I both love and hate my Unrelenting Standards Schema (perfectionism). It does bring mood and attitude problems into my life, but I would never want to entirely get rid of it due to the positive things that it also brings.
My perfectionism and attention to detail is sometimes key to my job success and the ensuing satisfaction that I get from feeling successful. I suspect that Unrelenting Standards is an extremely common maladaptive schema for people in technical disciplines like mine.
The problem is that people like me with an Unrelenting Standards Schema can be cranky on the job when imperfect company processes or less-competent coworkers hinder in any way their striving toward excellence. Yup, sometimes we’re simply trying too hard.
What’s wrong with trying too hard? Well… nothing really, morally speaking.
However, the reality of everyday life is that most things won’t usually be as perfect, high-quality or well-optimized as a perfectionist might like.
So, since life and other people never measure up to our expectations, a feeling of annoyance, frustration or “bitchiness” often characterizes how a person with an Unrelenting Standards Schema feels throughout the day, even when things are going rather OK.
The feeling is: “No matter how good I am, I can always do better. Everyone else could do better too, if only they cared more. Those who don’t meet these standards (including me) are failures.” So we end up disliking everyone, including ourselves, for those reasons.
People like me with an Unrelenting Standards Schema often carry that attitude of “workplace demands” and its accompanying dissatisfaction into their personal lives as well, unconsciously.
In my personal life, I do a lot of solo hiking in remote areas where few, if any, human footprints will be found. I do a lot of homework in preparation for these wilderness hikes since there are no trails to follow.
I don’t usually seek to reach the highest point of the mountain range like some hikers do, but I do seek to explore remote areas up close, the areas that the “peakbaggers” ignore.
Inevitably, the time comes during every day hike into a remote area to turn around and start walking back toward my starting location.
Detecting the Unrelenting Standards Schema
Now that I’m used to monitoring my thoughts and feelings, I’ve noticed that I often have a vague, negative feeling of failure in the back of my mind while hiking back to where I started.
On the one hand, though perhaps feeling a bit tired, I’m really enjoying the hike back—often with cooler air and reduced sunlight (or perhaps even magnificent moonlight)—while reveling in the greatness of the day’s explorations and discoveries.
On the other hand, the nagging, motherly, background script of my Unrelenting Standards Schema whispers repeatedly that “perhaps I could have seen even more, and enjoyed the hike even more, had I only persevered and hiked a little further, a little longer, over to the top of that next hill, or part of the way up that next rocky canyon, before turning around.”
I do find it sad how easily I can unconsciously diminish in this way some of the intense pleasure I’ve derived from a day of wilderness hiking. The background dissatisfaction is entirely self-inflicted, unproductive, and only an unfortunate result of my background experiences.
It’s a given that there will always be more that I could have seen if I hadn’t turned around—that’s the nature of wilderness. Wilderness is an endless target, all of which one will never see. Not reaching all of it doesn’t make anyone a failure in any way!
When I get these thoughts that maybe I didn’t hike far enough, despite having an awesome day, I stop, take in my wonderful surroundings, then remind myself that I have had a great day walking through wilderness, doing exactly what I set out to do, and that this is something that not everyone does, and which some people feel is downright scary or unattainable.
I don’t necessarily feel instantly perfect and 100% happy again after reminding myself that my day was indeed wonderful. However, with the aim of eliminating false negativity, I do immediately realize that I would be wrong to let myself believe that I’ve done anything less than really well on this great day.
How did I end up with an Unrelenting Standards Schema?
I’ve always tried too hard. So much of my childhood was filled with moments where I could only gain validation by showing how smart I could be. Otherwise, my feelings, tastes and desires as a child didn’t matter much.
This leads into a discussion of the closely related Emotional Deprivation Schema—that will be in another blog post.