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For five years The Healthy Compulsive Project has been offering information, insight and inspiration for OCPD, obsessive-compulsive personality, perfectionism, micro-managers and Type A personality. Anyone who’s ever been known to overwork, overplan, overcontrol or overanalyze is welcome here, where the obsessive-compulsive personality is explored and harnessed to deliver what it was originally meant to deliver. Join psychotherapist, Jungian psychoanalyst and author Gary Trosclair as he delves into the pitfalls and potential of the driven personality with an informative, positive, and often playful approach to this sometimes-vexing character style.
Gary Trosclair here, psychotherapist, Jungian analyst and author of the healthy compulsive project book, blog and podcast. Do you find it easy to get close to people? Or do you prefer to keep your distance even when you are around them? If so, this could be more than just natural, healthy introversion. If your parents were cold or inconsistent when you were young, you may have developed a default strategy that lead you to avoid close connections with others. We call this avoidant attachment. And for people born with obsessive-compulsive personality traits, the combination of perfectionism and avoidant attachment may lead to obsessive-compulsive personality disorder—a condition characterized by a need for control, perfection and order. In this case, discomfort with other people may lead you to focus on other things like work, cleanliness and planning—things that feel much more within your control than people do. Join me for an exploration of the inner workings of these two conditions and what impact their combination has on our daily lives.
This is episode 33 of the healthy compulsive project podcast: does avoidant attachment cause obsessive-compulsive personality disorder?
According to a study published in 2017, if you have avoidant attachment, that is, if you have trouble trusting that you can depend on other people and don’t allow yourself to get close, you’re more likely to development obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD).
Avoidant attachment is usually the result of unavailable, inconsistent, and insensitive parenting. There is no doubt that such parenting leads a child to become anxious.
But not everyone who experiences deficit parenting develops OCPD. The essential question is, how does each unique child cope with the anxiety caused by their unreliable parents?
The Intersection of Compulsive Personality Style and Avoidant Attachment
Obsessive-compulsive symptoms such as control, perfectionism, and planning, together constitute a particular way that some people try to cope with their anxiety. Those born with perfectionistic, meticulous and determined natures are more likely to use those traits to deal with their anxiety about relationships.
Others not born with those traits find other ways to handle their anxiety, such as clinging to other people, presenting as a victim, seduction, manipulation, or turning to sex, drugs, and rock and roll to feel comfort.
If you don’t feel secure in relationships, and you were born with compulsive traits, you are more likely to turn those potentially healthy compulsive traits (like high energy and scrupulosity), into unhealthy compulsive tendencies (like work addiction and judgementalism). You lean too heavily on getting stuff done and perfectionism, and you neglect relationships and your own well-being.
A Disorder of Priorities
In other words, your potentially adaptive traits no longer serve a meaningful order of priorities. The purposes they might have served such as passions, compassion, and self-development, are lost. These traits become disordered.
Thus, the diagnosis obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.
But the obsessive-compulsive personality is not necessarily disordered, it can be part of an effective and satisfying approach to life.
But if you have avoidant attachment, it’s more likely that your obsessive-compulsive traits become disordered as you use them to deal with your insecurity about relationships.
Here’s how this happens.
How Compulsive Personality and Avoidant Attachment Interact
At least three things can happen if you have natural compulsive tendencies overlaid with avoidant attachment:
Projects Over People. You invest your natural energy and meticulousness more into work and projects than investing in people because it feels safer. (By projects I mean anything from saving the world to loading the dishwasher PROPERLY.) Even if you aren’t aware of this tendency to prioritize work, you might feel you need to do it in order to avoid getting close and getting hurt. Some people work long hours because they’re passionate about their work, but others may do it because it feels safer to avoid starting or deepening relationships.
Proving Goodness To Get Respect. Because you're insecure you try to prove your worth to other people and yourself by being perfect and gaining their respect. This is a compromise: you may not feel comfortable allowing yourself to feel really close to other people, but you do want their respect.
Dismissing and Comparing. Avoidant attachment style in adults is also sometimes described as avoidant/dismissive attachment style. People with this style may dismiss others as irrelevant to prove that they don’t need them, and that they are better than them. The conscientiousness that is characteristic of the compulsive personality morphs into critical righteousness.
