It's time to stop trying to be perfect, psychologist says

Psychologist Alice Domar said self-imposed pressure makes dealing with everything from eating disorders to infertility more difficult for women. (Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff)

After more than 20 years of studying women's health issues, psychologist Alice Domar has come to a grand conclusion: Women are just too hard on themselves.

There is no pill that will cure this self-imposed pressure - which Domar says creates harmful stress and makes dealing with everything from eating disorders to infertility more difficult.

People will take pills, Domar says. That's easy. What's hard is to get women to accept what she says is obvious to men: Perfection is not attainable.

Domar, 49, has built a career out of encouraging women to take time for themselves and satisfy their own needs, which she says runs contrary to their natural inclination toward caring for others. In 1987, she founded the Mind/Body Infertility Program at what was then New England Deaconess Hospital, the first program of its type to focus on the impact of stress on women's health conditions and to promote self-nurturance as a way to combat the problem.

"She has a sixth sense about the emotional component in health issues," said Melissa Freizinger, a psychologist who works with eating disorder patients. "She's great at zeroing in on what women need and trying to help them manage their lives better, and she makes it doable for busy working women. A lot of it comes from what she's anecdotally observed in her patients, and that's the success of her programs. We couldn't prove why so many of her patients got pregnant, but she had these amazing numbers, much higher than women who went through in vitro fertilization."

Domar, who is executive director of the Domar Center for Mind/Body Health in Waltham and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, said she was one of those kids who always wanted to be a doctor. By age 13, she was spending all of her free time volunteering as a candy-striper at Emerson Hospital. Then, when she was 14, she had to have dental surgery at the hospital and, despite the fact that she knew everyone there and was confident in their abilities, she was very scared. So she decided that she would devote herself not to what was wrong with patients, but how they were coping with what was wrong.

In her work studying how people cope with medical problems, she found distinct gender lines.

"Women look in the mirror and they focus on the imperfections," she said. "Guys look in the mirror and say, 'Not bad.' So I wanted to figure out a way to help women ease up, to feel comfortable self-nurturing even if they don't feel they deserve it. I'm not talking about women with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Garden variety women are just too hard on themselves. When they open a drawer or a closet and see clutter, they feel like a failure."

Helping women to ease up on that self-pressure is the goal of her new book, "Be Happy Without Being Perfect: How to Break Free from the Perception Deception." On shelves March 5, the book is part self-help, part laywoman's guide to the science of perfection studies, and part attack on the Martha Stewarts of the world who have created an image of perfection that Domar views as a dangerous fantasy.

To help deliver this message - both in the book and with her patients - Domar will often use herself as an example. She's got a doctorate and a successful career, sure. But she lives in a "cluttered but clean" reality with two young kids and a puppy. And, she says, that's perfectly OK.

"I work with a lot of cancer patients, and they don't sweat it if there are dishes in the sink or they gain 5 pounds," she said. "But you shouldn't have to go through something like that to wake up."

She said she once horrified a group of women at a lecture when she explained that, earlier that day, she found she had some free time and instead of picking up her daughter an hour earlier, she decided to spend that hour by herself.

"There are women who sacrifice for their children to a pathological degree, and forget about themselves," she said. "If getting takeout pizza for the kids will give you a little bit of time for yourself, that can be a good thing.

"Everything doesn't have to be 100 percent. Look in the mirror, and instead of focusing on what's wrong, find something you like. It will make you healthier and happier."

Hometown: Grew up in Concord; lives in Sudbury

Education: Bachelor's in biology and psychology from Colby College in 1980; doctorate in health psychology from Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Ferkauf School of Professional Psychology in 1986.

Family: Husband, David Ostrow, 49, works in textbook publishing; daughters, Sarah, 12, and Katie, 7.

Hobbies: She enjoys baking with her daughters and taking them to see musicals; she travels as much as she can.