I received the following response from Karen Olsen to the draft of a chapter she was reading on the Perfectionist Critic.

I am wondering if there is a slightly different sort of Perfectionist than those which you have developed in your chapter. After going through your exercises, I came to the conclusion that it is not so much that my critic is yelling at me and belittling me as it is that there is a fear of and a huge resistance to appearing to be, to exposing myself to be….. less than special and exceptional.

Remembering back to my childhood, I don’t remember not being able to get approval from either my parents or other adults in my life. What I remember is that I was always an exceptional student and that I felt special and that I became very attached to feeling special. “Feeling special” is probably entwined all through my sense of identity.

Reading this over, I am thinking, “Yikes, they are going to think that they have a narcissist on their hands.” But I guess if that were true, I wouldn’t have creative blocks (I am an architect and writer) and instead would think that everything I did was just ….about …..perfect.

Here is my reply to her: It sounds like you have a Perfectionist, but not a Perfectionist Critic. Our understanding is that Inner Critics are enforcers of certain ways of thinking and being in the world. It seems that you have a need to fit a Perfectionist way of being, which comes from your childhood, as you describe. However, you seem to mostly achieve this, although with some anxiety about it. Therefore, you don’t need to have a Critic part that tries to enforce this by attacking you. At least, that is how I read your description. What do you think?

Here is her reply: Expanding on what you said about “a need to fit a Perfectionist way of being,” it seems to me that maybe we perfectionist types whose goal is to keep our “good images” intact rather than trying to overcome any “bad images” from our childhoods don’t need the critic because through our perfectionism we are doing something which is absolutely essential to our well-being—protecting our sense of self. This would be similar to a child who is “the funny one” or “the athletic one” or “the pretty one” and learns to value themselves for those qualities for which they perceive other people value them. This image of yourself gets inside you early and powerfully.

As an adjunct to that, I have noticed that writing causes me much more anxiety than the architecture, and I have often wondered if that wasn’t because I didn’t “do art” as a child or adolescent so it wasn’t incorporated into the self image which I developed during my childhood. Instead  I came to architecture after I already had one BA (in political science) and have never felt as threatened, vulnerable, and in danger of exposure as I do with the writing.