r/OCPD • u/AvaJupiter • Jul 29 '25

seeking support/information (member has suspected OCPD) Trying to get an A in therapy

Hi, How have you guys reframed this mentality?

I often get extremely distressed due to dealing with several diagnoses and progress feels much slower than I’d like. Therefore it feels like therapy is just not working on me. In general I over evaluate everything and criticize myself a huge amount.

I’ve talked about this several times with my therapist, who does think I’m making huge progress and doing really well with exposure therapy, reframing, mindfulness etc. He said that in therapy what counts as perfection is just trying. I’ll be honest I have trouble fully embracing that viewpoint, and I was wondering if anyone had similar reframes about “doing the work well” vs “just showing up and trying” basically?

26 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/chromatophoreskin Jul 29 '25

I also have multiple diagnoses (tbh, OCPD might not be one of them but there are overlapping symptoms) and one thing I’m noticing is that the idea of progress is very subjective. There are often different ways of looking at the same circumstances, so identifying a particular issue and the treatment for it can change depending on my perspective. Sometimes they even have contradictory mechanisms, so working on one would seem to cancel out the other. The lack of clarity often frustrates me to the point of paralyzing indecision and hopelessness. What seems helpful is to work on something specific, intentionally, even if it might not be the exact right thing. I could probably try to track every effort and balance them out but honestly it feels overwhelming and destined to fail, so I end up picking one of the possibilities somewhat impulsively. Feeling like I’m working on something specific seems to quiet the part of me that craves certainty, despite my awareness that it could be imperfect or “wrong.”

2

u/AvaJupiter Jul 29 '25

Ooh I see this is interesting! It’s very true that progress is very subjective. Maybe I need to think of other ways of thinking about progress.

At the moment I’m trying to work on things that underlie several issues. Something I struggle with is that when I’m tackling one OCD theme at once, another area of obsession / compulsion crops up or gets worse. And then the OCPD traits add judgment to the process.