Explore practical insights and nuanced strategies for working with clients who have obsessive-compulsive personality traits. Drawing on 33 years of experience, this post addresses common challenges, misconceptions, and ways to foster meaningful change—while offering a behind-the-scenes look for those in therapy.
This essay explores how perfectionist and obsessive-compulsive personalities construct “fortresses” to avoid humiliation, embarrassment, and shame. Through vivid stories and cultural examples—from Steve Jobs to Michael Jackson—it identifies four compulsive types (Boss, Workaholic, People-Pleaser, and Obsessor) and shows how their strategies both protect and imprison them.
A related and more specific unhealthy motivation that can seize people who are obsessive-compulsive and perfectionist is trying to avoid humiliation, embarrassment and shame. It’s a very limiting life strategy.
The very common but unrecognized disease of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) has a long and inglorious history—though they didn’t call it that 3000 years ago. They would have called it hubris, because the people who had this disease believed they knew everything and had the gall to try to control everything.
But they also had Anake to help them with this problem. When people recognized the goddess of compulsion and fate, they chilled out and let go of their fantasies of control. But while we might be familiar with Zeus, Apollo, and Dionysus, today we are oblivious to Ananke, and the limits she imposes. But these limits don’t go away.
And in our efforts to avoid them we become diseased.
Perfectionism distances us rather than connecting us. There’s always something wrong with the world, so we give it the cold shoulder and go our merry way. But this actually causes alienation, that vague but ever-present sense that we are at odds with the world around us and that it’s a dangerous place. We don’t belong and it makes us anxious. As if an imperfect world could never be our world.
To make a dent in the pile of material you might feel you have to read to be up on the most recent developments in mental health, here’s a practical review of the relatively new approach to therapy called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, with brief examples of how to apply it. Because one of the main goals of ACT is flexibility, it can be very helpful to anyone struggling with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), or to those just challenged by some obsessive-compulsive traits, perfectionism, workaholism, or Type A personality.
Seriousness is an occupational hazard for obsessive-compulsives, Type A’s and perfectionists. Being serious can hurt relationships, mental health and physical health. Yet many of us feel duty-bound to be serious and we lose out on the benefits of humor and laughter–which can melt the rigidity which comes with being serious.
How do we know if we are micromanaging? If you constantly look over someone’s shoulder, give them detailed instructions, distrust them, and make mountains out of molehills, it will discourage creativity, diminish morale, and disrupt relationships. It may even lead to them ignoring you. It brings about the opposite of your desired effect. Productivity, responsibility and ingenuity all decrease. It’s like trying to break a horse to train it. Instead we need to macromanage, to consider the larger picture of our values and priorities.
How do perfectionist and compulsive traits shape fatherhood? This post explores the challenges and opportunities for the obsessive father—how those traits can either alienate or elevate, harm or heal. Learn how self-awareness, values, and mindset can help fathers navigate the line between heroic and harmful.
Is burying the past holding you back? Most of us live as if we are still in the past without being aware of it. Discover how understanding your personal history can help you reclaim buried strengths, rewrite limiting stories, and live more freely in the present.
Insecurity is often the cause of people becoming unhealthy compulsives rather than healthy compulsives. It’s as if life were a test and, fearing we will fail, we resort to rules, rigidity and control to prevent failure. It can be so prevalent, yet so hard to see, that it’s like the air we breathe. But rather than trying desparately to pass the test, we can take a pass on the test, and adopt ways of living that have more meaning.
The Healthy Compulsive book is now available in paperback in addition to hardcover and e-book format:
Healthy Compulsive Book
© 2025 · Gary Trosclair, The Healthy Compulsive Project