I suffer from that too, so my heart goes out to you.

Since I am not a medical professional I cannot offer anything authoritative but only my own fallible reflections as a philosophy graduate student.

Perfectionism equates goodness with perfection. Therefore, what is not perfect is seen as somehow bad. This reduces the wide range of values to only two: the perfect and everything else.

This terrible reductionism is unfair to the scope and range of real values. Perhaps I might try to illustrate this.

A student once came to see me and said she was a failure, a loser and a waste of oxygen. So I asked her what happened. She said that she failed to get straight A's for the semester.

So I mentioned to her that there have been a couple of men in the last 100 years who caused the destruction of tens of millions of men, women and children through campaigns of genocide and forced starvation . . . men like Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse Tung.

Then I asked her if her failure to get straight A's caused the destruction of tens of millions of people. No. Did it cause the destruction of millions or hundreds of thousands of people? No. Did it cause the destruction of tens of thousands, thousands or hundreds of people? No. Did it cause the destruction of 10 or even one person? No.

So I told her . . . then how "bad" is your failure to get straight A's seen in the wide horizon of human values? It is very, very, very, very, very, very far from that kind of "failure."

None of us are Infinite, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-perfect beings. We each have little three pound brains that do a pretty amazing job most of the time.

As something finite, this brain sometimes makes mistakes. Most of the time it does not set out to make a make a mistake as though it woke up in the morning and said: "Today I plan to make a huge mistake."

When one is a perfectionist, one robs reality of its scope and depth. That is both an error and an injustice to reality. If only the perfect is good, then only the perfect is worthy of appreciation. Since nothing earthly is perfect, this would mean that nothing here is worthy of appreciation.

To live always thinking: "could be better but is not better" is a road to unhappiness because it blocks out the other way of looking at things: "could be worse but isn't worse, thank goodness."

Perhaps humans are genetically programmed to be dissatisfied and gravitate towards perfectionism. Dissatisfaction has its value. It led humans to create electric lights, polio vaccines, refrigerators, heaters, air conditioners and many, many things. But to get "stuck" in the "could be better but isn't better frame of mind robs one and robs reality of its richness.

Sometimes parental programming has a place in this. "If I am perfect, mommy and daddy will love me." "Mommy and daddy will love me only if I am perfect. If I am less than perfect I am basically defective, a loser, a failure as a human being."

Often parents instill this belief in children because they don't know any better and because that is how they were raised.

But I think the fight against perfectionism is a noble effort although difficult to be sure. One does not do it just for oneself. One does it for others too and in fairness to reality which deserve better than the perfectionist attitude.

These are just my fallible thoughts. Perhaps I am wrong. I am often wrong about things. In any case, I can truly identify with you and your struggle since I was raised to be a perfectionist. Hopefully others here will have better words for you than my poor words.