The Healthy Compulsive Project

What if the machine controlling your life isn’t out there—but inside you? Using The Matrix as a lens, this post exposes how maladaptive obsessive‑compulsive personality patterns act like internal programs that hijack authenticity, drain energy, and keep us locked in a dream of perfection, urgency, and control. Drawing from psychological research and Jungian theory, it reveals how these inner mechanisms develop, how they de...

It takes courage to make a relationship work. The courage to admit you’re wrong. The courage to persist when you’re right. The courage to take chances in communication, generosity and vulnerability. And most of all, the courage to objectively look at what’s happening emotionally inside of you. This episode explores projection and projective identification, two psychological processes that can make or break a relationship. ...

We’ve got perfectionism all wrong. The real problem isn’t high standards—it’s the illusion of perfectibility and harsh judgment that have been grafted onto it. Perfectionism began as a guide toward purpose, but centuries of distortion turned it into an enforcer of impossible ideals. Instead of banishing perfectionism, we can reclaim its adaptive side—commitment, persistence, and pursuit of excellence—while stripping away c...

This is an extended interview in which endurance athlete, coach, and podcaster Travis Macy asks me about the driven personality and broader questions of well-being. Having set records in some truly astounding endurance races, Travis knows about perseverance, resilience and fortitude, all of which exist as potential in the obsessive-compulsive personality. We compare notes about competition, athletics, optimizing our energy...

Carl Jung famously wrote that the gods have become diseases. What he meant was that because we no longer consciously acknowledge the powerful forces we used to call gods and goddesses, they’ve gone underground and manifest in our physical and mental ailments. However unbelievable they might seem, they are still forces to be reckoned with. Such is certainly the case with Ananke, the Goddess of fate, compulsion and inevitabi...

To make a dent in the pile of material you might feel you have to read to be up on the most recent developments in mental health, here's a practical review of the relatively new approach to therapy called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, with brief examples of how to apply it. Because one of the main goals of ACT is flexibility, it can be very helpful to anyone struggling with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (O...

Creativity may be one of the most fulfilling activities we have. Unless it’s blocked. Then the desire to be creative can feel like torture. But there are ways to get unblocked. In this episode we will talk about the possible benefit of compulsive urges, and the destructiveness of obsessive thinking. We’ll look at how the avoidance of feelings of anxiety and insecurity becomes a block. And we’ll look at the positive benefit...

 What happens when a rigid devotion to rules, order, and perfection replaces our ability to feel, connect, and live? In this episode, we explore two moving character studies from Fredrik Backman’s novels A Man Called Ove and Britt-Marie Was Here. Through Ove and Britt-Marie—both fictional but deeply familiar—we see the beauty, heartbreak, and potential of the obsessive-compulsive personality. These stories show what can go...

How do we know if we are micromanaging? If you constantly look over someone’s shoulder, give them detailed instructions, distrust them, and make mountains out of molehills, it will discourage creativity, diminish morale, and disrupt relationships. It may even lead to them ignoring you. It brings about the opposite of your desired effect. Productivity, responsibility and ingenuity all decrease. It's like trying to break a h...