I’ve wrestled with the questions of identity my entire life. What makes someone who they are? What makes them worthy of some label? When can someone call themselves a writer or a therapist, for instance? When can they feel secure in their contributions and feel as though their life mattered? Does one need to be the best to silence their persistent self-doubt? To perfectionists, much emphasis is placed on their decisions and their perceived talents because they define the individual. And, they look to their outcomes to judge them. While this is normal to a degree, since all of us need validation to learn about ourselves, perfectionists find themselves fixated on the pursuit of emotional security, hence their obsession with identity.

Here, the question of “Who am I?” is closely associated with “Am I allowed to be here?” or, even deeper, “Am I allowed to exist?” And the latter are closely associated with a strong need for evidence, which is, of course, based on the beliefs that one can and should always and concretely justify one's place in the world. In their hypercompetitive mind, the perfectionist divides up the world into the worthy and the unworthy, the useful and the useless. It can’t be that people deserve to exist or, a step further, deserve love because they do; to the perfectionist, everything has to be earned. A perfectionist may say, “Even though they won’t admit it,........

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