Overcoming Perfectionism and People-Pleasing: When "Good Enough" Feels Impossible
Perfectionism and people pleasing can be overcome.
“It’s just an email,” you tell yourself.
It's just a regular work email, nothing high-stakes. But you've rewritten the opening line three times. Does "I hope this finds you well" sound too formal? Is "Hey" too casual? You delete a paragraph, then add it back. Read it again. Change a word. Read it one more time. Twenty minutes have passed. It's still just an email, but somehow it feels like if you don't get the tone exactly right, something bad will happen and of course, everyone hates you now (you think to yourself.)
In another scenario, you're at dinner with friends and someone suggests splitting the check evenly, even though you ordered the cheapest thing on the menu and didn't drink. It's a $20 difference. You can afford it, but it also feels unfair. Everyone else quickly agrees. You open your mouth to say something, then close it. "Yeah, that works," you hear yourself say, smiling. Later you're annoyed at yourself for not speaking up, annoyed at them for not noticing, but also weirdly anxious that if you had said something, they would've thought you were being difficult.
You already know… but you might be here because you too experience these patterns of people pleasing and perfectionism - and you’re sick of it.. They're patterns that a lot of people recognize in themselves, ways of moving through the world that can feel like they're keeping you safe or acceptable, but often end up creating their own kind of exhaustion and anxiety.
The good news: these patterns aren't permanent personality traits or character flaws. They're adaptive strategies you developed for good reasons, and they can change. But overcoming perfectionism and people-pleasing isn't as simple as deciding to "just relax" or "learn to say no." These patterns have roots. They serve functions. They're often deeply entwined with your sense of self and safety. Healing them requires understanding where they came from, what they're protecting you from, and what it would mean to live differently.
What Perfectionism and People-Pleasing Actually Look Like (From the Inside)
From the outside, perfectionism might look like high achievement, attention to detail, or strong work ethic. People-pleasing might appear as kindness, generosity, or being low-maintenance. But from the inside, these patterns often feel exhausting, anxiety-provoking, and deeply constraining.
The Internal Experience of Perfectionism
Perfectionism isn't really about wanting things to be perfect. It's about the terror of being imperfect. It's the constant vigilance for mistakes, the harsh internal voice cataloging everything you did wrong, the inability to feel satisfied even with genuine accomplishments.
Perfectionists often experience paralysis and procrastination. If you can't do it perfectly, why start? The pressure becomes so intense that avoidance feels safer than the risk of falling short.
There's an inability to finish. Nothing ever feels complete because complete means exposing it to judgment, and there's always something more you could improve.
All-or-nothing thinking dominates. If it's not perfect, it's worthless. A single mistake negates all the things you did well. Success is expected. Anything less is failure.
Chronic anxiety becomes the baseline. Your nervous system stays activated, scanning for threats (mistakes, criticism, falling short), never able to fully rest.
Difficulty delegating or accepting help makes sense when no one else will do it right. Which really means: no one else will do it in a way that protects you from the criticism or rejection you fear.
The harsh self-criticism is relentless. The voice in your head says things you'd never say to someone you care about, constantly judging and finding you lacking.
And there's a joylessness in achievement. Even when you succeed, you can't fully feel it. The focus immediately shifts to the next challenge or to what wasn't perfect about this success.
The Internal Experience of People-Pleasing
People-pleasing isn't really about being nice or caring about others. It's about trying to control how others feel about you to stay safe from rejection, anger, or abandonment. It's the constant monitoring of others' emotions and needs, often at the expense of your own.
People-pleasers often experience a loss of self. You've become so attuned to what others want that you've lost touch with what you want, need, or feel. Someone asks your preference, and you genuinely don't know.
Difficulty with boundaries is constant. Saying no feels dangerous, like risking the relationship. Even thinking about your own limits triggers guilt or anxiety.
There's resentment beneath compliance. You say yes, you show up, you help. And underneath, you're angry. But expressing that anger feels more dangerous than continuing to over-give.
Hypervigilance to others' emotions never stops. You're constantly scanning. Is she upset? Did I do something wrong? Is he disappointed? You take responsibility for managing everyone else's feelings.
Fear of conflict runs deep. Disagreement feels threatening. You might avoid it entirely, or you might capitulate immediately to restore peace, even when you're right or the issue matters.