Let me give you an example of what this can look like in real life.
Example: Susan Detaches to Cope With Disappointment
Susan grew up in a stable but cold family. Both parents were busy and had no time for affection, emotional support, or any of the attention kids need to thrive. When Susan tried to get attention she was dismissed as needy and inconsiderate. The only time she did get noticed was when she straightened out the house or brought home straight A's. The small bits of begrudging attention she did get were conditional and distant.
She eventually coped by not making trouble and by not caring about emotional connection. It was better to avoid hope than to keep experiencing disappointment.
She also coped by succeeding in her academic work. It came naturally to her and won her the respect of teachers and peers.
Susan did get married, but it was a distant marriage. They lived in the same house, but emotionally they were miles away from each other. They both had avoidant attachment and so it sort of worked for them. Sort of.
They both avoided the kind of true emotional intimacy that comes with being vulnerable by exposing our emotions, and by allowing the other person to be profoundly important to us.
Sacrificing Love for Respect
While she preferred having distance from people, Susan still needed them to think well of her. They might not love her, but she would make darn sure they’d respect her.
She worked overtime in her job as an assistant principal at a private high school, solving problems and commanding respect. She also volunteered at her church a great deal, taking leadership and serving on committees.
While she had a reputation for being difficult, rigid, and bossy, she was also well-known as a stalwart that was always there to deal with problems. She was a fixer.
And the local savior. Sensing what was going on with her, the pastor at her church reminded her that the church already had a Savior. But she wasn’t convinced that if she didn’t take care of it, He would.
She sometimes resented the role, but it was an important part of her psychic economy: it helped her to feel more secure. She felt needed, but at a safe distance. She tried to control what others thought of her by being obsessive and compulsive.
Burnout and Further Withdrawal
Eventually though, Susan began to burn out and decided it was time for a change. While she would not have used the word "compulsive," she knew that there was something unusual about the way she attacked life. It was time to stop fighting, let go and slow down.
She didn’t want the pressure anymore.
She retired from her job (relatively early), and cut back on her participation at church. Seeing no need to be social, she worked at reviving her garden, took up speed-walking, and finally started cooking healthily.
It didn’t work.
She still felt pressure coming from inside, and there was nothing gratifying coming from outside to soothe that.
It wasn’t that she didn’t have things to do. It was more that her new projects didn’t give her the respect she needed and it was anxiety provoking. Worse, it felt empty. Maybe she needed people more than she had thought.
She had changed her behavior, and even some of her thinking. But her basic insecurity wasn’t touched by the changes she'd made.
A Modest, But Meaningful Shift
There isn’t a simple “happily ever after” ending to this story. Things rarely change so dramatically. But attention and intention can lead to an ongoing, gradual shift that leaves us feeling better.
Susan’s default inclination to seek respect more than closeness never went away completely. But with awareness she was able to override that default at times and take more chances in relationships.
To actually feel better Susan had to stare down the anxiety she experienced as she stopped trying to prove that she was OK.
On the one hand, she could look back on the service she gave over the last 25 years and say, “See what I did? I must not be so bad! I can’t be such a worthless person!” But more importantly she needed to recognize that, like most humans, she had basic goodness--even when she wasn’t obsessively fixing and serving.
And she had to risk a little closeness. She needed it after all.
Relationships Revisited--Minus The Controlling Perfection
Psychotherapy gave her a place to experiment with acknowledging that she wasn't perfect, and with allowing someone to have a little importance in her life. Susan would not have dared put it this way, but the relationship with her therapist itself was healing.
Over time her conversations with others were marked less by what was wrong with the world and more about what she felt, enjoyed and struggled with. She tried to dismiss others less and to be more curious about their feelings and ideas. She tried less to impress others with her conscientiousness, and more to reveal and express herself.
This led to both disappointment and gratification. But even the disappointments were helpful because she developed real resilience when she realized the disappointments wouldn’t kill her. And the gratifying experiences encouraged her. Sometimes it was worth it to take the chance of getting close.
And she didn’t have to be perfect or controlling to do it.