Breaking the Obsessive Compulsive Personality Thinking Cycle

The OCPD thinking cycle goes like this:

The Problem: Will I succeed in being (successful, attractive, respected, clever, smart, athletic)?  

 

The Solution: Work anxiously at trying to be (successful, attractive, respected, clever, smart, athletic).

 

The Result: Counterintuitively, the efforts to appear more successful inhibit my success. 

Repeat.

FIGURE 1: The OCPD Loop

FIGURE 2: My Husbandly OCPD Loop

 

 

The result is inevitable because of the nature of Gestalt. As the perception psychologists have shown, you and I can only focus on one thing at a time. 

 

Try this: Touch our right index finger to your left palm. Feel the left palm with your right index finger. Your attention is now at the tip of your right index finger. Now shift your focus so that you can feel the right index finger using your left palm. Your attention is now on the palm of your left hand. You cannot focus on both sensations of touch simultaneously. (As a third sense, focus your attention on seeing the point of contact. Now your awareness is out in space, seeing your finger and palm as objects.

 

Anybody who has tried to give a presentation and look good doing it will know what I am talking about. It is impossible to focus on presenting information and to effect a certain performance. The former group can only encounter information as if for the first time: noticing it and reacting to it in the presence of an audience. This is an extemporaneous presentation, and it is difficult to master. The latter group rehearses their presentation in advance. They imagine alternate scenarious, which they prepare for. They are incapable of being dynamic. They are performing.

 

The latter group—the preparers, the planners, the rehearsers—try to solve problems before they occur. They live in the intermediate zone. This preparation marks the beginning of OCPD. “I cannot just show up to a presentation without knowing that I will do it perfectly.” They do not trust themselves. They must already know that everything will work out. They are comfortable living as a computer, solving predetermined problems while on autopilot. Disingenuous 

 

The only way to stop the OCPD loop is to face the uncertainty—to live through it.

 

FIGURE 3: The Gestalt (Existential) Loop:

 

The Problem: What will I become????

The Solution: I will let me be and find out.

The Result: Being/becoming/existing