Perfectionist Finds Way Out of the Sand Trap : Laguna Beach psychologist Steven Hendlin uses his obsession with golf to show how aiming above excellence can exact a heavy toll.

Laguna Beach psychologist Steven J. Hendlin may not have been born to write a book on perfectionism, but his qualifications are impeccable.

As a competitive junior golfer between the ages of 11 and 19, Hendlin was, by his own admission, “obsessed with golf.” His ambition was to play as “perfectly as possible” and to achieve that, he practiced every spare hour after school and on weekends. Summers, he’d be at the driving range from early morning until late at night.

If that weren’t enough, he memorized obscure statistics in golf magazines. He could recite the personal preferences and idiosyncrasies of the top 50 touring pros “as if they were my relatives.” And what he didn’t know about the details of golf equipment “wasn’t worth knowing.”

But his ceaseless drive for perfection took a heavy toll.

As Hendlin writes in his new book, “When Good Enough Is Never Enough: Escaping the Perfection Trap,” what should have been an enjoyable walk in a park “became a maze to be negotiated, a dragon to be slain.”

Expecting to hit every shot “perfectly,” he could not tolerate being beaten by players he considered “less talented.” Hot tempered, he’d curse, yell, throw clubs and get angry with himself. He also suffered migraine headaches and would be depressed and irritable for days after a poor performance in a golf tournament.

Hendlin never became a “perfect” golfer, but as an author he manages to make his point perfectly clear: Striving for perfection is not a virtue, and when people try to measure up to impossible ideals, they often wind up feeling inadequate.

Indeed, Hendlin says, seeking “perfection” not only prevents us from feeling satisfied with daily life, but it also causes low self-esteem, a need to control others, stifled creativity, fear of failure and procrastination.

Want more reasons for curbing your own perfectionist tendencies?

Let Hendlin count the ways: Perfectionists may become depressed and suffer stress-related diseases, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, eating disorders, addictions and other health problems.

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If striving for perfection is such a losing proposition, then what’s the answer in our achievement-oriented culture?

Rather than seek perfection, Hendlin suggests, we should instead “aim for excellence.”

“It’s not just a question of semantics,” he says. “There is a real difference between pursuing excellence and falling into the perfection trap.”

The perfectionist, Hendlin says, “has unrealistic expectations that are set beyond reach and reason. Perfectionists are motivated by fear rather than satisfaction: They feel like they’re running away from failure rather than toward accomplishment.”

And, he said, “because they’ve set their expectations so high, each new challenge is scary because a perfectionist has not been able to use past successes for nourishment and support.”

The person striving for “excellence,” on the other hand, has more realistic expectations that are attainable.

“They’re motivated by success and the good feelings related to it--not by failure--and they are able to use past accomplishments as support for new challenges.”

“When Good Enough Is Never Enough” (Tarcher/Putnam; $19.95) provides a well-rounded overview of the problem, examining common characteristics of perfectionist thinking, the suffering that can accompany perfectionism, how people become caught in the perfection trap (and how to prevent it) and the cultural and psychological roots. It also addresses the perfectionist at work, at play and in other areas of life, including the search to find the “perfect partner” and attempts to achieve the perfect relationship.

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The book grew out of Hendlin’s 17 years in clinical practice and “seeing the suffering of what others go through in trying to pursue the perfect performance and how pervasive the ‘never enough’ mentality really is.”

Hendlin maintains that perfectionism is so deeply ingrained in our achievement-oriented culture that everyone suffers its consequences. “Nobody escapes the perfection trap if they grow up in Western culture,” he says.

But Westerners aren’t the only ones who must tread lightly. Hendlin says the sale of wigs in Tokyo have doubled in the last three years among fifth- and sixth-graders due to stress-related hair loss resulting from extreme pressure to excel in school. The same age group also is experiencing ulcers and high blood pressure.

“This is something that’s happening in all cultures that are pushing hard from the very earliest time for children to be the very best they can be,” he says, adding that fast-track American parents, themselves “the children of perfectionists,” often judge their success as parents by how fast their young child can learn to read or speak a foreign language.

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Family patterns play a major role in producing perfectionism in children.

In Hendlin’s case, his father was a driven sports perfectionist who had excelled in more than a half dozen sports as a youngster and felt his children should do the same.

Indeed, the real “payoff” for Hendlin to excel at golf as a teen-ager was to win the love, approval and admiration from his father: “He taught me that I should perform at the very highest level possible and that approval would come when I did and that it wouldn’t come as fast when I didn’t.”

When Hendlin was 14, he watched in horror as his 52-year-old father sat on the living room sofa, lit his pipe, choked and died of his fourth heart attack.

“There is no question in my mind that his heart problems were exacerbated by his driven perfectionism and what we call the Type-A personality,” Hendlin says.

Although Hendlin gave up his dream of being a golf pro halfway through college, he shifted his perfectionist tendencies to academics. (He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UC Berkeley and received both a master’s and a Ph.D in psychology in three years. By 27, he was teaching graduate-level psychology classes and had begun his private practice.)

Today, Hendlin views himself as something less than a perfectionist.

“I’d like to see myself as pursuing excellence and having escaped from the perfection trap,” he says, “but at times my perfectionist tendencies still come through.” He adds, however, that he has learned to use those tendencies “in a more healthy manner. One of the ways it’s very positive is in psychotherapy work where people expect to have sessions start on time. I take time seriously.”

So what causes so many people to fall over the edge?

“One of the points I make in the book is we start out on the path of excellence but what happens is it gets perverted along the way: The competitive individualistic system that promotes winning above all else teaches us that nothing short of seeking perfection will be enough,” he says.

Examples of our obsession with perfection abound, says Hendlin, from appearance (our clothes, body, home) to work and from sports to seeking the perfect mate.

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So what’s a perfectionist to do?

“The first thing is to realize that perfection is not a virtue and to realize that we can set our standards at realistic, attainable levels--that we can face our fears and our anxiety about not having the standard of perfection as what we shoot for and that we can realize that our satisfaction with our performance does not necessarily have to be related to a perfect performance,” he said.

What’s most important, Hendlin says, is to realize “that our own self-worth and self-esteem does not have to be dependent on outside approval, that we can go beyond our earlier programming.”

After all is said and done, is there such a thing as perfection?

Hendlin thinks so. But, he says, it has nothing to do with human beings and their performance.

“It’s related to the natural wonders of being alive,” he says. “Perfection can be found in the rhythms of nature, in the seasons, in the beauty of the natural world, which is perfect the way it is. We can have an appreciation of the rhythms of life like good timing, a good joke told in the moment, a phone call that comes when it’s needed.

“In Zen, the phrase is ‘every moment occurs at just the right time,’ and in that way we can find perfection.”