You Must Give Up Hope for a Better Past

Key points

Perfectionists often obsess over creating a state of emotional security.

Perfectionists often use their relationships with others, especially loved ones, to make up for past traumas.

To give up hope for a better past means to unfetter one's present and future from it.

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 nec