Up: [[Compulsion]] Created: 2025-07-15 In my books and speaking, I’d preach about changing just one thing and solidifying it before moving on blah, blah, blah. I talked about this because I knew intellectually, having done the research, that incremental change is what works for most people. The problem was, I didn’t consider myself “most people.” What I wanted, always, was transformational, everything is suddenly and massively different, change. If you remember the old tv sitcom *WKRP in Cincinnati*, I wanted to be DJ Johnny Fever, nodding sagely at conventional wisdom about tiny programming changes just before he strides into the sound booth, rips the elevator muzak off the turntable, spins some heavy metal and announces, “All right fellow babies. Let’s get down!” I honestly thought this desire for huge, transformational change had nothing to do with healing and was just a quirk of my personality. Until I read this… > [!Orbit] Katherine Morgan Schafler in *The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control* > Perfectionists do not enjoy focusing on healing because healing is not a prescriptive endeavour. We much prefer that one big thing be very wrong with us (a cluster of many medium- or small-sized impairments is also fine) so that we can systematically annihilate all of our inadequacies at once and move forward with a perfect reset. (p. 150) Ouch. Schafler, and my analyst Helen, occasionally employ a “take no prisoners” approach. It’s remarkably effective. That perfect reset that Schafler mentions is accompanied by a yearning for emotional perfection, meaning that we want to be able to *feel a specific way to a specific degree in a specific circumstance.* (p.99) The quest for that impossibility keeps me happily engaged in another of my passions — a project. I *love* thirty-day plans, five simple steps, the ten principles of x. If this describes you too, get ready. Here comes Schafler with the knockout punch. > [!Orbit] Katherine Morgan Schafler in *The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control* > All you need to do is follow exacting advice about how to best live your life from someone who’s not you and who doesn’t know you. Follow the specific advice perfectly, and when you mess up (because plans like that are impossible) make sure to blame yourself and not the approach. Always blame yourself — that way you can stay in control, because if everything is your fault, you can fix it all when you finally get your shit together and become perfect. (p. 150) Schafler stays strong. There’s no way she’s going to feed my desire for a six step plan. Instead, she says, [[How to Heal a Perfectionist]] comes down to one simple process that is not glamorous, has no instructions, and never ends.