The exhaustion from performing is real. Being what others need, managing impressions, staying likable. It's relentless and depleting.
And there's a feeling of being unseen. Even in close relationships, you might feel like no one truly knows you, because you've shown them only what you thought they wanted to see.
How They Intertwine
Perfectionism and people-pleasing often operate together. You try to be perfect to avoid disappointing others. You please others to avoid the criticism that feels intolerable to your perfectionist standards. Both are attempts to control an outcome you deeply fear: rejection, shame, being seen as inadequate or unworthy.
Both create a fundamental problem: your sense of worth becomes contingent on external validation. You're okay only if you perform well enough, if others are pleased with you, if you avoid mistakes. This means you never get to rest. Worth isn't inherent. It's provisional, constantly at risk, requiring endless vigilance to maintain.
Where Perfectionism and People-Pleasing Come From: Developmental Origins
These patterns don't emerge randomly. They develop as adaptive responses to your early environment and relationships. Understanding their origins isn't about blaming parents or dwelling on the past. It's about recognizing that these strategies made sense given what you experienced, even if they no longer serve you.
When Love Felt Conditional
If you learned that love, attention, or approval depended on your performance, achievement, or behavior, you may have developed perfectionism as a way to secure that love. Perhaps your parents praised you lavishly for accomplishments but showed little interest otherwise. Maybe conflict or criticism was intense, and staying perfect felt like the only way to avoid it. Or perhaps you saw a sibling struggle and decided unconsciously that achieving would protect you from similar rejection or disappointment.
The message you internalized: "I'm valued for what I do, not for who I am. I must earn love through performance."
When Others' Needs Consistently Came First
People-pleasing often develops when you learned that your needs were secondary, burdensome, or unwelcome. This happens in various ways. Parents who were overwhelmed and needed you to be easy. Caregivers whose emotions you had to manage to feel safe. Families where conflict was dangerous or where expressing needs led to rejection or punishment.
You learned to attune to others' needs as a survival strategy. If you could sense what they needed and provide it, perhaps you'd be safe, loved, or at least not abandoned. Your own needs became something to suppress or ignore.
The message you internalized: "My needs don't matter. My worth depends on being useful, easy, or pleasing to others."
When Mistakes Felt Dangerous
Some families respond to mistakes with shaming, harsh criticism, or withdrawal of love. If errors were met with rage, contempt, or painful consequences, you learned that mistakes are dangerous. Perfectionism became armor. If you could just avoid mistakes entirely, you could avoid the unbearable shame or rejection that followed them.
The message you internalized: "Mistakes make me unlovable. I must be perfect to be safe."
When You Experienced Inconsistency or Unpredictability
If your early caregivers were inconsistent (sometimes warm and attuned, other times cold or rejecting), you may have developed perfectionism and people-pleasing as attempts to create predictability. Perhaps if you could just figure out the right formula, do things correctly, be what they needed, you could secure consistent love and avoid the confusion and pain of their unpredictability.
The message you internalized: "If I try hard enough, I can control others' responses to me."
Cultural and Societal Reinforcement
Beyond family dynamics, broader cultural messages reinforce these patterns. Achievement culture valorizes overwork and perfection. Women especially receive messages about being accommodating, not taking up space, managing others' emotions. Marginalized communities may develop perfectionism as protection against discrimination. If you're perfect, perhaps you'll be safe from bias or violence, though this is an impossible standard that places the burden of others' prejudice on you.
These cultural messages interact with personal history, amplifying and entrenching patterns that might have begun as individual adaptations.
The Hidden Functions: What These Patterns Protect You From
Perfectionism and people-pleasing aren't just habits to break. They're defenses. They've been protecting you from experiences that feel unbearable. Understanding what they protect you from helps explain why simply deciding to "stop being a perfectionist" or "just say no" doesn't work. Letting go of these patterns means facing what they've been defending against.
Protection from Shame
At the core of most perfectionism is profound shame. The belief that you are fundamentally flawed, not enough, or unworthy. Perfectionism promises that if you can just be good enough, you'll never have to face that unbearable feeling. Every achievement, every successful performance, every moment someone approves of you temporarily holds the shame at bay.
But it never works permanently. Perfectionism can't heal shame because it's built on the premise that shame is warranted. That you really aren't enough as you are, that worth must be earned. The pattern maintains the wound it's trying to protect you from.
