Ellen Hendriksen
speaker
55 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Ellen Hendriksen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The word perfectionism is actually a misnomer. Instead of striving to be perfect, it's really about never feeling good enough, especially in the context of an ever more competitive culture. It makes sense that we respond with the feeling that we're not good enough.
Thank you so much for having me.
Oh, for sure. Yeah. So I am a clinical psychologist. I work at an anxiety specialty center. And I have to say that the majority of my clients who come into the center have perfectionism at the center of their challenges. But nobody has ever come in and said, Ellen, I'm a perfectionist. I need everything to be perfect. Instead, people say things like, I feel like I'm failing.
I feel like I'm falling behind. I have a million things on my plate and I'm not doing any of them well. And I think that's because the word perfectionism is actually a misnomer. That instead of striving to be perfect... It's really about never feeling good enough.
And that, especially in the context of 2025, a demanding, ever more competitive, ratings-oriented, optimization-focused culture, it makes sense that we respond with the feeling that we're not good enough.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the definition of perfectionism is the tendency to demand of oneself a level of performance higher than is required for the situation. And I really feel like that definition is sort of like one of those optical illusions where if you look at it one way, you see one thing. If you look at it the other way, you see another thing.
It's like the bunny and the duck or the young lady and the old lady. Because there is healthy perfectionism, like the tendency to demand of oneself a level of performance higher than is required for the situation can be really great. That's when we hit it out of the park. That makes the world go round. That's when we strive for excellence. We do good work for the work's sake.
We set high standards. We care deeply. Please keep doing that. Those are all amazing things. But where it can go. tip over into unhealthy perfectionism and to clinical perfectionism is when we start to get into two things, when that demanding of oneself a level of performance higher than is required turns into something called over-evaluation, which was a new term for me.
And what that means is when we start to conflate our performance and our character. Essentially, when I did good means I am good, or I did bad means I am bad. And we can over-evaluate anything. So think of the striver student who derives their value from their grades, or the employee who sees their quarterly evaluation as a referendum, not just on their work, but their character.
The musician who's only as good as their last performance, the athlete who's only as good as their last game. We can really over-evaluate anything, like how healthy we ate today, whether or not we were awkward at the holiday party. It's wherever we think we have to perform as superbly as possible. to be sufficient as a person. So that's one of the big pillars. And the other is self-criticism.
And that needs no definition, but in clinical perfectionism, it's particularly harsh.
Yeah, absolutely. That's the $64,000 question. So this is... kind of at the edge of science, but it's starting to look like perfectionism, even though it in itself is not a disorder. It's more like a cross-cutting part of other disorders. You know, perfectionism is part of social anxiety, eating disorders, depression, like lots of OCD, lots of things.
And so even though it's not diagnosable in and of itself, it's definitely heritable. It's genetic. So it can come from within, from our own DNA. It can also come from the way we were raised. So there's some research just showing likelihood of if we were raised in a family where love is sort of contingent upon performance, where love and pride get confused.
If we were raised with a sort of snowplow or helicopter type of family, That can increase the likelihood that we come out perfectionistic. If we were raised in sort of a chaotic, unstable family where maybe there was some substance abuse, chronic illness that, again, made that family unstable, it's likely that we might come out feeling like we need to overcompensate for something.
But I think this is the most interesting thing. It can also come from the culture all around us. The researchers, doctors Thomas Kern and Andrew Hill looked at 27 years worth of data and found that perfectionism is on the rise. And I found it particularly fascinating that the inflection point was 2005. That's when it really started to increase like a rocket launch.
And I think it's no coincidence that that's when Facebook came out. So with the rise of social media, and again, this ever more demanding ratings-oriented consumeristic capitalistic culture, it makes sense that we respond by feeling like we're not good enough.
Sure. No, I think that's a really, really important point. Because absolutely, like the problem with perfectionism is not the high standards. We can aim for and get straight A's. Those high standards are fantastic. They do get us far in life. Performing really well at work. Yes, absolutely. That's going to get us some admiration, respect. maybe fast track or promotion.
And that's why I think that the advice around perfectionism is a little bit misguided because certainly, you know, I identify as having some perfectionism. And sometimes I've been told, Ellen, you need to stop when things are good enough, or, you know, you really should lower your standards, right?
But like we talked about, when there is a little bit of over-evaluation happening, when we're conflating ourselves with our performance, good enough doesn't resonate when it's something from which we derive our value. We're not going to settle for what we consider good enough, like subpar or mediocre performance, because that would mean that we're subpar or mediocre.
So again, the problem with unhealthy perfectionism, it's not the high standards, it's that over-evaluation.
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