Perfectionism Therapy for Women in Los Angeles
There's a voice that runs underneath everything you do, quietly grading it.
You could have been more patient. More prepared. More on top of it. It doesn't matter how much you actually got right today. That voice rarely says it was enough.
I offer therapy for perfectionism here in Valley Village and virtually throughout California, for women who can't remember the last time they felt like they were doing okay, even when everyone around them would say they were doing great.
Whether you are in Valley Village or anywhere across Los Angeles or California, we can work together to rebuild your sense of self-compassion.
When "Having It All Together" Is the Problem
Perfectionism often gets mistaken for a personality trait, or even a strength. In practice, it's frequently a coping strategy: if you can just be excellent enough, careful enough, prepared enough, nothing bad will happen and no one will be disappointed in you. That strategy can work for a while. It's also exhausting to maintain, and it tends to collapse under the relentless, shifting demands life places on women, whether that's career, motherhood, relationships, or all of it at once.
The cost isn't just how you feel. Perfectionism can make it hard to receive help, hard to let other people see you struggle, and hard to feel proud of anything you've done, because there's always a way it could have gone better.
Where Perfectionism Shows Up
Perfectionism tends to attach itself to whatever's demanding the most of you at any given time. For new mothers, it often shows up as pressure to bounce back and get it right immediately, which can intensify postpartum anxiety or postpartum depression.
For parents raising a child with additional needs, it can look like relentless advocacy that never feels like enough, something that comes up often on the special needs parenting support and neurodivergent parenting support pages. For women in midlife, it can resurface alongside the changes covered on the perimenopause anxiety page. And for many women, it shows up well outside of motherhood entirely, in career, relationships, or how you relate to your own body and choices. When perfectionism has worn you down to the point of depletion, my burnout therapy page speaks more directly to that exhaustion.
Wherever it's showing up for you, the pattern underneath tends to be the same: a belief that your worth depends on your performance.
Getting to the Root With EMDR
Most advice about perfectionism stops at reframing: lower your standards, practice self-compassion, let good enough be good enough. Those ideas are true, and they rarely stick, because they don't touch the belief underneath the perfectionism, the one that says you're only safe or acceptable when you're getting everything right.
For many of the women I work with, that belief didn't start with whatever's triggering it now. It started much earlier, often in childhood.
When that's the case, EMDR can be useful for processing the origin of that belief directly, so it carries less weight day to day, rather than just managing its symptoms in the moment. For others, the work is more present-focused: building a version of "good enough" you can actually sustain, and getting more comfortable with the discomfort of not being perfect.
Frequently asked questions about perfectionism therapy
IS PERFECTIONISM ACTUALLY SOMETHING A THERAPIST TREATS?
Perfectionism isn't a diagnosis on its own, but it's strongly linked to anxiety, depression, and burnout, and it responds well to therapy. If perfectionism is driving your self-criticism, your fear of falling short, or your inability to rest, that's absolutely something we can work on directly.
ISN'T PERFECTIONISM JUST HAVING HIGH STANDARDS? WHAT'S ACTUALLY WRONG WITH IT? High standards and perfectionism aren't the same thing. High standards let you feel satisfied when you meet them. Perfectionism keeps moving the goalpost, so satisfaction rarely arrives, even when you've done well by any reasonable measure.
HOW IS THIS DIFFERENT FROM BURNOUT THERAPY?
Perfectionism is often what's driving the burnout in the first place, the belief system underneath the exhaustion. If you're mainly feeling depleted and running on empty, my burnout therapy page may be the better starting point. If it's more about the inner critic and the fear of not being enough, this page is likely the closer fit. Many women find the two are connected and end up working on both.
WHAT DOES THE WORK ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE?
It depends on where the perfectionism is rooted. Some of it is present-day: identifying the specific beliefs driving your self-criticism and practicing tolerating imperfection. Some of it goes further back, using EMDR to process where the belief that you have to be perfect originally took hold.
