Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder

‘’I don’t want to make a mistake’’

Millon and Davis, 2001
Obsessive personalities are normative, persistent and meticulous; they are very concerned
with perfectionism and performance, they need order, tidiness and meticulousness and
obsessive personalities are also prone to have doubts systematically, which leads them to
resort to repetitive behavior and verifications. Nevertheless, they do not achieve an
appropriate feeling of safety because they have a hard time dealing with small amounts of
uncertainty and always speculate with catastrophic possibilities or with unpredictable issues.
Obsessive personalities are afraid of everything and they constantly live on the defensive,
without expecting reality to set the real terms in which each issue will be laid out. Otherwise,
they are meticulous with social order, they are horrified at the idea of transgression and they
never experience a pleasant state and are morally suspicious. They are extremely kind
people, in other words, pusillanimous, and avoid any interpersonal tension that can add up
the anxiety which stems from their recurrent uncertainties. In addition, they speculate instead
of acting and denying themselves the adaptive and homeostasic effects of the action, which
tends to be inhibited like the rest of the disorders of this group.

Consequently, obsessive personalities are likely to use more psychological defense

mechanisms than behavioral coping strategies: rationalization is used to calm themselves
down and, sometimes, they rely on/resort to superstition or delegation of decisions in others.
In contrast, they are behaviorally untidy/unorganized —slow, repetitive, rigid, impractical—
and they only trust the value of the effort so they are disciplined and persistent when
knowing what to bear/face and they never risk improvising.

The term “compulsive” refers to the unpleasant nature of many obsessive behaviors,
imposed as a homeostatic need, even though the person thinks they are inconvenient or
absurd. This way, the obsessive person feels inevitably pressured to prove or repeat rituals,
although they rationally judge them as superstitious, and only after its execution does the
person feel liberated from distress. It is easy to find obsessive personalities between
hypochondriac people, as well as anxiety feelings and depressive disorders, which seem to
result from the combination of a sharp emotional tension (not shown in an interpersonal
way), a low self-esteem and a unique thinking style based on the conviction that event
controlling is not possible.