Up: [[Compulsion]] Created: 2025-07-10 Updated: 2025-07-11 An email landed in my inbox this morning. From the New York Jungian group, Jung on the Hudson, the email was a reminder of an upcoming weeklong online symposium titled “The Pitfalls of Perfectionism.” Fortunately, the expense of the event meant I didn’t register when the first notification came out months ago. Back then I was convinced that my perfectionism was a flaw that needed to be fixed. Now, having read Katherine Morgan Schafler’s wonderful book, *The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control*, I understand that [[Perfectionism]] is on a spectrum. Collectively, we focus exclusively on the negative pole of maladaptive perfectionism and ignore the positive pole of adaptive perfectionism. > [!Orbit] Katherine Morgan Schafler urges, > Investing in a pathologized version of who you are is a profoundly unnecessary use of your energy. It’s also an excuse for you to avoid healing. (p. xviii) Her second sentence got me wondering. Is adaptive perfectionism actually good for you, or just not as bad for you as maladaptive perfectionism? Only a few researchers are studying perfectionism. There’s no single agreed definition of the construct; sample sizes are small; it’s difficult to come up with effective ways to study it, and there’s the societal perception that it’s uniformly bad for us. But even with all of that being true, the research is pointing in some interesting and positive directions. ### Adaptive Compared to Maladaptive This is the low hanging fruit, obvious from looking at the chart in the [[Perfectionism]] note. In contrast to maladaptive perfectionism, adaptive perfectionism offers these benefits: - higher self-regard - higher levels of work engagement and psychological well-being - lower levels of perceived personal failure - taking a problem-focused and solution-oriented approach to stress, instead of ruminating or avoiding conflict - higher levels of motivation to achieve goals - less worry and more optimism when thinking about future performance Again, nice, but are we just playing with different degrees of dysfunction here? ### Adaptive Perfectionism and Flow This finding excites me. Adaptive perfectionism is *a significant predictor of encountering ‘flow’ states, moments of intense yet effortless engagement with a task or goal.* Schafler doesn’t elaborate, but as a long time student of [[Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi]]’s work on [[Flow]], it makes sense to me that the adaptive perfectionist, bringing her or his considerable skills to the challenge of closing the gap between real and ideal in some specific endeavour, would encounter flow states more often than others. ### Adaptive Perfectionists Compared to Everyone Else It’s looking like adaptive perfectionists might have home court advantage in more than frequency of achieving flow states. Researchers Joachim Stoeber and Kathleen Otto did groundbreaking work in comparing adaptive perfectionists not just to maladaptive perfectionists, but to a general population of non-perfectionists. Among the three groups, adaptive perfectionists demonstrated - highest levels of self-esteem and cooperation - lower levels of procrastination, defensiveness, and interpersonal problems - fewer somatic complaints Other small studies of all three groups show adaptive perfectionists - report the highest levels of meaning, subjective happiness, and life satisfaction - are least self-critical - are most interested in working with others - have lowest levels of anxiety and depression. Further research shows adaptive perfectionism can serve as a protective factor against anxiety and depression.