Episode Details

 Introducing The Healthy Compulsive Project Podcast, offering information, insights, and inspiration to optimize the obsessive-compulsive personality.  From clinical, personal and Jungian perspectives, help with depth and a light touch for OCPD, perfectionists, control freaks and micro-managers. 

Transcript:
Wait, The Healthy Compulsive? Isn’t that an oxymoron?

Not in my book. And I’ll tell you how I got there.

Five years ago I launched The Healthy Compulsive Project, starting with a blog, and later adding a book. Today I'm launching a podcast, an OCPD podcast, but for many more than just those with OCPD. 

The goal of the Project has been to help people with obsessive, compulsive, perfectionistic, micro-managing and type A personalities live healthier and more fulfilling lives, lives that are better not despite their compulsive tendencies, but because of them.

The audience for the Project includes people with Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder—OCPD, and those who might just have a few of the personality traits and don’t meet the full criteria for the personality disorder. It’s not intended for people with OCD, Obsessive-compulsive disorder, which is a different condition, with different implications for treatment. I’ll explain the differences later.

The obsessive-compulsive personality type has much to offer. Harness the drive at the root of it and you’ve got direction, energy and purpose.

The word compulsive derives from the words compelled and driven. And that’s not always bad. Lots of good has come out of having an inner drive that’s hard to resist.

But I’m not Pollyannaish about this either. When hijacked by anxiety and insecurity, this energy can lead to a really lousy life: depression, rigidity, chronic irritability, work addiction, and paralyzing perfectionism. And it can destroy relationships.

Healthy and unhealthy compulsiveness are like water and ice. It’s the same material. But, one flows freely and the other’s frozen stiff. All the insistence and determination characteristic of compulsives can be used constructively or destructively.

To move toward the healthier end of the compulsive spectrum takes the willingness to face uncomfortable feelings and to forgo the security of overdoing everything with planning, control and perfectionism.

You may notice that I’m lopping together the terms compulsive, obsessive, perfectionistic and Type A. While there are differences between them, there is more overlap than distinction. In the great battle between specificity and efficiency, I’m going to side with efficiency on this one, referring to the lot of them as compulsives, rather than listing everyone that my comments might apply to each time.

I’ll explain the differences in future episodes, but for now I’ll say that a common denominator is that they all feel compelled to bring order to what they experience as chaos—for worse and better. And within the obsessive-compulsive personality there are four subtypes. I’ll also explain those later, but for now we can describe them briefly as leader, worker, server, and thinker.

The New OCPD Podcast

Getting back to The Healthy Compulsive Project I began five years ago…Reactions to the book and the blog have been gratifying and encouraging. It seems that they’ve helped lots of folks look at their condition in a very different way, and to behave in ways that leave them less depressed. It’s also helped some of their loved ones feel less oppressed. Many people who’ve been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder have found hope in