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Feb. 7th, 2022 06:11 amOur need for ourselves and our surroundings and the people around us to follow these rules in order to be optimal and perfect is incredibly strong and pervasive throughout every setting. This leads to us spending an incredibly long time doing things like repeatedly erasing and rewriting our work until we feel that it’s perfect, because everything we do must be perfect. We often develop eating disorders, because we need to be perfect. We try to change our surroundings so that they are perfect (i.e. by cleaning excessively). We also want to get others to do what we want in order for things to be perfect—sometimes, when we have more insight, we actively fight the urge if trying to get them to do it will violate their rights and harm them.
In the beginning, we don’t realize these needs and behaviors are detrimental to ourselves. We believe the world is wrong, not us (and we’re not entirely wrong, either!) We firmly believe that the best route to reduce our suffering, going forward, is to try even harder to achieve perfection. We never, ever think about just not doing it—our minds simply shy away from it. At least, up until we finally break, and begin to examine ourselves, to face the hard truths that we have ignored for our entire lives.
OCPD causes pain, because our world is confined by the laws of physics, as are we and the others around us. We physically and mentally cannot successfully make everything perfect. And when our needs are not met—we suffer. We feel intensely uncomfortable. Oftentimes our self-esteem lowers, because we feel as though we have failed at the task(s) most important to us.
How this relates to OCPD’s DSM-V criteria:
1. Is preoccupied with details, rules, lists, order, organization, or schedules to the extent that the major point of the activity is lost.
2. Shows perfectionism that interferes with task completion (e.g., is unable to complete a project because his or her own overly strict standards are not met).
This is caused by our perfectionism—we need things to be done the Right Way, thus we need to do those things the Right Way, and often part of The Way manifests in the form of a need to perfect details, rules, lists, order, organization, and schedules.
My best guess is that OCPD forms (apart from genetic predisposition) as a result of authority figures in our lives being too controlling, demanding too much from us, setting standards too high. So we subconsciously shift—to preempt their anger and disappointment, we decide that we need to do it perfectly, on our own, for ourselves. We develop the need for perfection so that we can find it easier to automatically perform well enough.
But it is not a healthy coping mechanism, an adaptive need. Because as with every personality disorder, there is a catch.
We go overboard with our system of perfectionism. We make the need intense, all-consuming. We close off the option of being imperfect and never think about it again because if we do… well.
We make ourselves feel happy and comfortable doing things perfectly. The more perfect, the better. We convince ourselves that our way must be the right way. We are The Best when it comes to following the rules, to turning in the most perfect work.
We don’t realize that by then, our own standards for ourselves have surpassed even our abusers’ high standards. But by then, it’s too late. The patterns are deeply ingrained, and egosyntonic to boot.
A few days ago I started thinking more in depth about the interplay between OCPD and the capitalist system. When my mother brought up, for me, the possibility of OCPD to my psychiatrist, he said that having “a little bit of OCPD” is an adaptive trait. Makes for better employees and CEOs. I disagree, for the same reasons I disagree with those who say narcissism is rewarded under capitalism.
Inherent to the definition of OCPD, as with narcissism/NPD, is disorder. If your grandiosity doesn’t come with narc injury when it is challenged, it is not narcissism. If your perfectionism/desire to do higher-quality work doesn’t come with certain drawbacks, it is not actual anankastia/“a little bit of OCPD traits.”
Like with NPD, people with OCPD overcompensate. With NPD, we create a false veneer of grandiosity far beyond what is necessary to maintain a reasonable level of contentment with ourselves and our self-esteem. With OCPD, we go overboard with our high standards. We need them too much, and we need perfectionism too much. We need things to be too perfect, even more perfect than what our superiors demand of us. We need the rules/schedules to be followed exactly or else it’s Not Good Enough.
Until we do a lot of self-examination, we are incapable of recognizing that this is not, in fact, the best way to succeed in our environment. We spend so much effort trying to perfect our work, despite our superiors not even needing it to be so perfect, until we go beyond what is actually needed. We spend so much time trying to make it exactly right, erasing and rewriting, backspacing and retyping, discarding and retrying, that we often miss deadlines.
