One of ways a person must advance past perfectionism is to deal with and gradually become more and more vulnerable. Every good perfectionist knows that this is VERY scary. • Vulnerability involves allowing oneself to be open to feedback—both positive and negative from others.
• Vulnerability also involves real risk that a perfectionist will have to experience moments of fragility, weakness, and pain.
• Vulnerability means risking feeling trapped in a situation—either by circumstance, or emotion, or mental blocks.
• Vulnerability takes one through unknown waters of life on life’s terms.
• With vulnerability, one is able to look backwards and glean all lessons, compile their history, learn and become a much stronger individual!!
• Yet being vulnerable, even with one trusted ally, allows former perfectionist to slowly evolve: to slowly see themselves, their life, their history… and to be ok.
Some suggestions: * First you will need to enlist help of at least one outside person for accurate feedback. This can be a trusted friend, a pastor, chaplain, sponsor, or coach. You are to seek out someone that you can develop closeness to, someone that you feel safe with: someone that will verifiably love and support you while you take these risks in opening up.