The prospect of social interaction, whether it actually happens or not, can trigger it. Any time I start a project (including assignments at university), go back to edit something, and it doesn’t meet my standards, I get quite severe self-deprecating feelings.
For the second one I managed to mitigate it by changing my working process to something more iterative and focused on meeting the minimum requirements before optimizing. I still have not found a remotely serviceable solution for the social interaction problems, and the feedback loops there are more destructive too. At least with the perfectionism problem I can move to another project to help restore some of my self-esteem.
It’s easy to be sympathetic with these two scenarios—I get frustrated with myself, often enough. Would it be helpful to discuss an example of what your thoughts are before a social interaction or in one of the feedback loops? I’m not really sure how I’d be able to help, though… Maybe your thoughts are thoughts like anyone would have: “shoot! I shouldn’t have said it that way, now they’ll think...” but with more extreme emotions. If so, my (naive) suggestion would be something like meditation toward the goal of being able to observe that you are having a certain thought/reaction but not identify with it.
The prospect of social interaction, whether it actually happens or not, can trigger it. Any time I start a project (including assignments at university), go back to edit something, and it doesn’t meet my standards, I get quite severe self-deprecating feelings.
For the second one I managed to mitigate it by changing my working process to something more iterative and focused on meeting the minimum requirements before optimizing. I still have not found a remotely serviceable solution for the social interaction problems, and the feedback loops there are more destructive too. At least with the perfectionism problem I can move to another project to help restore some of my self-esteem.
It’s easy to be sympathetic with these two scenarios—I get frustrated with myself, often enough. Would it be helpful to discuss an example of what your thoughts are before a social interaction or in one of the feedback loops? I’m not really sure how I’d be able to help, though… Maybe your thoughts are thoughts like anyone would have: “shoot! I shouldn’t have said it that way, now they’ll think...” but with more extreme emotions. If so, my (naive) suggestion would be something like meditation toward the goal of being able to observe that you are having a certain thought/reaction but not identify with it.