Protection from Rejection and Abandonment
People-pleasing operates on the fear that if others see your needs, limits, or authentic self, they'll leave. By staying attuned to what others want and providing it, you attempt to secure connection and prevent the abandonment that feels like annihilation.
This makes sense if early relationships taught you that your authentic self wasn't acceptable, that expressing needs led to rejection, or that love was contingent on your usefulness. But the protection comes at enormous cost: you're never actually known, and the connection you maintain by pleasing isn't truly intimate because it's not based on your real self.
Protection from Conflict and Others' Anger
Both patterns often function to avoid conflict. Perfectionism minimizes criticism. People-pleasing prevents others' anger or disappointment. If conflict felt dangerous in your early life (if anger was explosive, if you were punished for disagreeing, if you had to manage volatile emotions to stay safe), avoiding conflict makes sense.
But perpetual conflict-avoidance keeps you trapped, unable to advocate for yourself or address legitimate problems. Relationships remain superficial, your needs stay unmet, and resentment builds beneath the compliant surface.
Protection from Your Own Needs and Vulnerability
Sometimes these patterns protect you from the scariest thing of all: your own needs and the vulnerability of having them. If expressing needs in childhood led to disappointment, ridicule, or neglect, you may have learned to disconnect from them entirely. Perfectionism focuses on achievement. People-pleasing focuses on others. Both keep you from having to face your own longing, sadness, or need. Feelings that once felt too dangerous to acknowledge.
The Paradoxes: How These Patterns Create What They're Trying to Prevent
One of the cruelest aspects of perfectionism and people-pleasing is that they often create the very outcomes they're designed to prevent.
Perfectionism Increases Mistakes and Failure
By making standards so high they're impossible to meet, perfectionism guarantees failure. The procrastination perfectionism creates means you miss deadlines or rush at the last minute, producing work below your actual capability. The anxiety perfectionism generates interferes with performance. The all-or-nothing thinking means you give up entirely when you can't meet impossible standards.
Perfectionism doesn't protect you from failure. It creates conditions where failure becomes more likely while simultaneously making failure feel catastrophic.
People-Pleasing Damages Relationships
By never showing your authentic self, by always accommodating, by suppressing your needs and resentments, people-pleasing prevents the genuine intimacy it's meant to secure. Others can't truly know you because you haven't shown them who you are. The relationships you maintain through pleasing feel hollow. The resentment you suppress eventually leaks out in passive-aggression, withdrawal, or explosion, damaging connections you were trying to protect.
People-pleasing doesn't secure love. It creates relationships built on performance rather than authentic connection.
Both Patterns Reinforce Shame
Perfectionism is built on the premise that you're not enough as you are, reinforcing the shame it's trying to escape. People-pleasing communicates to yourself that your needs and authentic self are unacceptable, reinforcing the belief that drove the pattern in the first place.
Every time you enact these patterns, you're essentially agreeing with the early message that you need to earn worth through performance or accommodation. The patterns themselves become evidence for the beliefs that created them.
Both Create Chronic Anxiety and Exhaustion
The hypervigilance required (scanning for mistakes, monitoring others' reactions, maintaining performance, managing impressions) keeps your nervous system activated. You never get to rest. This chronic stress has real consequences: anxiety, depression, burnout, physical health problems, difficulty sleeping, trouble being present in moments that should be enjoyable.
The safety these patterns promise never actually arrives because the threat they're defending against is internal. The beliefs and fears you carry, not external circumstances.
What Overcoming These Patterns Actually Looks Like
When people search for "how to stop people-pleasing" or "overcoming perfectionism," they often hope for concrete strategies: tips for saying no, techniques for managing perfectionist thoughts, steps to follow. These can be useful, but they're insufficient without addressing the deeper roots of these patterns.
Real change involves several dimensions.
Recognizing the Patterns as Defenses, Not Character
The first shift is understanding that perfectionism and people-pleasing aren't who you are. They're strategies you developed. This distinction matters enormously. You're not "a perfectionist" in some fixed, essential way. You're someone who learned to use perfectionism as protection. This means change is possible. You can develop new strategies without losing yourself, because these patterns aren't your self.
Understanding the Developmental Origins
Therapy for perfectionism in Denver or therapy for people-pleasing often begins with exploring your history. Not to dwell in the past, but to understand how these patterns made sense given what you experienced. This understanding typically creates compassion, toward your younger self who developed these strategies, and toward your current self who still uses them.