Under capitalism (as well as school, the predecessor to us becoming slaves to the capitalist system), this becomes utter hell, because our perfectionism involves internalizing externally imposed rules and standards like we did in the process of our childhood development of the disorder, and capitalism forces upon us a lot of rules and standards and guidelines. Once we decide we have to follow a certain external rule society gives us, we begin perfecting and “improving” it.
I feel stressed when I don’t know how to correctly follow the rules. I often feel relieved when I am exempted from doing something with a lot of complicated rules or which would be difficult to optimize/perfect. Tack on a dash of autism (so I struggle to understand the intent behind allistics’ instructions unless they’re clear and literal) and (now-recovered) social anxiety which makes it difficult for me to ask for clarification, and you can see why I have meltdowns in school so often.
A key trait we experience is believing that the problem is with either (or simultaneously) 1) others, for not needing perfection as much as we do, or 2) with us, for not being good enough at working, perfect enough, skilled enough. That if we just Tried Harder, we would be able to accomplish what our perfectionism demanded. That the most efficient way to make us finally happy is to be better at working, not to take away our need for perfectionism. This is extremely difficult when we also happen to have comorbid disorders which fuck up our executive function (for me, ADHD and for a long time MDD too). I’m describing my entire life right now and finally putting my struggles into words and also kind of crying.
3. Is excessively devoted to work and productivity to the exclusion of leisure activities and friendships (not accounted for by obvious economic necessity).
OCPD is not defined at its core as an “overproductivity disorder.” Nevertheless, it is an effect—nearly every second of every minute of every day, we have at least something on our endless to-do lists. We don’t really view doing those things as leisure, even if they enjoy them—they’re classified as Work, because they are something we have to do. We have to be productive 24/7, working on our to-do lists 24/7, because if we don’t—well, we don’t think about that. We just Have To. There are barely enough hours in the day for even neurotypicals to survive under capitalism, much less those of us who have to go far above and beyond even those high demands the system imposes upon us. I’m better at this now, but throughout most of my life I’ve felt very uncomfortable having anything but Work Time. I would long for free time, and at the same time yell at myself the moment I thought about having some before my to-do list was done. I joked a lot about never having any free time in all twenty-four hours of every day. I didn’t realize that this wasn’t exactly funny, or fun, or good, or normal.
4. Is overconscientious, scrupulous, and inflexible about matters of morality, ethics, or values (not accounted for by cultural or religious identification).
One common manifestation/part of our perfectionism (I don’t really personally experience this one, but I’ll try my best to explain it here) is applying our high valuation of external rules to moral/ethical rules. As well as needing to follow them to an extreme degree, we need others to accommodate us in our attempts to follow them, leading to interpersonal difficulties.
5. Is unable to discard worn-out or worthless objects even when they have no sentimental value.
Another common way in which our perfectionism manifests: hoarding. I used to do this a lot before I became addicted to AO3 and researching and Tumblr and the focus of my perfectionism switched. My closet is full of all sorts of weird shit I’ve collected which I refuse to throw away. I would feel suboptimal and imperfect if I threw something away, because what if I needed it later to do my work better? Which spiraled into having a whole system with the hoarding, with rules (i.e. “if you see this on the ground, you have to pick it up and take it home and put it in the collection, these are the rules for what is and is not required to be taken home based on how useful it is,” complete with full-length philosophical debates in my head arguing about what the rules should be).
6. Is reluctant to delegate tasks or to work with others unless they submit to exactly his or her way of doing things.
Our needs are so specific and important to us, and different from everyone else’s, that no one else would, by default, do things our way. If we try to give them instructions on how we would want it done, it’s hard, because our needs are so detailed and specific that the easiest way to get the thing done the right way is to do it ourselves.
7. Adopts a miserly spending style toward both self and others; money is viewed as something to be hoarded for future catastrophes.
Again related to the same mechanisms behind our hoarding, and most likely an extension of a mindset of “being miserly/suffering/not allowing yourself to have good things” being imposed upon us in childhood. I’m not allowed to spend money online without parental supervision, and until I started having aspirations for online projects I never really wanted to buy anything, so I haven’t had an opportunity to struggle much with this personally.
8. Shows rigidity and stubbornness.
Basically the result of us trying to apply our perfectionistic standards to our standards. We’re rigid, we’re stubborn af, we refuse to yield to others’ suggestions because our way is, in our minds, the most perfect and optimal way.
