"Elder Holland addressed toxic perfectionism in his 2017 general conference address. He asserts that Satan is the reason that men and women feel the oppressive effects of a doctrine of demanded perfection. Compare this idea to the teachings of the Prophet Spencer W Kimball in a BYU devotional in 1974. What does modern psychology have to say about the source of depression and worthlessness which come from toxic perfectionism?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iFoB4KVf2w

I can't tell you how many dozens of times I heard messages in the cult about,"be ye therefore perfect." Their level of criticism stemmed from contempt we were not perfect enough. The people pleasing epidemic was 24/7/365. I am a high achiever by nature and yet felt inadequate, unappreciated and unwanted because I was not BIC, Miss America, came from a royalty lds tribe, descend from lds pioneers, go to BYU, drive a Mercedes, sing in the mormon tabs, etc. My honesty bothered people. One sociopathic bishop called my curiosity, "zealousness." Really. I never knew. He and the RS president had a fling thing going on and she was a witch on wheels. She made my life and other ladies in RS pure hell. I left the cult for four years after dealing with their evil in 2000. I should never have returned in 2005 after she moved away. Perfectionism is the highest form of self-abuse that exists, a sure sign of co-dependency. This mental dis-ease requires CBT, DBT and training to overcome. Takes years to rebuild a true self based on self-respect and tolerance of human errors and mistakes. My mother has advanced stages of dementia so if I had any lingering internal traces of a perfectionistic attitude since leaving the one and only perfect, true (false) cult on the planet, being a caretaker for years has cleansed my soul of that disease. It's a sure sign that I carry no trace of the cult with me into my true destiny.

After watching the video here on 'toxic perfection' with Spencer Kimball speaking to those in power today inside the cult, it was a searing reminder to me of how impressionable I was too as a young girl growing up inside that cult's teachings - never feeling adequate or good enough as I was - while constantly striving for more perfection in myself (and always coming up short.)

It's no wonder women suffer from self-esteem problems in the church to the extreme, and high rates of depression.

We can take heart that the times are changing. Maybe too slowly for our liking. The cult is losing ground, as people like us find the teachings empty built on false promises.

It takes a paradigm shift to align thinking in a different direction. The church needs to keep its members feeling inadequate in order to keep them bound.

Thanks for your insights on the dangers of perfectionism. Mormonism takes it to a whole 'nother level of what's toxic IMO.

It wasn't until a couple of years ago that I stumbled on the real meaning of the words, "perfect, or "perfected". An attorney had said that in the legal world, it simply means "whole", or "complete". It's not the toxic meaning of never being good enough or being the hamster on the wheel. IMO, when the word whole or complete is substituted for the word "perfect", you begin to see things very differently from the way you did before.

This is perhaps the best definition I've heard of to date.

Perfectionism was a driving force in my life from early on. And that drive to be perfect increased throughout my adult life until I folded. And I folded several times. I have generalized anxiety disorder and wonder how much the church exacerbated that problem. I know from reading responses to my posts that fear is the basis of anxiety. And perfectionism for me was one of the biggest fears of all. It was like a banner on the side of my wagon: "The Celestial Kingdom Or Bust." And bust meant complete and utter failure. Even after being out of the church for more than three years I still feel somewhat like a failure, though I'm getting better.

Well since one can never be good enough "in the church," it practically guarantees we'll fail by leaving it.

That's one of the holds the cult has over its members. The fear of failing at whatever one does. Yet it sets people up to fail by its untenable, unreachable, unmaintainable standards.

Guilt, fear, and shaming are powerful motivators it uses over its minions to keep them in line.

The striving for perfection in Mormonism probably has caused more despair, anxiety and self loathing than any other teaching. Kimball was a big proponent of striving for perfection in the 1970s. The doctrine does not seem to have been fully revoked. The BoM has a passage from 2nd Nephi "...for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do." We obviously can never do all. The Mormon hamster wheel has no good enough or off switch.

Wikipedia has the following:

A widely accepted interpretation of "The perfect is the enemy of the good" is that one might never complete a task if one has decided not to stop until it is perfect: completing the project well is made impossible by striving to complete it perfectly. Closely related is the Nirvana fallacy, in which people never even begin an important task because they feel reaching perfection is too hard. The original meaning may have been that attempts to improve something may actually make it worse, similar to the sentiment expressed in the maxim "leave well enough alone".

Last week I was on the Harvard shuttle bus, and I noticed a young man, apparently back from a Christian retreat or something. He was reviewing a teaching sheet titled, "Be Ye Therefore Perfect...eventually."

Nice take on the verse.

According to P. G. Wodehouse, the phrase was "Be ye therefore Prefect."

Perfectionism or the desire to be perfect is dangerous. Because it is not possible to be perfect and can cause mental illness and self-destruction. Jesus was not perfect i do not care what anybody says. To be perfect you have to be imperfect and jesus broke many laws and seen as a rebel hence not perfect for his time. The imperfect man or woman is farther along then the perfect one.

This. This whole post. It falls in perfectly with what I have been struggling with, 16-17 years post TSCC. The definition of perfect, was perfect. :) Gonna have to write it down!