Obsessive-Compulsives work hard and embrace drudgery as if it were the path to salvation. They are not all that dangerous, but they can be tremendously annoying, and often hurtful. The secret to dealing successfully with Obsessive-Compulsives is recognizing that all their most draining behaviors are motivated by fear—fear of the unknown, fear of being wrong, and, most of all, fear of mistakes. If there are mistakes, they will have to be yours, because Obsessive-Compulsives don’t make any.
When these vampires attack, if you can see the fear beneath their harsh words, you will be better able to defend yourself.
Nobody can remember how many times Linda has been named Volunteer of the Year. Since time immemorial, she has been Empress of the Benefit Auction. The events she puts on are successful and beautiful, but a little dull because they are exactly the same year after year.
If you are on her committee, you get a list of the tasks you are to do and when you need to do them. You’ll get a reminder e-mail and a call to make sure you’ve done your job on time. Everything must be done in a particular way, or Linda herself will redo it.
Rosa has been volunteering for a couple of seasons and has some ideas about how to liven things up a bit and maybe even raise some more money. She brings them up at the planning meeting.
“What about a raffle for something really big, like a car? We could charge $200 a ticket, and we could limit the sale to say 500. We could make, maybe—.”
Linda interrupts. “We considered that a few years ago, but we decided there’s too much risk and a possible liability. Are there any other ideas?”
Obviously, the planning meeting has nothing to do with planning; it’s just Linda telling people what to do.
Rosa’s job is finding sponsors for the auction items, and she’s really good at it. Still, she gets daily e-mails from Linda telling her who to contact and what to say. Rosa has considered just quitting the committee, but she is devoted to the organization, and the auction is where most of the money comes from.
Every day, Rosa gets more irritated at Linda. Over and over, the same questions keep running through her mind: Why won’t Linda listen to any new ideas? Why won’t she let me do things my way? Does she think I’m stupid? Why is she such a control freak?
Before Rosa gets too worked up, she should stop and consider: why would a person have such an overwhelming need to control? The answer is, simply, fear.
Frightened people devise frightening systems to keep themselves at a safe distance from whatever it is they fear. What they do to protect themselves often causes more damage than what they were afraid of.
As Linda becomes more controlling, the performance of the people on her committee deteriorates. Irritation at being controlled and worrying about being criticized makes people anxious, so they make more mistakes. Then there is always passive-aggressive retaliation from people who don’t like to be told what to do. Whatever their causes, the mistakes that ensue increase Linda’s need for control, and performance deteriorates further. Many highly motivated and competent people have burned out on Linda’s committee. Rosa is well on her way.
If Rosa can turn the situation around enough in her mind to see Linda’s fear rather than her own irritation, she might be able to make some headway, or at least stop wearing herself out with all the internal muttering.
Here are some suggestions that may help in dealing with control freaks like Linda.
This is the secret to dealing effectively with micromanaging control-freak Obsessive-Compulsives like Linda. If you want them to be less controlling, you have to calm them down rather than making them more upset.
Power struggles will only make the situation worse. Listen to the adult on your other shoulder.
Getting irritated and calling them control freaks, whether out loud or in the privacy of your mind, will make the situation worse. Controlling people pay attention to tiny details. They will see your irritation as clearly as if you’d posted it on a billboard outside their window. Your attitude will serve as evidence that they should watch you even more closely.
Even if you bring it up in the kindest way possible, discussing the issue of control directly will backfire. Control freaks, even if they joke about it, never see themselves as overly controlling. They are only protecting an ungrateful world from the inevitable mistakes that result from not paying close enough attention. Forget trying to talk them out of it. They will only see this as criticism, which is what they are afraid of in the first place.
Even though control freaks may make very critical comments, they are not really personal. They criticize everybody. Obsessive-Compulsives are not thinking about you or your specific abilities, but about all the things that might go wrong. Most of their harsh comments are just worrying out loud.
The process of getting a control freak to lighten up is similar to training a squirrel to eat out of your hand. It must be done slowly and patiently, or you are likely to get bitten.
Control freaks love to give lectures. Listen attentively, respectfully, and, most of all, visibly. Take copious notes.
There are two reasons for doing this. The first is simple reassurance. If you look like you are taking their instructions seriously, control freaks will worry less about you misunderstanding and making mistakes later on.
The second reason for listening closely is to come away with clear specifications of the end product required. If at all possible, at the end of the initial lecture, negotiate to deliver a very specific, measurable product at a very specific time. This will be crucial later on when Obsessive-Compulsives try to control the process.
Nothing allays control freaks’ fears like excess information. Remind them that you are taking the project as seriously as they do.
If you actually do what you say you are going to do when you say you are going to do it, control freaks will be less worried about your performance, and may go off to micromanage somebody less responsible.
Over the long run, when you have shown yourself to be reliable, control freaks may not be eating out of your hand, but they may occasionally listen to a few of your ideas.
If by chance you are an actual teenager, regardless of what your parents are like, you will probably see them as control freaks. The strategies just given will still work for you, if you care to use them.