This exploration helps you recognize: "I learned this. I wasn't born this way. And if it was learned, it can be unlearned."
Feeling What You've Been Avoiding
The defenses protect you from unbearable feelings. Shame, vulnerability, need, the risk of rejection. Overcoming these patterns means gradually learning to tolerate the feelings you've been avoiding. This doesn't happen through willpower or forcing yourself. It happens through slowly, repeatedly experiencing these feelings in small doses within a safe relationship (like therapy) and discovering they don't destroy you.
You learn: "I can feel shame and survive it. I can express a need and tolerate the vulnerability. I can disappoint someone and the relationship continues."
This is why perfectionism therapy and people-pleasing therapy often focus heavily on the therapeutic relationship itself. In therapy, you practice showing parts of yourself you usually hide: your needs, your imperfections, your anger, your limits. You experience your therapist responding differently than early figures did. This new relational experience gradually updates your expectations and expands what feels safe.
Developing Self-Compassion
The harsh self-criticism of perfectionism needs to be replaced with something gentler. Self-compassion isn't self-indulgence or lowering standards. It's recognizing your humanity. You're allowed to make mistakes. Your worth isn't contingent on performance. You deserve kindness, especially from yourself.
This sounds simple but often requires deep work. The critical voice has been there a long time, possibly sounding like internalized versions of early critical figures. Learning to speak to yourself differently, to offer yourself the understanding you'd give someone you care about, is genuinely transformative.
Practicing Boundaries and Authentic Expression
For people-pleasers, learning boundaries is essential, but it's a practice, not a skill you learn once. It means gradually experimenting with saying no in low-stakes situations, expressing preferences, stating limits, and discovering that relationships can survive (and actually deepen) when you show up authentically.
This is terrifying at first. Your nervous system screams that rejection is imminent. This is why it's best practiced in therapy first, where you can explore your fears about asserting needs and experience your therapist responding supportively.
Tolerating Good Enough
For perfectionists, learning to tolerate "good enough" is radical. This means deliberately leaving things imperfect, submitting work before it's "perfect," letting others see your rough edges. Initially, this triggers enormous anxiety. Over time, as you accumulate experiences of things being okay even when imperfect, the anxiety lessens.
Therapy for perfectionists often involves intentionally practicing imperfection: making small mistakes, sharing unpolished thoughts, showing vulnerability. And then processing the feelings that arise.
Grieving What You Missed
As you begin to change these patterns, grief often surfaces. Grief for the childhood you deserved but didn't have, where you could have been imperfect and still loved, where your needs would have mattered. Grief for all the energy and life you've spent managing anxiety, trying to be perfect, accommodating others. Grief for relationships where you weren't truly known.
This grief is important. It acknowledges the cost of these patterns and makes space for genuine healing rather than just behavior change.
Building a New Sense of Worth
Ultimately, overcoming perfectionism and people-pleasing requires building a sense of worth not contingent on performance or others' approval. This is perhaps the deepest and most challenging aspect of the work. It means internalizing, at a gut level, that you have inherent worth. Not because of what you achieve or how you make others feel, but because you exist.
This doesn't happen through affirmations or cognitive reframing alone (though these can help). It happens through accumulating experiences of being valued for who you are, not just what you do. Through relationships (therapeutic and personal) where you're accepted in your imperfection, where your needs matter, where conflict doesn't destroy connection.
The Role of Anxiety: Why These Patterns and Anxiety Are So Intertwined
If you struggle with perfectionism or people-pleasing, you likely also struggle with anxiety. This isn't coincidental. These patterns are essentially anxiety management strategies. Understanding this connection is crucial for perfectionism and anxiety therapy in Denver.
Perfectionism as Anxiety Management
Perfectionism attempts to control anxiety by controlling outcomes. If you can be perfect, you (theoretically) won't be criticized, rejected, or shamed. The problem is that the standard is impossible, so you're never free from the threat. The anxiety persists, driving more perfectionism in a self-perpetuating cycle.
Additionally, perfectionism itself generates anxiety. The constant pressure, the hypervigilance for mistakes, the catastrophic thinking about failure. What began as an attempt to manage anxiety becomes a primary source of it.
