01/21/2026
Perfectionism slips into ordinary days wearing the costume of virtue. It shows up early, stays late, cleans its tracks, and asks for praise only in private. The damage it does is quieter, harder to name, and often mistaken for character.
Anne Wilson Schaef named that damage with a bluntness that still startles. When she wrote Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much in the early nineties, she was writing into a moment when women were being told they could finally have everything, provided they managed it flawlessly. Schaef was a clinical psychologist, a speaker, and an Episcopal minister, shaped by the recovery movement and by feminist critiques of caretaking as a moral trap. Her work circled addiction, codependence, and the ways socially rewarded behaviors can still hollow a person out. The book’s audience was not abstract. It was overfunctioning women who mistook exhaustion for virtue and control for safety.
What makes her claim about perfectionism sting is the reversal. Abuse is something done by an external force, not something we inflict on ourselves. Yet perfectionism thrives on internalized authority. The rules are invisible, the punishments self-administered. No one needs to scold because the voice already lives inside, precise and unsparing. The standards keep shifting. The relief never arrives. Excellence would allow for rest. Perfectionism does not.
Psychologically, the habit feeds on fear dressed up as discipline. The fear of being ordinary. The fear of needing help. The fear that any looseness will expose a deeper failure. In that sense, perfectionism behaves less like ambition and more like compulsion. Schaef’s background in addiction studies mattered here. She saw how behaviors that look admirable on the surface can operate with the same rigidity and self-erasure as substances. The harm is normalized because the results often benefit institutions, families, and workplaces that quietly depend on someone else’s overextension.
Culturally, the idea has only grown more relevant. The contemporary workplace praises optimization and resilience while quietly penalizing limits. Even outside paid labor, standards multiply. Bodies must be maintained, homes curated, emotions managed, relationships improved. The language has changed since the nineties, but the underlying demand remains. Be better, but never be finished. Think of how often a task completed cleanly still feels inadequate. The email sent and then reread. The presentation delivered and then replayed. We know the moment when the room empties and the second guessing begins.
Literarily, Schaef’s sentence belongs to a lineage of women who resisted the moralization of self-denial. Audre Lorde argued that self-care was not indulgence but survival. Adrienne Rich wrote about the cost of internalized obedience. Even earlier, Virginia Woolf noticed how women learned to serve an ideal that required their disappearance. Schaef’s contribution was to use the language of harm without ornament, refusing to soften the claim. Calling it abuse removed the possibility that perfectionism was merely a personality quirk.
Schaef herself became a complicated figure later in life. Some of her public statements, particularly around vaccines and autism, drew justified criticism and distanced many readers from her work. Acknowledging that matters. Wisdom does not arrive as a complete package, and insight in one domain does not guarantee judgment in another. Still, the clarity of her observation about self-punishment stands apart from those later controversies. The sentence survives because it describes a pattern many recognize before they have words for it.
The hardest implication is not that perfectionism hurts, but that it can feel like love. It promises protection. It claims to keep chaos at bay. Letting go can feel reckless, even immoral. I’ve noticed how strange it feels to stop revising something that could be marginally better, to send it off and sit with the small thud of incompleteness. The room does not collapse. The world does not notice. The quiet that follows can be unsettling, but it is also clean.
Anne Wilson Schaef was not arguing for carelessness or lowered standards. She was arguing for an end to self-hostility disguised as devotion. The line between care and cruelty runs through intention and outcome. When effort becomes a way to deny rest, worth, or forgiveness, the effort has turned against the person making it. Naming that shift is not weakness. It is the first unpunished act.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
