The Obsessive-Compulsive Types
Can you imagine a vampire who drains you by working hard, being conscientious, and always doing the right thing? I’m sure you can, if an Obsessive-Compulsive has ever caught you making an insignificant mistake or going out to play before all the work was done. Obsessive-Compulsives are the living embodiment of too much of a good thing. In their world, no mistake is insignificant, and all the work is never done.
These vampires have characteristics of Obsessive-Compulsive personality disorder. In the minds of the public, this is hopelessly confused with Obsessive-Compulsive disorder, which is a brain dysfunction characterized by ritual repetitions, such as hand washing and door locking.
Obsessive-Compulsive disorder probably involves some disruption in brain chemistry and is often treated with medication. An Obsessive-Compulsive personality is a pattern of overly rigid and detail-oriented thoughts and actions that typically doesn’t respond to drugs. To make things more confusing, obsessive-compulsive disorder sometimes occurs in people with obsessive-compulsive personalities.
Colloquially, people often speak of being “a little OCD” when they mean having a slight tendency toward the place for everything and everything in its place characteristics of Obsessive-Compulsive personality. This is almost as annoying to people in the field as calling Histrionics who act as if they had two competing personalities “schizophrenic.” As you can already see, dealing effectively with Obsessive-Compulsives means keeping your details straight. You might also see that most professionals are a bit Obsessive-Compulsive.
The engine that runs both the disorder and the personality is fear. Obsessive-Compulsives are deathly afraid of doing anything wrong. To them, the smallest crack in their perfect facade leaves them open and vulnerable to all the seeping horrors of the universe.
Obsessive-Compulsives see their existence as a battle against the forces of chaos. Their weapons are hard work, adherence to rules, scrupulous attention to detail, and the capacity to delay gratification into the next life if need be.
Without Obsessive-Compulsives to do the unpleasant and painstaking tasks that make the world go, nations would fall, businesses would grind to a halt, and households would collapse into utter confusion. At least, that’s what these vampires think, and it may well be true. We do need them. We trust in their honesty, we depend on their ability, and we rely on their tireless effort. You could almost believe that we’re the ones who drain them. There is, however, more to the story.
Obsessive-Compulsives want to create a secure world by making everybody Obsessive-Compulsive. Only then can they be safe from themselves.
Here’s their secret: inside every Obsessive-Compulsive is an Antisocial trying to claw its way out. These overly conscientious vampires distract themselves from the scrabblings and scrapings of the unacceptable creature within by keeping their hearts in the right place and their noses to the grindstone. The internal battle is too terrifying for them to face, so they force their gaze outward—at you. As long as Obsessive-Compulsives are protecting you from your base impulses, they never have to look at their own.
Imagine your entire future riding on a single critical action—an examination, a presentation, a sports event, or perhaps a job interview. You can’t stop thinking about it. You go over every detail to make sure it’s perfect, punctuating your thoughts with jolts of adrenaline when you envision making a mistake. One part of Obsessive-Compulsive consciousness is this sort of incessant anxiety over even the smallest of performances.
For the other part, picture yourself walking into your office with your mind already filled to overflowing, then checking your e-mail and finding a hundred new messages marked urgent, then looking up to see lines of people in the hall bringing in more work. Next, imagine looking around the office and noticing that everybody else is talking, laughing, and generally goofing off. This is the Obsessive-Compulsive’s consciousness: always rehearsing something, terrified of mistakes, overwhelmed by trivial tasks, and resentful of other people’s lack of attention to detail. Can you imagine how terribly lonely you’d feel being the only competent person on the planet?
All the incessant work and mental activity is designed to keep Obsessive-Compulsives from thinking about that frightening creature inside them. It’s not as if these people would be serial killers if they let themselves go. The monster inside is little more than a rebellious teenager, so long walled off from the rest of the personality that it has taken on the aspect of an alien menace. Obsessive-Compulsives, like Histrionics, attempt to get rid of the unacceptable in themselves rather than learning how to live with it. Histrionics can just ignore what they don’t like. Obsessive-Compulsives have to bury it in piles of work or drive it off with a flaming sword.
There is no success without compulsion. Since you’re reading a book on improving your interpersonal skills instead of watching TV, you probably know this. Being a little Obsessive-Compulsive leads to an accomplished and virtuous life. Being too Obsessive-Compulsive leads to defeating yourself and draining other people.
How much is too much? As we saw in the case of Narcissistic Legends, one of the elements of socialization is learning how to make yourself do things you don’t want to do because they need to be done. Obviously, that has to stop somewhere, but where? There must be a point at which a person works too hard or is too good.
Unfortunately, the answer can’t be expressed as some sort of optimum good-to-evil or work-to-play ratio. The difference between normal conscientiousness and Obsessive-Compulsive behavior lies not in how much work people do, but in the strategy they use to keep themselves working when they’d rather play. Obsessive-Compulsives use psychological violence—jolts of fear, pangs of guilt, and sharp, icy threats of punishment. And that’s just on themselves.
