Grief is a catch-22 for perfectionists

A decade ago, whenever I experienced a loss in my life, I was surprisingly emotional. My emotions were not surprising in proportion to how much I loved and cared about the person I lost. But surprising in the way I embraced and expressed these emotions, as someone who did not often do that openly.

As someone with perfectionist and intellectualizing tendencies, I only allowed myself to express emotions that seemed justified and explicable to others. I needed permission to feel my feelings, and without a good enough reason to feel that way, those feelings would be dismissed. By me.

In the absence of a good enough reason, the problem was, by logical default, me and my over-reaction; therefore, it was on me to get over it.

Society widely validates grief as a prompt for deep, heart-wrenching emotion. Grief is a universally recognized hardship across cultures worldwide. People, in fact, expect a strong emotional response to loss, and they support it without question. They do not have to know the person who passed or the circumstances under which they passed or anything about your relationship to be able to condone and understand the expression of intense sadness, anger, and despair.

As you could imagine, this was a huge relief for someone like me. Grief was the perfect umbrella under which I could fully experience the full range of my emotions without limitation, because I had an entirely justifiable, understandable reason to feel the way I felt. With this permission slip, I let it all out. It felt authentic and freeing. I could fall apart and still be perfect because I was grieving.

Months later, however, I noticed my permission slip had been taken away. I began to intuit a shift in others’ expectations of my experience. I had resumed my regular day-to-day life, and people expected my emotions to bounce back too. The same emotion I had three weeks after a loss might still arise months later, but the societal response and leeway I could expect to receive had changed. My justification for falling apart had lost its relational power, and I no longer felt as validated and safe expressing how I truly felt without being seen as overreacting or imperfect.

Here’s the thing: grief has no set path, and it is not something that goes away entirely with time. This means the emotional response of grief continues long after the social one ends. And that is both normal and important for healing.

Perfectionists might not always seek support for grief at the start, while society approves of their emotional response and friends and family create space for the messiness of grief. Often, perfectionists tend to struggle with grief later on, when they stop sharing their experience and quietly begin to ask the question, “Why can’t I move on?“.

I refer to this dynamic as a catch-22 because the perfectionist is pulled in seemingly opposite directions - a desire to be and appear “okay” and a desire to heal, which includes feeling the “not okay” feelings. The perfectionist type is highly skilled at putting their emotions aside and getting the work in front of them done effectively and efficiently. And when that does not work in the face of grief, it can leave them feeling lost and helpless.

Therapy offers those with perfectionist tendencies permission to continue to engage with the messiness of grief without worrying about justification or perception. It provides a safe opportunity to take a break from the performance of keeping it all together and honor the ups and downs of grief on the path to healing.