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The Healthy Compulsive Project: Help for OCPD, Workaholics, Obsessives, & Type A PersonalityThe Healthy Compulsive Project: Help for OCPD, Workaholics, Obsessives, & Type A Personality
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flexibility

Seven Ways to Achieve More Flexibility in Your Relationships

January 20, 2021 Posted by Gary Trosclair 4 Comments

Occasionally I come across a study that sheds so much light on the struggles that compulsives face that it seems made for people with OCPD (obsessive-compulsive personality disorder). One such study recently highlighted the importance of flexibility in promoting healthy relationships between partners, and with their children.

The study measured family discord by surveying 742 parents across the U.S. in April 2020, which of course was early in the COVID pandemic. The research was conducted by psychologists at the University of Rochester to see how inflexibility impacted stress during the pandemic.

Here’s one of their conclusions: “Higher levels of parent inflexibility were predictive of higher levels of family discord (i.e., family chaos/discord and parenting burden), higher levels of coparenting discord (i.e., coparent conflict, coparent triangulation, and coparent disagreement) and lower levels of family cohesion, suggesting that parents engaging rigid and inflexible responses to difficult and challenging experiences might sow discord into the broader family environment, particularly in the midst of a pandemic.”

On the other hand: “Parent flexibility was predictive of greater family cohesion, lower family discord, and greater use of constructive parenting. Thus, these results highlight that although parental psychological flexibility might not have served to reduce the overall stress parents faced in the early stages of the pandemic, it seemed to promote kinder and more compassionate and supportive interactions at all levels of family functioning.”

So if you want to from ripping your family apart you’ll need to loosen up. For that matter, if you want your relationship to stay in one piece, you’ll need to loosen up.

Contents

  • But What About Standing Up For What’s “Right?”
  • Letting Go: A Personal Example
  • The Importance of Choosing What’s Most Important
  • Being Right About Being “Right”
  • Ralph Spends the Family Fortune
  • How to Be More Flexible in Your Relationship

But What About Standing Up For What’s “Right?”

But this isn’t so simple for people with compulsive tendencies. (This includes people with OCPD, obsessives and perfectionists as well, but for short I refer to compulsives). To compulsives, being correct is a greater virtue than flexibility. We aren’t adamant about something just to be rigid, but because it seems like the right thing, the conscientious thing, to do.

Compulsives often feel responsible for making sure that things don’t go wrong.  We’re naturally more meticulous, future-oriented, and risk averse. And all of those tendencies serve a very important function in relationships.

But we need to be smart about how we use these tendencies. Without flexibility, they hurt more than help.

Before we go on, a caveat: no one should tolerate abuse. If you are being hurt you should not be flexible about that. In this piece I’m addressing the compulsive folks who usually find it hard to be flexible, especially the leader/teacher type.

Letting Go: A Personal Example

When I was first training as a psychoanalyst my supervisor told me that I should never allow clients to reschedule sessions, and that they should always be billed for their regular session time, even if they didn’t attend. Even though it didn’t seem completely right to me, I wasn’t going to let my weakness get in the way of doing the “right” thing, or of being the most helpful analyst I could possibly be.  Even if that meant being rigid.

There are good reasons to have a policy like the one my supervisor insisted on. But there are better reasons to be more accommodating at times.

Thankfully, my clients indirectly educated me and I developed a more reasonable, more flexible, policy that I felt addressed the concerns my supervisor held. But at first, taking a strong stand on it seemed like the “right” thing to do to help my clients. In the long run, I had to decide what was most important and most effective in helping them.

The Importance of Choosing What’s Most Important

This conflict between flexibility and doing the “right” thing is one reason that I often harp on the importance of being clear about what’s most important. In order to override the less healthy aspects of a compulsive personality, we need to recall what our values are.

