The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control Quotes

“Your memories of perfect moments are memories of moments in which you were most present.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“When you ruminate, you mistake replay for reflection. When you catastrophize, you mistake worrying for preparation.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“Energy management beats time management.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“Because balance doesn't exist, you're either operating under or over your energetic equilibrium. In other words, you're in the realm of being either underwhelmed or overwhelmed. Perfectionists reliably choose to operate over their equilibriums. For perfectionists, the risk of being underwhelmed is much scarier than the risk of being overwhelmed.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“You live with an attachment to a future outcome that generates chronic excess anxiety and you call that anxiety "hope.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“Maybe you are and maybe you aren't. A lot of perfectionists think they're driven by success when what they're really driven by is the avoidance of failure-two very different animals.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“For so long, I honestly believed that whatever I accomplished didn't count if I had to ask for help along the way. I used to never ask for help, for anything from anyone.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“The therapist version of "Live laugh love," is "Feelings aren't facts.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“You still love planning, you still love organizing, you still love making it beautiful-but you do it because you want to, not because everything will fall apart if you don't. You operate from a well of desire, not a pit of desperation. Your life may or may not look the same on the outside, but on the inside, much has changed. You stop working to curate a programmed experience. You allow yourself open access to all that you think and feel. You allow yourself to be free.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“You will never experience the future; you’re always and only in the present moment. If you’re waiting on the future to feel joy, you will never feel joy.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“Clients come to acknowledge that their desire was never to be perfect; it was only to be loved. To simply be seen, accepted, and embraced without conditions is what the child, who is now an adult, has been obsessed with-not perfect.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“A part of her wanted to stop pushing herself, stop feeling compelled to rise to the occasion of being her best self. She wanted to figure out how to be her average self without feeling like a loser.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“You don’t heal by changing who you are; you heal by learning how to be yourself in the world.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“It was never the terrible things that happened to you that made you stronger; it was the resiliency-building skills you engaged to process the terrible things. What doesn’t kill you can make you stronger, but only if you feel your feelings, process your experience (i.e., figure out what the experience means to you), and engage the protective factors around you—mainly, the power of connection.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“Humans have a special talent for complicating simplicity. We make a spectacle out of simple.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“A restored perfectionist understands that it's not that you long for some external thing or for yourself to be perfect, it's that you long to feel whole and to help others feel whole.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“Where you worry you may be planting a seed, a large tree has already grown. -Dr. Stacey Freedenthal”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“Joy holds tremendous power. It is impossible to live joyfully without your joy benefiting the world.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“Procrastinator perfectionists who aren’t managing their perfectionism become self-loathing and critical. Not just self-critical, other-critical; they’re disparaging towards others who aren’t constrained by the same tendencies. Procrastinator perfectionists might publicly or privately declare all the ways in which they could’ve done X so much better—thrown the party, written the book, built the house, organized the conference, cooked the meal. And maybe they’re right. They probably could’ve done it better if they had tried, but they didn’t allow themselves to take the risk of trying. This haunts them.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“Interestingly (read: predictably), the push to curb perfectionism and be “perfectly imperfect” is directed towards women. Have you ever heard a man refer to himself as a “recovering perfectionist”? When Steve Jobs or Gordon Ramsay or James Cameron demand perfection, they’re exalted as geniuses in their respective fields. Where are the celebrated female perfectionists?”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“Adaptive perfectionists are connected to their self-worth. When you know you’re already whole and complete (i.e., perfect) as you are, you’re operating from a mindset of abundance. You already have what you need, and you feel secure. For adaptive perfectionists, striving towards an ideal is a celebratory expression of that security. Maladaptive perfectionists do not feel whole or secure. They feel broken, and they operate from a mindset of deficit. Their striving is driven by the need to compensate, to fix what’s broken, and to try to offer substitutes for or try to hide what’s missing.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“When you know success is just a matter of trial and error, you don’t mind the trial and you don’t mind the error. Not only do you not mind working on the puzzle; you also extract enjoyment from working on the puzzle.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“Art is designed to be experiential. Any description of an artwork is an immediate reduction of an artwork; that’s what makes it art. Grief is the same way. Nobody fully understands art or grief because neither allows for perfect closure.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“Everyone has perfectionistic tendencies about something. When those tendencies (the desire to bridge the gulf between an ideal and reality) present more often than not and are accompanied by the impulse to actively strive towards bridging that gulf, you can consider yourself a perfectionist.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“Parisian perfectionists want to be perfectly liked, an “achievement” other types of perfectionists don’t prize. Even when everything else is going exactly the way they’d choose, when a Parisian perfectionist is experiencing difficulty connecting to someone with whom they want to connect, it can all feel for naught.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“Sometimes you say a thought out loud to give it weight because it matters. Sometimes you say a thought out loud to let it go because it's trivial. Until you let the words hit the air, it can be difficult to tell which is which.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“For perfectionists struggling with emotional perfectionism, everything is timed and measured. They attempt to control their feelings like a volume knob, and not just the "bad" ones.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“When you understand that closure is a fantasy, you have all the closure you'll ever need.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“Lucky for you, the deepest, most powerful parts of who you are never abandon you. Whatever you did to numb out or downplay or otherwise mute the powerful energy inside you that you didn’t know what to do with, I did it, too. It’s okay; none of it worked. Thankfully, your perfectionism is still intact, and now you have a real solution to your problem.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“You know better than this, what’s going on?” or “You know better than this, what do you need that you’re not getting?”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power