It’s often said that we can’t love others until we love ourselves first. While this lesson fails to account for a basic human need, needing others to help us understand and appreciate ourselves, it’s true on another level — ultimately, making sense of the data and forming an identity from it is our responsibility. While we should seriously consider others’ perspectives, they can’t instill self-esteem in us. This reality clashes with perfectionism, a state defined by hyper-independence, hyper-dependence, exaggeration, an extremely poor character assessment, and an equally poor assessment of character. At once, perfectionists seek approval and/or admiration while always rejecting it because it fails to match their self-concepts. So, perfectionism is also defined by confusion, the inability to know who to trust.

So, what then comes first, the self-image or praise? With a chicken-or-the-egg type question as the foundation, the perfectionist fluctuates between rejecting praise (while overworking to magically offset their tainted essence) and pining for it, hoping for an air-tight argument that silences the brutal inner-chatter. But, there’s often no resolution and no understanding of what self-love actually means, no sense of what one needs or even wants from themself or another. Therefore, those around perfectionists often don’t know how to respond to

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