For instance, telling a child that they should eat well, study hard and practice the bassoon five hours a day is important. But conveying that they are loved unconditionally is more important and will serve them well their entire lives. This doesn’t mean anything goes, but it does mean that while it might seem like being inflexible is the “right” thing to do for your child, other values may need to override the “right” thing.

Similarly, maintaining a good relationship with your partner requires more flexibility than it does standing up for what’s “right.” If they’re occasionally late for a date, is berating them for that more important than having a good time? Is making sure that your partner is impeccably dressed more important than them feeling relaxed and loved? Is maintaining a strict budget more important than having peace in your home?

Being Right About Being “Right”

Now that I’ve put “right” in quotation marks about ten times you’re probably either getting really annoyed or getting the point: “right” is a relative thing. The “right” thing becomes the wrong thing in different circumstances. To really be right you need to be flexible.

Even if you’re “right” in some objective way, it doesn’t mean you are right, because you’re going to ruin your relationship if you don’t loosen up.    Another one of my supervisors, a much more flexible one, illustrated the dire results of a rigid approach: “The operation was a success, even though the patient died.” Doing the “right” thing in one circumstance can lead to disaster in another.

Ralph Spends the Family Fortune

Let’s imagine Ralph and Rolanda. Ralph knows for sure that Costco has the best prices on frozen lasagna. He and Rolanda are on a budget so of course it makes sense to him for her to make the trip to Costco to get the cheaper lasagna. Rolanda didn’t do that, though. She went to the closest grocery store and paid three dollars more so she’d have more time at home with the family. But she had already made four other even more expensive purchases this month. Ralph was “right:” she spent more money than she needed to.

But Ralph wasn’t being very flexible, and the emotional price the entire family paid when the screaming started was far greater than the total $92.37 he criticized her for.

“Still,” I hear the Ralphs of the world say, “What are we supposed to do, go into debt?”

Well, maybe, maybe not. There are worse things than debt. Like divorce, divorce attorneys, and divorce attorney bills. Not to mention medical problems such as Alzheimer’s made worse by stress.

Even if you do need to draw a financial line, your words, tone and attitude can convey the really important thing: you care about your future together. Too often compulsives fail to communicate the reasons behind their adamant stances. And too often when they do, it still has that “holier-than-thou” tone.

How to Be More Flexible in Your Relationship

We become rigid when we’re anxious and feel a need to control what happens. We like to think that it’s about principles, but it’s often an attempt to avoid anxiety. If you feel responsible for making sure that things don’t go wrong, it could make you anxious and therefore more inflexible.  It’s best to face down the anxiety and admit that you can’t determine all outcomes, rather than try to avoid it with rigid control. That will get you more of what you want.

So here are seven things to keep in mind if you want to be more flexible in your relationship, and if peace in your home is important to you:

 

  • Remain curious about your partner’s experience and thoughts. Just pause. You don’t have to agree or disagree right away. Give yourself points every time you stop and listen to your partner’s point of view.

 

  • Think outside of the box: things don’t have to be a certain way unless your anxiety forces you to believe your fears.

 

  • Inflexibility is often the result of trying to prevent an unlikely future. When we believe that it’s imperative to prevent something from happening we become trapped in rigidity. It’s not worth the energy.

 

  • Accept what’s out of your control. Perseverance is not always a virtue.

 

  • Choose your battles: let them have what’s important to them at least half the time.

 

  • Ask, what’s best in this circumstance?

 

  • When you do need to stand up for something, communicate that it isn’t because you’re right, it’s because you care.

 

Being flexible is really the right thing to do. It doesn’t mean you’re weak. And it doesn’t mean you don’t care. It means you’re smart about how you care.

For more insights about struggles in relationships, read my series of posts about Rescuers, Victims & Persecutors in Relationships with Compulsives. For 19 suggestions about parenting click here. 