If your spouse is a control freak, you may be able to use most of the suggestions I’ve outlined here and in the previous two chapters. In addition, you might want to go back and read about the on-duty procedure as described in Chapter 6.
Being as close and personal as you are with an Obsessive-Compulsive, you may also have an opportunity to deal directly with the fear that underlies overly controlling behavior. Just be sure that your inner teenager is deactivated.
Linda’s husband, Peter, dreads auction season. For months Linda gets uptight and snaps at everyone. Nothing is right. She grumbles about having to supervise her committee so closely. At home, everything has to be neat and tidy—no, make that sterile—or it drives her insane. She says that her mind is so cluttered with details about the auction that she can’t stand any more clutter around her.
Peter tries to help out, but what he does is never enough. If the kitchen is not antiseptically clean, she redoes it, sighing like a steam locomotive. If he leaves part of the newspaper lying by his chair, or his biking gear by the door, it is a Major Issue. He feels like he is not allowed to live in his own house.
When he says something about her criticism, Linda agrees that since she’s so stressed out, she may occasionally go over the top, but she has good reasons for everything she says and does. She says she needs his help to get through this stressful time, which means doing everything her way. Nothing changes.
When Peter is not feeling irritated, he worries about all the pain and excess work Linda is creating for herself. He’d like to help her, but nothing he tries seems to have any effect.
Anybody who lives with a control freak like Linda can see clearly that what’s driving her crazy is not the work she has to do, but the obsessive way that she worries about it. Getting her to see that she is making herself and everybody else miserable is very difficult. If Peter tells her she is overreacting, she will see it as accusing her of making a mistake, and we know how Obsessive-Compulsives react to that.
If you, like Peter, are married to a control freak, here are some ideas that may help.
Even though control freaks are totally unreasonable and tend to irritate everyone close to them, confronting them gets you nowhere.
Peter is at a choice point. He can’t help her and be mad at her at the same time.
If he wants to help, he needs to view situations through Linda’s eyes rather than his own or his inner teenager’s. This does not mean that he has to do everything her way, but it does mean that he has to communicate with her in her own language.
Psychologists make a distinction between stress, which is what’s happening out there, and anxiety, which is the internal reaction to external events. Most people, especially Obsessive-Compulsives, do not make this distinction. They think that the worry, irritation, and overall misery they feel is a direct and inevitable result of the external stress, and everything that they are doing is the only possible response to the situation. This is a good working definition of a neurosis. To help Linda deal more effectively with her anxiety, Peter will have to operate within her belief system. He will have to speak and act as if the source of her pain is actually the external stress. This can be tricky.
Obsessive-Compulsives see their anxiety as a handicap that should be accommodated. They will expect you to accede to their demands and tolerate their irritability because they are under so much stress. On the face of it, this sounds reasonable, but it isn’t. What they are really asking you to do is to reward them for managing their own anxiety badly.
A handicap is something a person can’t do anything about, like being in a wheelchair. If you accommodate a handicap, say by building ramps and making tables the right height, it makes the handicapped person’s life better. If you accommodate a neurosis, you make it worse by reinforcing the person’s belief that she is the way she is, and there is nothing else she can do. You might think of this as the don’t upset your mother syndrome, which transfers the responsibility for managing anxiety from her to you.
Another way of accommodating a neurosis that has been unsuccessfully used by well-meaning spouses is saying, “Just quit.” There is absolutely nothing positive to recommend this strategy. It does damage in every way imaginable. It will be seen as insulting and condescending by most Obsessive-Compulsives, who feel honor bound to live up to their responsibilities. What they will hear is an unsupportive spouse saying that what they are putting all their time and effort into is trivial enough to just toss away. Even if they do take the advice, it teaches them to avoid anxiety rather than deal with it.
Yet another way of accommodating a neurosis is medicating the symptoms away. A prescription for benzodiazepines can temporarily get rid of the anxiety, allowing control freaks to continue their neurotic behavior with less pain, but the possibility of addiction. Antidepressants are less dangerous, but without behavior change, they treat only symptoms, leaving the cause of the problem untouched. The value of these medications is that they may alleviate crippling symptoms enough to make it possible for people to learn different techniques for dealing with anxiety.
Not accommodating a neurosis doesn’t mean attacking it directly. We have already seen that confronting Linda’s demands and irritability directly doesn’t work. Peter will have to entice her into changing her behavior, which will also change her way of thinking. To do this, he can make use of her Obsessive-Compulsive tendencies in a positive way.
Peter will have the most success if he encourages Linda to deal with the physiological aspects of stress rather than the external factors, like the incompetence of volunteers or the mess in the house, that she believes are causing her problems. Talking about how stressed out she is will only make her worse. Managing the physiology of stress might make her better. Luckily, there are hundreds of books and articles on how to do this. All of them advise the same things: exercise, eating right, getting enough sleep, and learning relaxation techniques.
Whether it’s going for walks, changing the diet, going to bed at a reasonable hour, or signing up for a yoga class, Linda will at first claim that she doesn’t have time. Peter will gain much more traction if he organizes the stress management program and follows it with her, hand in hand, encouraging her at every step. Obsessive-Compulsives don’t give out much praise, but they do respond to it.