Today, 20 April 2008

Yesterday, 19 April 2008

Question
Where can I get information regarding obsessive-compulsive personality disorder?

I want to read more about it on the web.

Answer
I presume you've already tried the search engines.

If you do, you'll probably end up in fairly academic websites, because this type of diagnosis is not one that people tend to appropriate for themselves. In other words, you're not likely to find a website where people congregate to talk about the problems and support each other!

Although, you may find people talking about "Type A personality" who seem to be occupying the same sort of territory: controlling, driven, emotionally distant, inclined to put organisation in itself ahead of the reasons for getting organised, and so on.

First of all: let's be clear that this problem is one that develops over a lifetime and which involves many aspects of behaviour, emotion, thinking and attitude. It is NOT related to "obsessive-compulsive disorder" or OCD which is a very specific anxiety disorder with rituals (see our archives for more on OCD).

A person who battles with disturbing thoughts and compulsive rituals to ward off those thoughts has OCD; he or she may or may not have the kind of personality which could be labelled "obsessive-compulsive".

The textbooks will further tell you that this personality disorder is principally about the struggle for perfection. It is a struggle which can come to influence everything (or nearly everything) a person does, and not only those things they do themselves but also the things other people do around them.

Perfection, as it happens, is not easily or ever achieved, so the outcome of this unsuccessful struggle is likely to be a great deal of dissatisfaction, complaining, a critical spirit towards others and a tendency to reject things as not being good enough.

Pleasure becomes a very scarce commodity in such a life.

Ironically enough, the struggle for perfect completion, for every last i to be dotted and t crossed, has the very opposite result — all too often it is disastrously inefficient.

Knowing that defeat is inevitable, the veteran perfectionist may try to avoid the hopeless struggle by putting things off, especially the most important things.

These are the list-makers, the drawers-up of long tables of rules and regulations and schedules, which always run behind.

They can easily become prisoners of their own rules, unable to bend even when logic itself tells them it's time to let go.

Perfectionism tends to recruit people into focusing very intensely on work and achievement, leaving relationships and even personal pleasure neglected. The idea of "going with the flow" is impossible, but on the other hand, indecisiveness and postponing may hinder progress.

Because of the lack of practice, it can become difficult to talk about feelings or even to be aware of them, certainly in a personal way. The most likely things to get this person stoked up would be moral issues, the way things "should be" and keeping the rules.

As a spouse, a boss or a parent, they may seem unavailable, chilly, rigid and critical.

In a social or working environment which actively encourages perfectionism, it can be difficult to stop its rampage through a person's life, their work, their health and their family.

But life also presents frequent opportunities to break with perfectionism, including such things as falling in love and then having to make a relationship work, colleagues we find irritating, and parenting (thank heavens for toddlers — they are mighty freedom fighters in the war against perfectionism).

Because most people (individually and collectively) have a complex relationship with perfectionism and control, I'm not keen on labels like "obsessive-compulsive personality" which make out that the problem exists solely inside a person's head.

Such labels cannot inspire a person to break away from habits which may have a lifelong claim on them, instead they seem to speak of hopelessness. What could be worse than to have a "personality" that is defective?

What better way to write someone off?

So, when you do your research, I hope you'll be able to come across information that helps you to understand this problem without entering into that same critical, chilly and "distanced" relationship to the problem... few of us have completely escaped the influence of perfectionism and drive — whether we conform to it or rebel against it.