The Healthy Compulsive Project

Why do driven, high-functioning people sometimes find themselves trapped in codependency  — bound to others in ways that feel obsessive, compulsive, and impossible to escape? In this episode, psychotherapist and Jungian analyst Gary Trosclair explores the hidden connection between compulsive personality types and codependent relationship patterns. Drawing on  attachment theory and Jungian psychology, Gary breaks dow...

Why do so many disciplined, high-functioning people keep pushing themselves long after the tank is empty? This episode explores the hidden costs of overusing willpower and why self-control, though powerful, can become destructive when it loses contact with the body, emotion, values, and limits. It looks at how rigid ideas of strength, externally driven perfectionism, and fear-based motivation can trap people in cycles of depletion....

If you’ve ever felt unsure what you want, relied on logic where feeling should guide you, or wondered why emotions seem elusive, this post is for you. Alexithymia—“the unspeaking heart”—is not a lack of feeling, but a learned and often inherited difficulty accessing it. Drawing on research, clinical insight, and everyday examples, this piece examines how emotions become blocked, the quiet costs of livi...

There are both among us and within us young souls and old souls. Some of them fulfilled and some of them unfulfilled.  Typically, people with obsessive-compulsive personality traits are old souls, and they can express that part of them either constructively or destructively. But usually their young soul is silenced.

This old soul is one manifestation of the archetype of the Senex, or the old man. Traits such as wisdom, caution,...

Compulsive traits are often judged as rigid or unhealthy, but they originate in qualities that once helped humans survive. This essay reframes compulsiveness as an adaptive style—rooted in conscientiousness, focus, and persistence—and explores how these traits can become strengths when consciously directed. Through research, evolutionary psychology, and a clinical vignette, it shows how finding the right “calling&...

Receiving an OCPD diagnosis can leave you unsure where to begin, but the traits that once fueled rigidity and perfectionism can also support meaningful change. This guide introduces RAILS, a five‑step framework designed to help you start removing the “disorder” from your obsessive‑compulsive personality. The steps encourage building self‑respect, acknowledging how maladaptive perfectionism has caused harm, identifying t...

A Husky narrates a compassionate, humorous, and perceptive account of living with a human who has obsessive‑compulsive personality disorder traits. Through keen canine observation, the Husky contrasts natural dog instincts—flexibility, presence, connection—with the rigid routines, perfectionism, rationalization, and emotional struggles of the human world. The story explores themes of routine, control, relationships, emo...

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...

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 relat...

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&m...

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, dealing...

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 inevitabilit...

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 (OCPD), or ...