 

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  • Mythoughts
    · Reply

    March 7, 2021 at 10:46 PM

    Hi, I go to your site sometimes and I was thinking about this article while reading it. In my opinion, some of this is about the issue of different value systems and hidden motives that even the involved parties themselves may not recognise. So for example, if I am in a relationship and I get accused of wanting to just be right, it would not be because my main motive is to want to be right, it’s because the other person has an underlying motive of pushing their own agenda. Even without being aware of that necessarily. So for example with Ralph and Rolanda I would imagine it could go down like this: Ralph is concerned about not being able to pay debts and it’s a valid concern – because a regular overspending of 90 dollars can indeed be too much for a tight budget, and the money could also be spent better, on more fun things for the whole family for example -, but Rolanda isn’t good with money and her main agenda in the resulting argument is that she is concerned about her comfort and genuinely doesn’t understand that the budget really is tight. So she gets upset and feels like her husband doesn’t care when this argument happens. As for how Ralph should respond to this issue. To me it’s not a good argument that he should give in to his wife’s upset simply because divorce lawyers are expensive because to me an objective, practical issue of finances shouldn’t be mixed up with relationship status and emotional matters. To me, it’s a basic thing to be able to just manage finances and be responsible about it enough. So what Ralph could do is set time aside and patiently explain and help Rolanda deduce that the finances are too tight for her to want that comfort. She can find some other way to relax and feel comfortable instead, after expending the effort to go to the shop that’s at a further distance. Ralph should not give in to drama over practical considerations just because his wife is upset and emotional. Both parties in a relationship should focus on improvement in things, not just the “rigid one”. So for example a solution can be that Rolanda understands the necessity for saving on the price of food, and find a compromise on having her relaxation and comfort in some other, less expensive way, and then if Rolanda doesn’t want to deal with counting the pennies, she can also agree to Ralph giving her a very specific amount of money so she doesn’t even get the temptation to overspend. That is an example of a solution without having to put it all on bad personality traits of the “rigid one”.

    • Gary Trosclair
      · Reply

      Author
      March 8, 2021 at 8:21 AM

      Good point. I agree, and I can be flexible about this too! As you point out, how Ralph explains it can make a lot of difference. And it seems to me that you are making a very nuanced argument here: Ralph is consciously deciding when to stick to his guns, he is not just taking a position that he is “right” by default. I think that what you suggested is actually a flexible approach in that Ralph tries to find other ways for Rolanda to be happy. Money management is one of the things that compulsives are good at. I think it depends on the actual family situation, while for some $90 isn’t worth fighting over, for others it is a lot of money. Perhaps the common ground here is that neither party should assume an inflexible position, either the one with OCPD, or the partner who might consistently blame the OCPD partner.

  • M
    · Reply

    July 2, 2021 at 2:35 PM

    Many good points in your post. Thank-you.
    Take a situation where both Ralph and Rolanda have perfectionistic tendencies, perhaps OCPD. Ralph is 65 and has had untreated hypertension for at least 8 years, and refuses to take medication. Rolanda is a medical professional and has many ideas for ways Ralph could lower his blood pressure even without medication. Ralph is taking some measures, very slowly, in his own way, but not enough to lower his blood pressure. Rolanda is concerned for Ralph’s health, wishing to have a long active life together. She also realizes that if Ralph has a stroke and becomes disabled, she will be his caretaker. She’s concerned she’ll feel resentful since Ralph didn’t heed her warnings. Ralph is likely to feel badly not just because of his disability but also regretful that he didn’t take stronger action sooner. Rolanda feels good that she is able to make a small difference in Ralph’s life. Of course, we will all age and become less healthy in some way, and die, but when the dangers are so clearly known, as in hypertension, how much ‘flexibility’ should Rolanda convey? Of course Rolanda should manage her own anxiety and express herself lovingly but the cost is so high if his bp stays high, how much should she let go? She knows she causes Ralph more stress by always being ‘on him’ about his hypertension. Over time, she becomes obsessed with leaving him. The disruption and grief from ending a long-term relationship would also be very harmful to health and happiness. How can Rolanda find peace here?

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