(photo: Al Shahed Press, 2025)
My spiritual director was a priest in his elder years who had “seen it all, done it all.” During one of our meetings, he commented, “I have heard confessions – thousands of them, maybe more, who knows how many? In all of that time what I saw was that I could offer people God’s forgiveness and absolution – no problem – but so often the problem was that people just would not forgive themselves. That was the bigger challenge: getting people to accept God’s forgiveness and to forgive themselves.” What I understood from our conversation was that perfectionism can be a real problem for a person’s well-being, in both its mental and spiritual dimensions. We can sometimes hold ourselves to such high personal standards that even God’s forgiveness is not enough for us. We can even be so merciless on ourselves as to think to ourselves, “God has forgiven me my shortcomings and failures, but God does not matter. I cannot and will not forgive myself.” That is a special kind of merciless perfectionism, and it can utterly destroy us.
Perfectionism is often praised in the world of business as a kind of personal integrity in the quest for designing and delivering the absolute best products and services. But on the personal level, perfectionism can be a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, there is virtue in striving to do the best that you can do when you are doing something that is good. On the other hand, perfectionism can be the cause of being overly self-critical, perceiving yourself as a failure, anxiety and depression. Newly available research findings from Gen Li and Frank Fincham (2025) in a paper entitled Perfectionism and Depression: The Roles of Shame, Rumination, and Self-Forgiveness, suggests that the difference between perfectionism as a virtue and a blessing, and a perfectionism of self-condemnation and depression, relies upon self-forgiveness.
Li and Fincham define perfectionism as “a personality trait characterized by striving for flawlessness, setting high personal standards, and engaging in critical self-evaluation.” The authors note previous research findings that as much as perfectionism promotes motivation for achievement and success, the excessive standards and persistent concerns more often result in adverse outcomes for the perfectionist. Some research has suggested that perfectionism is so often associated with depression that perfectionism is just not worth it. Li and Fincham define a few of the adverse outcomes associated with this kind of maladaptive perfectionism:
- Perfectionistic Concerns — worries about mistakes and failure, fear of disapproval.
- Shame — a self-conscious emotion that emerges when individuals perceive themselves as violating social norms, personal values or expectations.
- Rumination — a repetitive passive focus on one’s distress, particulularly on the causes, consequences, and subjective experiences of negative emotions.
However, there is also adaptive perfectionism in which the striving for excellence happens with maintained psychological flexibility and a stable sense of self-worth. Previous research has suggested that healthy perfectionists have lower perfectionistic concerns, and in fact display higher strivings for excellence than their maladaptive perfectionist counterparts.
Li and Fincham studied whether self-forgiveness is a critical factor in the difference between adaptive and maladaptive perfectionsim. They defined self-forgivness as, “a motivational shift from self-condemnation toward more compassionate and constructive self-attitudes following a transgression,” and posed the possibility that self-forgiveness may buffer the maladaptive effects of perfectionism by reducing self-condemnation and helping restore emotional balance.
Using a very large sample of study participants, Li and Fincham observed that the results of their study confirm previous research findings that shame and rumination have mediating effects between perfectionism and symptoms of depression — the more rumination and shame resulting from perfectionism, the more likely are symptoms of depression. Importantly, Li and Fincham observed:
When perfectionistic individuals fail to meet their own standards or those imposed by others, they tend to interpret such failures as personal inadequacies rather than situational shortcomings, leading to shame, a negative self-conscious emotion characterized by negative self-evaluation and feelings of inferiority. Prolonged experiences of shame reinforce negative self-schemas and a sense of worthlessness, which in turn heightens vulnerability to depression.
If that’s the bad news, the good news from the study study is that self-forgiveness observably fosters warmth and understanding in moments of failure and decreases self-condemnation uniquely focusing on releasing resentment tied to specific mistakes and promoting self-reconciliation. As Li and Fincham state:
The positive cognitive reappraisal involved in self-forgiveness allows individuals to reinterpret their shortcomings and with kindness and acceptance, thereby reducing the emotional exhaustion associated with perfectionism.
The implications are clear, if you really want to do your best, pursue excellence, and be successful, you have to build self-forgiveness into your plan and into all of your efforts. In fact, your real perfection may lie most in your ability to see that your shortcomings, failures, and imperfections are perfectly human — just as God intended them to be. Perfectly imperfect! God loves you for your shortcomings, and even has them built into a plan of “sheer goodness” (Catechism, para. 1) for you that’s ready when you are! Work the plan, and you will be truly surprised and amazed at what you can do!
Please share these words with someone who needs them today.
This text is an original work of its author Tom Delaney and was entirely composed without the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
If your parish or faith community is seeking a deeper experience of forgiveness, healing, mercy, and spiritual renewal, Live and Forgive is here to help. To begin the conversation, email Live and Forgive presenter and facilitator Tom Delaney at tom@liveandforgive.com — he will be glad to connect with you for a conversation. Please type in your email and click “Subscribe” below to stay connected and get Live and Forgive articles delivered to you.
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