How Perfectionism Lives in Your Nervous System
Perfectionism isn't about being detail-oriented or having high standards. It's a survival strategy — and once you understand what it's doing to your nervous system, the exhaustion finally makes sense.
For many perfectionists, the body is running a chronic threat response: always braced, always vigilant, never quite able to settle. The internal signal that says that's enough, you can stop never makes it through. And when something goes wrong — or feels like it has — the system doesn't just activate. It can collapse entirely.
This is perfectionism as a nervous system pattern. And thinking your way out of it has limits.
March Newsletter
When I was 14, a friend read my writing and told me it wasn't particularly interesting, entertaining, or well written. That was the end of my editorial career — for nearly 30 years.
The thing is, I didn't remember where the belief came from. I just stated it as fact: I'm not a good writer. It wasn't a thought I was having. It was a route my body already knew.
This is why insight alone so rarely creates change. We can know something is a limiting belief and still feel it as truth. The body needs to experience a new possibility — to sense that it's safe — before it will let us act differently. Cognition follows sensation, not the other way around.
So: think of something you've told yourself you can't do. Don't just think it — locate it. Where do you feel that certainty in your body?
Now ask yourself: is that a fact, or is it a very old feeling?
What Is Creative Arts Therapy?
I didn't know it then, but I was already doing something like therapy. As a kid who grew up without a lot, that box of Crayola crayons was everything — pure possibility in perfect rows. Art has always been my escape, my mood shifter, my comforter. It's why I became a creative arts therapist. I understood the power of it intuitively. The science came later.
What I know now is that for some people, creative arts therapy isn't just helpful — it's necessary. When trauma lives in the body and outside of language, talking about it has a ceiling. Creative arts therapy works differently. It works with the whole person.