Obsessive-Compulsives believe punishment is synonymous with justice. Punishment is the only strategy that Obsessive-Compulsives know for controlling their own behavior or that of other people. It is also the only one they want to know.
Punishment has two distinct purposes. First, it’s a way to keep people from doing bad things. In that respect, it’s not particularly efficient. Any psychologist will tell you that punishment causes all sorts of unintended side effects, and that rewarding people for positive behavior is far more likely to get them to do what you want.
It is the second use of punishment that makes it so popular with Obsessive-Compulsives. Punishment is a clever device that allows good people to do bad things without seeing themselves as evil.
Obsessive-Compulsives have the same kinds of innate violent tendencies as everybody else, but they deplore them as uncivilized, dangerous, and definitely outside the fence. Unless, of course, they’re doing violence to somebody who is bad. The secret reason that Obsessive-Compulsives keep themselves from sin is so they can be first in line when it’s time to throw stones.
Obsessive-Compulsives use punishment in all its forms, from condescending lectures and poor performance ratings to witch burning. They always see their actions as altruistic, done for the person’s own good, rather than sadistic.
No matter how and how often they use punishment, Obsessive-Compulsives never seem to grasp its true nature, or understand that it just doesn’t work. The only predictable effect of punishment is that it creates more need to punish.
Obsessive-Compulsives coined the phrase, “This hurts me more than it does you,” and they believe it absolutely. There is no clearer window through which to see the murky confusion of their souls.
Obsessive-Compulsives are always trying to establish order. The problem is that the human mind is basically disorderly. Along with noble impulses, our thoughts are full of mixed feelings and uncivilized urges. These overtaxed vampires must hide from this reality behind enormous piles of work. From there, they can safely throw stones.
The specific behaviors covered on the checklist relate to several underlying personality characteristics that define an Obsessive-Compulsive emotional vampire.
Forget about simple carnality. The great passion in the lives of Obsessive-Compulsives is work. It is their pride; their joy; their obsession; their drug; the alpha and omega of their existence. It is their gift, and the cross they have to bear. When Obsessive-Compulsives are working, they feel good about themselves and safe. If you want to feel safe, you’d better be working, too.
True or False Score one point for each true answer.
You can trust Obsessive-Compulsives. They keep their promises, and they’re honest to a fault. Their word is as good as a legal contract, and often as labyrinthine and confusing. In their world, the law is all letter and no spirit.
Black-white, right-wrong, good-bad—Obsessive-Compulsives invented the dichotomy, which, like the straight line, does not exist in nature. (Obsessive-Compulsives also invented the straight line.) Though these vampires love complexity, they have a hard time with ambiguity, especially moral ambiguity. They struggle all their lives to impose order on a capricious universe.
Obsessive-Compulsives are famous for not seeing forests because of all the trees. They dash frantically from one detail to the next, never quite grasping that all the little details fit together into some sort of big picture.
Perfectionism is a vice that masquerades as a virtue. It can lead to excellence, but it usually doesn’t. Doing everything correctly can become the top priority, eclipsing the importance of the task or the feelings of other people. The wake of Obsessive-Compulsives is an orderly row of insignificant tasks done to perfection, and significant people leaving in frustration because they don’t measure up.
Most Obsessive-Compulsives suffer from emotional constipation. Freud thought this was caused by strict toilet training. He called them anal-retentives, because not going potty on demand was how they gained control of their overly demanding universe.
For anal-retentives, holding back is a creative act. Emotional control is their major art form. They take pride in it the way any artist would. Obsessive-Compulsives all seem to come from the same planet as Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, a place where irritation at illogical thinking is the only feeling allowed.
Obsessive-Compulsives try to keep their options open long after the windows of opportunity have shut. Their basic life strategy is minimizing loss rather than maximizing gain. This strategy is reflected in every conscious decision these vampires make, or rather fail to make.
One of the most common manifestations of Obsessive-Compulsive indecisiveness is the amount of stuff that these vampires accumulate, because they can never bring themselves to throw anything away. Often these people require more space to store useless items in than they do to live or work in. The extreme of this behavior is hoarding, which is likely a manifestation of the brain dysfunction rather than the personality. Obsessive-Compulsives keep useless things for a reason: they think they might have a use for them. Hoarders are just terrified of throwing anything away.
Obsessive-Compulsives secretly resent people who are not as hardworking and upstanding as they are. That turns out to be almost everyone. This resentment is hidden only from them; everybody else knows about it all too well.
Say what you will about Obsessive-Compulsives being difficult and draining, you have to admit that they put their money where their mouth is. Without their hard work and stern example, all of us would probably go over the edge.