People-Pleasing as Anxiety Management
People-pleasing attempts to control others' reactions to manage your anxiety about rejection or conflict. If you can sense what others need and provide it, you (theoretically) keep yourself safe. But this requires constant vigilance, keeping your nervous system activated and anxious.
And because you can never truly control others' feelings, the strategy fails, generating more anxiety about whether you've done enough, whether they're upset, whether rejection is coming.
Breaking the Cycle
Overcoming these patterns means finding new ways to manage anxiety. Ways that don't require perfection or constant accommodation. This might include nervous system regulation (learning somatic techniques to calm your body's stress response directly rather than through behavioral control), cognitive work (challenging catastrophic thinking and all-or-nothing beliefs that fuel anxiety), exposure (gradually facing the feared outcomes in manageable doses), and relational safety (building relationships where you feel secure even when you're imperfect or assertive).
Common Obstacles to Changing These Patterns
Even when you understand these patterns and want to change them, obstacles arise.
"But These Patterns Work"
In some ways, they do. Perfectionism may have contributed to career success. People-pleasing may have maintained relationships. This makes change scary. If you let go of what's "worked," what happens?
The truth is that they work at enormous cost, and they create problems even as they solve others. Acknowledging this requires honesty about the full impact of these patterns, not just the superficial benefits.
"This Is Just Who I Am"
When patterns are longstanding, they feel like identity. Changing them can feel like losing yourself. This is why framing them as strategies rather than essence matters. You're not giving up who you are. You're releasing protective strategies that no longer serve you, making space for more of your authentic self to emerge.
Fear of Becoming Lazy or Selfish
Many perfectionists fear that relaxing standards means becoming mediocre or lazy. People-pleasers fear that boundaries mean becoming selfish or uncaring. These fears reflect all-or-nothing thinking. There's a vast middle ground between relentless perfectionism and laziness, between people-pleasing and selfishness.
Overcoming these patterns doesn't mean not caring about quality or others. It means caring in sustainable, balanced ways that include yourself.
Lack of Models
If you didn't experience healthy models (people who maintained standards without perfectionism, who were generous without self-abandoning), you might not know what balanced alternatives look like. Therapy can provide this modeling through the therapist's way of being: maintaining professional standards while being imperfect, caring deeply while maintaining boundaries.
The Patterns Serve Current Relationships
Sometimes your perfectionism or people-pleasing serves others' needs. A partner might benefit from your over-accommodation. A workplace might exploit your inability to set limits. Changing means disturbing these dynamics, which can create relationship conflict. Ironically, the very thing people-pleasing was designed to avoid.
This is where support becomes essential. Navigating relationship changes as you establish boundaries or relax impossible standards requires skills and backing, often provided through therapy.
When to Seek Therapy for Perfectionism and People-Pleasing
These patterns exist on a spectrum. Some level of caring about quality and considering others' needs is healthy. But when these patterns significantly impair your wellbeing, relationships, or functioning, therapy can help.
Consider therapy for perfectionism if:
Your standards are so high they create paralysis, procrastination, or chronic anxiety
You can't enjoy accomplishments because they're never good enough
Your self-criticism is harsh and relentless
Perfectionism interferes with relationships (you're critical of others, can't tolerate others' mistakes, or can't be vulnerable)
You experience physical symptoms from stress (headaches, digestive issues, sleep problems)
You avoid trying new things or taking risks because you might not excel
Perfectionism drives disordered eating, overexercise, or other harmful behaviors
Consider therapy for people-pleasing if:
You consistently prioritize others' needs over your own, even when it harms you
You have difficulty knowing what you want or need
You avoid conflict to your detriment
You feel resentful in relationships but unable to address it
You say yes when you mean no
Your boundaries are porous or nonexistent
You feel exhausted from trying to manage everyone's emotions
You feel like people don't really know you
Consider therapy for both if:
You recognize these patterns are intertwined and creating significant distress
You've tried to change on your own but the patterns persist
Anxiety or depression accompanies these patterns
You're ready to understand their roots and develop new ways of being
You want a relationship where you can practice being imperfect and assertive
What Therapy for Perfectionism and People-Pleasing Involves
Effective therapy for these patterns typically includes several elements.
Psychodynamic Exploration
Understanding where these patterns originated and what functions they serve happens through psychodynamic therapy in Denver. This exploration connects current struggles with developmental history, helping you recognize the adaptive nature of these strategies and creating compassion for why you developed them.
