character assessment, and an equally poor assessment of character. At once, perfectionists seek approval and/or admiration while always rejecting it because it fails to match their self-concepts. So, perfectionism is also defined by confusion, the inability to know who to trust.

So, what then comes first, the self-image or praise? With a chicken-or-the-egg type question as the foundation, the perfectionist fluctuates between rejecting praise (while overworking to magically offset their tainted essence) and pining for it, hoping for an air-tight argument that silences the brutal inner-chatter. But, there’s often no resolution and no understanding of what self-love actually means, no sense of what one needs or even wants from themself or another. Therefore, those around perfectionists often don’t know how to respond to self-loathing, erring on the side of caution and offering a significant amount of sympathy. Problematically, partners and friends who tend to personalize fail to realize that they can’t solely be responsible for changing anyone else’s mind; we don’t have that capability on our own.

Writing this, I’m reminded of a scene in the film, To Hell and Back, about the singer Meat Loaf. After reaching critical acclaim in the form of a Grammy nomination, he’s still deeply unhappy, asking his wife, Leslie Aday, “Why do they keep knocking me down? They make me feel like I’m still just that fat kid, never gonna amount to anything.” In response, she notes that she and their children never thought of him that way, which he discounts by telling her that they’re family. In the film’s pivotal moment, feeling stirred, she subsequently challenges him, “Oh, and that’s not enough for you?!” Going on, she says, “So, what is? Because if you’re trying to please the whole world, honey, it will never be enough. Open your eyes, Meat; you have gotten more right in your life than most people dream of; you just have to let yourself see it.”

It’s one of the best scenes I’ve seen in any film dealing with perfectionism. Meat was a notorious perfectionist, frequently pushing others away through his inability to like much of anything he made — he was rarely able to conceal his anger about his performances. But Leslie knew what he needed, all without any formal training in clinical psychology. In the end, it was up to him; he had to find a way to make sense of conflicting data. On the one hand, his family, friends, fans, and some music executives clearly loved him. On the other hand, he was heavily bullied as a child for his weight and heavily scrutinized as an adult, for both his music and personal life. Meat sought perfect harmony, believing that if he worked hard enough, eventually everyone would realize his talent and, therefore, his value. As long as there was any doubt, his inner critic easily silenced praise; it was all or nothing.

Leslie knew it was a battle she could never win on her own. Likely having tried to reassure him repeatedly, at some point, she acknowledged she needed his help; it was up to him to integrate her insights and form his own conclusions about them. By asking, “What is?” she effectively indicated that it was his responsibility to seriously consider the bar he set for himself. What did it mean? Why that standard as opposed to another? Was it realistic? Am I asking for too much? And was it there as a mere placeholder, used as a way of evading responsibility (i.e., if your standard for liking yourself is impossibly high, others inevitably take it upon themselves to try to make you love yourself, creating an unending loop of self-loathing and reassurance)? Her response was the perfect (no pun intended) mixture of sympathy and tough love, as well as a request for thoughtfulness (Meat was extremely impulsive).

Many of our perfectionistic patients struggle with rejection, tending to personalize it. So, they struggle with making sense of a past full of it, especially during a time when everything felt like a direct reflection. This is, in large part, why many continue to strongly need everyone to like them; otherwise, their lives don’t seem to make sense. Perfectionists, due to an extremely poor self-concept, struggle with understanding how any sort of vitriol directed at them can betray an underlying sense of jealousy or, at least, a need for superiority. To them, everything related to them has to be about them and, in general, they tend to be fairly literal.

Their characters make convincing them otherwise extremely difficult, but not impossible, as long as they remain open to being convinced. Returning to the film, if Meat at least accepted the validity of both perspectives, his and hers, doing so wouldn’t have offset his, but it could have mitigated it. Sometimes, knowing and believing that people we admire, even if it’s a few, think well of us, while disagreeing of course, can afford us the strength to continue.

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