Mallary Tenore Tarpley was 11 years old when her mother died of metastatic breast cancer. She went to school the very next day. “I did what I knew how to do best, which was to pretend that I was OK and to put on a happy face,” she recalls.
She also read the eulogy at her mother’s funeral — without crying. “I felt like I had to be perfect at grieving.”
In her health class at the time, Tarpley was learning about “good foods” and “bad foods.” She began to equate eating bad foods with being bad and eating good foods with being good. This black-and-white framework gave her something she could control in the wake of her mother’s death.
“I couldn’t control what happened to her body, but I could regulate what I put in mine,” Tarpley, a journalism professor in the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin, writes in Slip: Life in the Middle of Eating-Disorder Recovery.
At 13, she was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa.
The link between perfectionism and disordered eating has been well studied. A 2023 meta-analysis found that “both perfectionistic strivings and perfectionistic concerns have significant associations with eating disorders.” And a cross-sectional study published in 2024 found a link between perfectionism and both orthorexia nervosa and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The study authors suggest that treating perfectionism may help people recovering from orthorexia.
After five hospitalizations and a 17-month stay in a long-term residential treatment facility, Tarpley was determined to make a full recovery. She was beginning to grieve her mother’s death and starting to work through her eating disorder.
“I left in a much better place,” she says. Yet she also left wanting to achieve an A plus in healing. “When I was sick, I wanted to be the perfect anorexic, and when I left treatment, I wanted to be the poster child for full recovery.” Anything less was unacceptable.
Perfectionism Defined
Perfectionism is a pernicious personality style that results from a defective sense of self, says Paul Hewitt, PhD, a clinical psychologist and a leading expert on perfectionism. On a fundamental level, someone with perfectionism feels they are not good enough; they’re concerned they don’t belong. They learned early in life that the way to deal with those feelings is to be perfect, he adds. Achieving perfection is the only way they’ll feel worthy, acceptable, and loved.
In other words, perfectionism serves a purpose. It is an attempt at self-protection from the crushing disappointment of rejection or failure.
But this is not healthy, Hewitt emphasizes. “Striving for excellence, or mastery, is a good thing,” he notes. “Those are positive things, and that’s not what perfectionism is.”
While the effort involved in healthy striving may feel hopeful, enjoyable, and inviting, the pursuit of perfection typically feels obligatory, discouraging, and unending. That’s partly because, rather than passion or excitement, perfectionism is rooted in fear. Failure is not an option.
Many clinicians and scholars use the terms “maladaptive” and “adaptive” when discussing perfectionism. Maladaptive perfectionism describes the point at which idealistic pursuit becomes a fixation that harms a person’s mental health. Adaptive perfectionism, on the other hand, is described as a healthy sense of perfectionism that helps a person strive for excellence and maintain high personal standards.
Hewitt wholeheartedly disagrees with this framework. He argues that perfectionism does not exist on a spectrum; it is by nature an unhealthy preoccupation.
Hewitt’s longtime collaborator, Gordon Flett, PhD, a retired professor in the Department of Psychology at York University, agrees. “Perfectionists can be incredibly accomplished people, yet they don’t enjoy the success because they’re focused on what they didn’t get right, as opposed to what they did,” he says. He refers to this as the deficit model of thinking.
Flett mentions his wife — “a perfectionist” — as an example: “If I come home from the grocery store with 40 items, she’ll say, ‘What is this? This is not on my list,’ or ‘You forgot this,’ and I’m going, ‘What about the 39 things that I got right?’”
The Roots of Perfectionism
Tarpley believes she was born with a perfectionist temperament. But, she adds, “My mother really wanted me to excel academically, and so, often in my younger years, I was trying to please her.”
After her mother passed, Tarpley thought that she could keep her close by refusing to grow. That was when the anorexia started.
This fits with Hewitt’s explanation of perfectionism’s genesis. “Personalities develop in response to the environment an individual is in,” he says. It’s natural to desire validation from, and community with, others. “When those needs are thwarted, people can learn to be perfectionistic in order to meet those needs.”
As with people who struggle with other problematic ways of being in the world, “perfectionists are driven more by safety than happiness,” Hewitt says.
Antidotes to Perfectionism
People with perfectionism tend to operate with an all-or-nothing mindset, a common cognitive distortion associated with depression and anxiety. Tarpley is deeply familiar with this way of thinking.
After leaving treatment, she took an absolutist approach to recovery. This worked for a couple of years, until she relapsed in college. With perfection no longer an option, Tarpley developed a secret pattern of binge eating and food restriction that would last a decade. Although she maintained a calm façade, she felt ashamed. She was failing at both recovery and anorexia.
Then she started working at a nonprofit focused on using restorative narratives — stories of people and communities making meaningful progress in the aftermath of illness, trauma, or tragedy — to generate positive change. Tarpley realized that she could apply this type of framework to her own recovery. She began rewriting her inner recovery narrative, breaking out of the all-or-nothing mindset she’d been trapped in for so long.
