The Healthy Compulsive Project:

Meditation for Type A personality, and people who are driven or obsessive-compulsive, might seem like a bridge too far. They might like the idea of the rewards of meditation, but they often find the process itself discouraging or even off-putting for a number of reasons. It might feel foreign to their nature and even contradictory to their principles. These hesitancies…

Earth Day blew by recently so I started thinking about how spending time in Nature can help heal unhealthy compulsive tendencies. And it occurred to me, the activity we need the most is often the activity that we don’t bother doing. There’s an increasing amount of research which suggests that spending at least two hours each week engaging with nature…

How do I move past creative blocks? Many people get stuck and aren’t able to complete creative projects. But this can be particularly disturbing for people with obsessive-compulsive personality (OCP) and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD). Because, as I see it, creativity springs from compulsion. There is something you need to do, but with a creative block you can’t. The word…

Let’s take a break from formal clinical studies and approach the subject of compulsive perfectionism through the lens of Disney’s animated film Encanto. Encanto demonstrates the transformation from unhealthy compulsive to healthy compulsive at least as effectively as any medical description. A transformation that requires us to recall the original intent of perfectionism. And let’s not turn up our noses…

If you’re a Type A, driven, perfectionist, high-achieving, or obsessive-compulsive parent, you’re probably just as committed to great parenting as you are to achieving in other areas. What is Type A parenting like? Type A parenting, at the far end of a continuum, is characterized by urgency, assertiveness, and competitiveness. At the other end of the continuum there are possible…

It was another one of those nights. You dreamt you were going back to school, and not only were you supposed to take an exam you hadn’t studied for, you also couldn’t find your clothes. So now you’re thinking, why am I having anxiety dreams? In short, they bring our attention to things we’ve been trying to ignore, they help…

Living under the constant judgement of an overactive guilt complex can keep us from living a fulfilled life and even cause severe depression. But, first, what is a guilt complex?  A healthy guilt complex (and yes, there is a such thing*) is a part of your psychology that helps you to take responsibility for mistakes you’ve made, and keeps you…

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) have some similarities that can make them difficult to distinguish. But they are fundamentally different and it’s important to recognize the differences in order to understand yourself or others. Typically, and greatly simplifying, while those with NPD typically need to feel special, those with OCPD need to escape accusations from themselves…

Britt-Marie Was Here. So what? What difference does it make if a 63-year-old divorced woman with obvious psychological and interpersonal challenges shows up in a small, dying town? Lots. The author of Britt-Marie Was Here, Fredrik Backman, gave us a feel for what it’s like to be on the inside of the obsessive-compulsive personality in a previous novel, A Man…

In my last post I wrote about how people with obsessive and compulsive traits try to avoid anxiety by controlling the people and world around them. In this post I’ll focus on how they try to avoid anxiety by controlling themselves. This creates problems that are just as serious, such as repressing feelings, not even being aware of them, and…