Perfectionism Up Close: How to Support Without Making It Worse

When someone close to you feels that everything must always be perfect, the natural instinct is to pour on support: advise, explain, reassure, solve things on their behalf. Dr. Saulitis warns that this instinct is precisely the trap.

Overfeeding the Pattern

"We started feeding, feeding, feeding, feeding — and then it turned out you shouldn't feed like that, or it grows that way." The doctor uses this image to describe how excessive help cements the problem rather than dissolving it. The more loved ones absorb the person's anxiety — double-checking for them, softening demands, making excuses — the more entrenched the dependence on those "props" becomes.

Perfectionism Is a Programme, Not a Personality Trait

Dr. Saulitis treats perfectionism as a form of anxiety, close to compulsive thinking: a rigid internal programme that fires automatically — "running like autopilot." Loved ones need to grasp this: the person is not being difficult or unreasonable; they are in the grip of learned, conditioned responses. That understanding shifts the tone of conversation from "you're too demanding" to "I can see how hard this is for you right now."

What Actually Helps

The doctor singles out work with inner dialogues — the ability to notice a thought without fusing with it: "if you can already track a thought, it means you are not the thought." Loved ones can support exactly this: instead of arguing with the content of anxious beliefs ("you won't fail"), gently help the person *observe* those beliefs from a distance — by asking questions rather than providing answers.

How Not to Break Yourself

A loved one's reaction to someone else's perfectionism often turns reactive — irritation, an urge to "fix" things, or complete surrender. Dr. Saulitis notes: "reactive thinking operates at a lower level, and we simply cannot respond correctly from there." Pausing and checking your own state before you reply is not indifference — it is the very condition that makes genuine support possible at all.