This isn't just intellectual understanding. It's emotional insight that shifts how you relate to yourself.
Relational Healing
Because these patterns developed in relationships, they heal in relationships. The therapeutic relationship becomes a space to practice new ways of being: showing imperfection without judgment, expressing needs without rejection, disagreeing without abandonment, being authentic without losing connection.
Your therapist's responses (accepting your imperfection, respecting your boundaries, valuing you beyond your performance) provide new relational experiences that gradually update your expectations and internal working models.
Working with Internalized Voices
The harsh critical voice of perfectionism and the anxious accommodating voice of people-pleasing often represent internalized versions of early figures. Therapy helps you identify these voices, understand their origins, and develop alternative internal voices that are more compassionate and reality-based.
Approaches like Internal Family Systems can be particularly useful, helping you understand different parts of yourself (the perfectionist part, the people-pleasing part, the frightened younger parts they protect) and facilitate internal integration.
Practical Experimentation
While insight is crucial, changing these patterns also requires behavioral practice. Your therapist might encourage experiments: deliberately doing something imperfectly, saying no to a request, expressing a need, tolerating someone's disappointment.
These experiments are processed in therapy. What fears arose, what actually happened, what you learned. Over time, new experiences accumulate, providing evidence that challenges old beliefs.
Nervous System Work
Because anxiety is so central to these patterns, somatic approaches that work directly with your nervous system can be valuable. Learning to calm your body's stress response without having to be perfect or please others gives you new tools for managing the anxiety that drives these patterns.
Addressing Underlying Trauma
For some people, these patterns are connected to trauma (developmental trauma, specific events, or chronic relational wounds). Trauma-focused approaches like EMDR can help process these experiences, reducing the emotional charge that fuels perfectionist and people-pleasing defenses.
About Integration Psychotherapy LLC: Therapy for Perfectionism and People-Pleasing in Denver
Integration Psychotherapy LLC, founded by Erin McMahon, LCSW, provides depth-oriented therapy for adults in Denver struggling with perfectionism, people-pleasing, and the anxiety that accompanies these patterns. The practice specializes in helping clients understand the origins of these protective strategies and develop more sustainable, authentic ways of being in the world and in relationships.
Understanding Patterns, Not Just Changing Behaviors
What distinguishes therapy for perfectionism and people-pleasing at Integration Psychotherapy LLC is the depth-oriented, psychodynamically-informed approach. Rather than simply providing techniques for managing perfectionist thoughts or saying no, the work explores where these patterns came from, what they protect you from, and what it would mean (emotionally and relationally) to live differently.
This doesn't mean the work is only exploratory. Insight without change isn't particularly useful. But change without understanding tends to be superficial or temporary. Integration Psychotherapy LLC offers both: the depth of psychodynamic exploration and the practical support for trying new ways of being.
A Relational Approach to Relational Wounds
Perfectionism and people-pleasing develop in relationships, through the messages you received about your worth, your needs, and the conditions under which you were valued. They heal in relationships too, through experiencing something different.
At Integration Psychotherapy LLC, the therapeutic relationship is central to the work. You're offered a relationship where your worth isn't contingent on performance, where your imperfections don't lead to rejection, where your needs matter, where disagreement doesn't destroy connection. This isn't just nice. It's therapeutic. These new relational experiences, repeated over time, gradually update the internal models that drive perfectionist and people-pleasing patterns.
Erin McMahon brings an authentic, warm, and boundaried presence to the work. You're not meeting a perfect therapist (which would only reinforce impossible standards) but a real person who models being human: competent and imperfect, professional and genuine, caring and boundaried.
Integrative Treatment for Complex Patterns
The approach at Integration Psychotherapy LLC is grounded in psychodynamic therapy but integrates other modalities when they serve the work. Internal Family Systems (IFS) helps understand different parts of yourself (the perfectionist part, the people-pleasing part, the frightened younger parts they protect) and facilitate internal healing. EMDR can process specific traumatic experiences or memories that contribute to these patterns. Somatic techniques work with the anxiety and nervous system activation that fuels and results from these patterns. Attachment-based approaches address the relational wounds underlying these defenses.
This integration means treatment is tailored to your specific needs rather than applying one method uniformly.
