Obsessive-compulsive PD’s are truly awful people, I am sorry. They just are. I knew my father for over 50 years of my life. They’re not ok.
The problem is because of their extreme conformity, workaholism, and morality, a lot of people who know them they are “fine upstanding people.” Only the people who live with them know what monsters they really are. That’s why no one believed my siblings and I when we talked about what a lousy father my Dad was. All the other adults of his generation thought he was the star of the neighborhood – a classic, fine, upstanding, good, hard-working, moral family man. That’s the face they put on to everyone else. They know exactly what they are doing, and they can control themselves most of the time. They just choose not to control themselves around their loved ones because they can get away with treating loved ones like crap.
OCPD often takes the form of hostility, constant criticism, and rages.
They project all the time and go around pointing out everybody else’s faults. Everyone else is lazy, messy, immoral, and incompetent.
They’re prigs. They’re always calling you evil in some way or another because you are probably inherently immoral.
You’re always a slob, no matter what. They love to go through other people’s stuff and clean it up. They often go through other people’s stuff and throw a lot of the other person’s possessions away.
They work constantly and they never have fun. They try to force everyone around them to do this too and if you don’t, you’re evil or sinful.
Having fun is evil or sinful and you need to be ashamed of yourself. They hate parties. You go on vacations with them, and they spend the whole time working, being uptight, and yelling at people. They are like martyr-saints who believe that life is crap, and life is nothing but suffering. Hence, suffering and constant deliberate deprivation are noble things.
They are frustrated all the time.
They are tightwads. They hate spending money except on necessities and paying off debt. Spending money for fun is literally sinful, and you should be ashamed of yourself. They’re stingy with money. If you need money as a college student, they might grudgingly give you five bucks.
They have no insight whatsoever and they have a defensive structure that is so elaborate that it is like an Escher + Goya painting combined with a Rube Goldberg device. The defenses literally have layers upon layers, trap doors, fake entrances, and the craziest fortifications you have ever seen. If you try to point out their OCPD nonsense, they fly into wild rages because it really hits home.
They can’t delegate any responsibility for any job because everyone else is incompetent, so they have to fix everything themselves. Except they don’t know how to fix anything. They try to get you to help them and then scream at everything you do because everything you do is wrong because you are inherently incompetent.
They are masochistic and are always taking on thankless tasks that other “incompetent” people won’t do. They stay late at work fixing the work of the “incompetents.”
They’re never wrong and they’re always right. Everyone else is always wrong and never right. They’re perfect and everyone else isn’t and needs to be constantly criticized for being such screw-ups.
They are always making long lists of things to do, but then they hardly do any of them. They get lost in the endless planning of the project such that the project itself never really gets going. They can’t see the forest for the trees. They can’t see the big picture.
They put everything off to the last minute, and then they run around frantically, hollering in frustration all the time, doing all the tasks that they put off to the end because now they are in a terrible time bind.
They’re control freaks in a covert way that is not obvious.
They hate change. They are some of the most rigid people you will ever meet. They hate anything new.
They are perfectionists and a lot of their own work is never good enough and needs endless revisions.
They’re always tense and uptight and rarely relax.