Rather than looking at slips as failures invalidating her progress, she tried to see them as a normal part of the recovery process. A slip didn’t mean that she’d have to start over; it was an invitation to return to her inner work and an opportunity for growth. She decided to see herself as someone who lived in what she called “the middle place” — the space between sickness and full recovery.
“In this space, I can continue to move forward but also recognize that slips exist,” Tarpley explains. “That framework really helped me to get out of that binge-restrict cycle and finally make meaningful progress.”
It also enabled her to be more authentic. Until then, she was so ashamed of her slips that she covered them up and told people she was fully recovered.
Tarpley now prefers the term “perfectionistic” to perfectionist. While writing Slip, she surveyed over 700 people with eating disorders around the world; 85 percent of them said they could identify with this middle place. “Thinking in black-and-white terms — you’re either sick or fully recovered — can make people feel judged or worse,” she writes. “We should be able to embrace imperfections in recovery and explore these gray spaces.”
Finding the Middle Place
Perfectionism is a trait people typically develop early in life, but you can loosen its hold at any age. The following strategies can help you find the middle place.
Try therapy.
As a clinician, Hewitt has seen many perfectionists move away from their ingrained behavior patterns and toward happier lives through psychotherapy. Interestingly, patients often come to him seeking help for another issue, such as anxiety, depression, isolation, or a perceived failure. In fact, he and his patients don’t talk about perfectionism much at all in treatment — but rather about what lies under the surface of perfectionism.
“If you have a sore knee and you go to the emergency room,” Hewitt says, “they’re not just going to give you painkillers — hopefully.” They’re going to try to figure out what’s causing the pain and then treat the whole problem.
He says the same thing applies to perfectionism. “There’s a reason for the behavior,” and it’s often related to unmet needs. If you can identify the reason and find better ways to meet those needs, the perfectionism dissipates.
Talk with someone you trust.
Tarpley met her future husband around the time she began working with restorative narratives. She’d begun thinking about reframing her narrative but still hadn’t told anyone about her slips — everyone believed she was fully recovered.
Hiding parts of yourself is common among perfectionists, Flett says. “They tend to be low in self-compassion and low in acceptance of self and others.”
Sharing your struggles can reduce their power over your consciousness. A trusted friend or family member can help you break out of negative thought patterns and remind you that you’re loved just as you are.
These tendencies can make it difficult to be vulnerable around people. But Tarpley felt safe with her future husband. She also knew that she’d need to be completely truthful with him about her struggles for their relationship to be rooted in honesty. So she told him the truth about her recovery. And when he didn’t judge her but loved her all the same, she found that she was able to open up to others as well.
Sharing your struggles can reduce their power over your consciousness. A trusted friend or family member can help you break out of negative thought patterns and remind you that you’re loved just as you are.
Practice self-compassion.
It’s critical to address how you react when things aren’t perfect, says Flett. For example, people with perfectionistic reactivity may respond to a mistake with anger, frustration, or anxiety that feels out of proportion to the circumstances. He suggests that one way to counter this response is to “learn to be more self-compassionate and more self-accepting, as well as more compassionate.”
Practicing self-compassion helps those with perfectionism move toward the middle place, where mistakes can be seen as growth opportunities rather than as failures or character flaws.
“Self-compassion means you are kind and understanding when confronted with your failings — after all, [whoever] said you were supposed to be perfect?”
A good way to build self-compassion is through practices recommended by Kristin Neff, PhD, an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. “Self-compassion means you are kind and understanding when confronted with your failings — after all, [whoever] said you were supposed to be perfect?” Neff writes.
Embrace mistakes.
Bonnie Zucker, PsyD, a psychologist who specializes in the treatment of anxiety disorders and OCD, understands the value of learning to tolerate the discomfort that comes with making a mistake.
On the Speaking of Psychology podcast, Zucker describes advising a young patient with signs of perfectionism to deliberately turn in a homework assignment late, which would automatically lower the assignment grade.
The straight-A student had to step outside of her comfort zone, Zucker explains. While it may have been uncomfortable for her to fall short of expectations, the patient learned it wasn’t the end of the world. Getting a B on an assignment wasn’t going to make anyone like her less or make her any less happy.
Experiences like this can help people learn to tolerate discomfort and move closer to the middle place. “You have to actually experience it differently in order to think differently about it,” Zucker notes.
To help foster an attitude of healthy striving in young kids, she advises parents to openly accept their own mistakes in front of their children. “When parents say, ‘I messed up’ or ‘I didn’t handle that well,’ they’re modeling that it’s OK to make mistakes.”
She suggests saying things to children like, “We don’t need to be perfect” and telling them that no matter what, they are worthy of love.
This Post Has 0 Comments