Who the Practice Serves
Integration Psychotherapy LLC works with adults who struggle with perfectionism that creates anxiety, paralysis, or chronic dissatisfaction. People who recognize people-pleasing patterns that leave them exhausted, resentful, or disconnected from themselves. Those who experience both patterns intertwined, driving anxiety and relationship difficulties. People who have tried to change these patterns on their own but found them persistent. Those who want to understand the roots of these patterns, not just develop surface-level coping strategies. People dealing with anxiety or depression connected to perfectionist or people-pleasing tendencies. Those who recognize these patterns stem from childhood experiences and want to address developmental roots. People who feel ready to practice being imperfect, assertive, or authentic in a safe relationship.
The practice welcomes clients from all backgrounds, with awareness of how cultural messages and experiences of marginalization can intensify perfectionism and people-pleasing as survival strategies.
What Therapy Looks Like
Therapy at Integration Psychotherapy LLC typically begins with a free consultation to discuss what brings you to therapy and whether the practice might be a good fit. If you decide to work together, initial sessions focus on understanding your specific perfectionist and people-pleasing patterns, exploring their origins, and beginning to build the therapeutic relationship that will support deeper work.
As therapy progresses, you'll explore how early experiences shaped these patterns while simultaneously practicing new ways of being. In therapy first, where it's safer, and gradually in your outside life. This might look like sharing something you'd usually hide out of fear it's not good enough. Expressing a need or limit with your therapist. Disagreeing or providing feedback about something that didn't work. Allowing yourself to be imperfect in sessions: speaking without planning, showing emotion without composing yourself first, being confused or uncertain.
These "practice runs" in therapy, where your therapist responds with acceptance rather than criticism or rejection, create new experiences that challenge old beliefs and expectations.
The work also includes processing feelings that arise as you begin changing patterns. Grief for what you didn't receive, anger at early experiences or current relationships, fear about letting go of strategies that have felt protective, and eventually, the tender vulnerability of showing your authentic self.
Addressing the Anxiety Connection
Because perfectionism and people-pleasing are so intertwined with anxiety, therapy at Integration Psychotherapy LLC addresses anxiety directly. This includes understanding anxiety as a signal of threat (real or perceived) rather than a character flaw. Learning nervous system regulation skills so you have ways to manage anxiety beyond perfectionism or pleasing. Exploring what you're actually anxious about beneath the surface symptoms. Gradually facing feared outcomes (imperfection, others' disappointment) in supportive, manageable ways. Processing traumatic or frightening experiences that seeded the anxiety.
This integrated approach to perfectionism, people-pleasing, and anxiety recognizes they're interconnected patterns requiring comprehensive treatment.
Practical Information
Integration Psychotherapy LLC serves adults in the Denver area through both in-person and teletherapy sessions. Sessions are typically 50-55 minutes, scheduled weekly. The practice operates on a private-pay basis and can provide superbills for out-of-network insurance reimbursement.
The length of treatment varies based on the depth of these patterns and your specific goals. Some clients work for several months. Others engage in longer-term therapy. What matters is that the time creates genuine change, not just behavioral modification but shifts in how you understand yourself, experience relationships, and move through the world.
Taking the First Step
If you're exhausted from trying to be perfect, from accommodating everyone else, from the relentless anxiety these patterns create, change is possible. These aren't permanent personality traits. They're strategies you learned, and you can learn new ones. You can develop a sense of worth not contingent on performance or others' approval. You can have relationships where you're known and valued for who you actually are, not for how well you perform or accommodate.
This work requires courage. Letting go of patterns that have felt protective, even when they're exhausting, activates deep fears. You'll need support, skill, and a relationship safe enough to risk being imperfect and assertive. Integration Psychotherapy LLC offers that support.
The practice provides free consultations for prospective clients. This conversation allows you to share what you're struggling with, ask questions about the therapeutic approach, discuss practical matters, and get a sense of whether the relationship feels right.
To learn more or schedule a consultation, visit integrationpsychotherapyllc.com.
You don't have to keep striving for impossible standards or abandoning yourself to please others. There's another way, one where you're allowed to be imperfect, where your needs matter, where worth isn't something you have to earn. Integration Psychotherapy LLC would be honored to support you in finding that path.
In the spirit of transparency and authenticity, this blog post was constructed with AI assistance for informational, educational, and marketing purposes. Erin does not use AI in her sessions or in her note-taking of sessions.
