Andreea Ciocan's Key Ideas from The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control
by Katherine Morgan Schafler

Your memories of perfect moments are memories of moments in which you were most present.

When you ruminate, you mistake replay for reflection. When you catastrophize, you mistake worrying for preparation.

You don’t heal by changing who you are; you heal by learning how to be yourself in the world.

It was never the terrible things that happened to you that made you stronger; it was the resiliency-building skills you engaged to process the terrible things. What doesn’t kill you can make you stronger, but only if you feel your feelings, process your experience (i.e., figure out what the experience means to you), and engage the protective factors around you—mainly, the power of connection.

Sometimes you say a thought out loud to give it weight because it matters. Sometimes you say a thought out loud to let it go because it's trivial. Until you let the words hit the air, it can be difficult to tell which is which.

You can perfectly paint by numbers without making a single mistake, but you'll never create a masterpiece that way.

For perfectionists struggling with emotional perfectionism, everything is timed and measured. They attempt to control their feelings like a volume knob, and not just the "bad" ones.

It’s not mere talent that rises to the top, it’s persistence.

Enthusiasm itself will not be enough to sustain an endeavor.

Exploration doesn’t need to culminate in bullet-pointed certainty about anything. Thoughts and feelings don’t need to operate with an itinerary. It’s okay to hold something for a long time, look at it, turn it over, feel it, think about it, turn it over again, talk about it, write about it, and then look up and say, “I don’t know.” It’s okay to not have closure.

You will never experience the future; you’re always and only in the present moment. If you’re waiting on the future to feel joy, you will never feel joy.

A lot of perfectionists think they're driven by success when what they're really driven by is the avoidance of failure-two very different animals.