perfectionism

[QUOTE=meatthinker]I am a perfectionist perpetually in recovery. Sub-topics include hoarding (being a pack rat), procrastination, depression, writer's block, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), which is [B]not[/B] the same thing as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) with the hand washing and stuff.[/QUOTE]
tell us about the differences between OCD and OCPD. and tell us a bit about being a packrat, procrastinating, depression. what are your experiences with them, and what sort of information on them can you provide?

i'm interested in this OCPD business. i need an excuse for why i'm the way i am!

[QUOTE=trypdwyre]tell us about the differences between OCD and OCPD. and tell us a bit about being a packrat, procrastinating, depression. what are your experiences with them, and what sort of information on them can you provide?[/QUOTE]

OCD has been pretty much proved to be a biological rather than psychological disorder, and has been found to respond well in many cases to certain drugs. Jack Nicholson's character from [I]As Good As It Gets[/I] is a pretty good representation of a typical OCD person, though his symptoms were mild compared to how bad it can get. Symptoms include insisting on a very rigid routine, a fear of germs and compulsive hand washing, "checking" which is a ritual of repetetive behavior.

An example of "checking" is the ritual that Nicholson's character goes through when locking or unlocking the door. He has to repeatedly lock and unlock the locks multiple times in a particular sequence. If he screws up the sequence partway through, he starts the entire sequence over again until he does it perfectly. These behaviors seem to have something to do with trying to cope with a sense of anxiety or impending doom over irrational fears, like you might literally believe that your mother could become seriously injured if you step on the crack in the sidewalk.

As for fear of germs, I have an acquaintance who goes through a ritual of soaping up completely three times when taking a shower, because that is the only way that he can feel clean, but he has a desk job, it's not like he's working the fryer at McDonalds in which case I might understand you would have to go through that to get off all of the grease.

[QUOTE=trypdwyre]tell us about the differences between OCD and OCPD. and tell us a bit about being a packrat, procrastinating, depression. what are your experiences with them, and what sort of information on them can you provide?[/QUOTE]

OCPD is more about always being right, and insisting that things have to be done a particular way even when it is clear to everyone else that it is irrational, even when you yourself might finally recognize that it is irrational. You know how things [I]should[/I] be done as a matter of fact. OCPD people tend to hide their emotions, what is called a [I]flat aspect[/I]. Mary Tyler Moore's character in [I]Ordinary People[/I] is a perfect example of an OCPD person. For example, she and her husband are getting dressed for her son's funeral, and she has a problem that the dress shirt he put on has pin stripes on it, or something like that. You would think that under those circumstances you would be occupied with more important things, maybe even feeling sad, rather than picking on every petty little detail.

From what I have been able to piece together, my grandma appears to be the source in my family of OCPD behavior. When you grow up with an OCPD person, you develop strategies for coping with unreasonable demands, and a lot of energy goes into placating the OCPD person, or walking on eggshells to avoid a confrontation. Some people internalize the behavior while other people rebel against it. My mom adopted some of the OCPD traits from her mother, but I don't think she is full blown OCPD.

As a child, the experience of it was getting little praise and being criticized for petty little things. It wasn't that my parents were strict, I didn't even have to get straight A's or anything like that. It's more that the things that were criticized themselves weren't really important but should have been irrelevant. Some of it comes as "advice" that if you don't follow leads to argument, criticism, or sulking because you didn't do it "the right way." Your job is to read the OCPD person's mind and do things the way that he or she would do it him or herself, because it's "just obvious" that everybody should do it that way, and you're crazy if you just can't see that.

For example, I'm an adult man putting frosting on my daughter's birthday cake and putting sprinkles on it, and my mom comes and tells me that I'm supposed to write her name in sprinkles and I'm doing it wrong, so she grabs the sprinkles out of my hand and does it the way that it [I]should[/I] be done. I'm the idiot for not seeing that everybody should put sprinkles on the birthday cake that way. There's a sense of urgency or importance about it that should be reserved for matters of national security, like not putting sprinkles on the cake that way is going to allow Al Queda operatives to storm the Capitol building or something. But from her perspective, I'm the one who is irrational, because it should be obvious to me. Maybe it's a loss of proportion, seeing things with a distorted perspective where things that shouldn't matter seem incredibly important to extent that the big picture is lost.

Worry is a big part of it. My mom worries about everything, and always has a scenario for something catastrophic that is going to happen. Her alcoholic brother is going to come shoot her with a shotgun. My daughter is going to grow up unable to socialize with other people. About a year ago, I just sort of had an awakening that these were crazy thoughts and that I had been internallizing them and it was putting a strain on my marriage. At first, I went through a period where I was very angry, almost feeling like I had been betrayed and an idiot not to see what had been going on. I tried to talk to my mom about it, but everything that I said was perceived as an atttack and she just got defensive. Things are still strained and awkward with my parents and I haven't figured out what to do about it. It's like from my mom's perspective I'm just being a jerk and I'll come back to seeing things her way eventually.

Hoarding seems to go hand in hand with worry. It's like you have this sense that some day you're going to be in this catastrophic experience and this one thing, whatever it is, is going to be the thing that saves your life, but you're not sure in advance what that one thing will be. It could be that teddy bear that your high school boyfriend gave you, or all the tinfoil and plastic bags that you've carefully washed out and reused. My mom hoards paper, especially newspapers, piles and piles of them that she swears that she is going to go through at some point. She's going to cut out all of the important articles and scan them into the computer. Somewhere in there is the article that's going to save her or someone who she loves from cancer or heart disease or whatever, but if she throws it away, all hope will be lost, and it will be her fault--that's one point where the feeling of OCPD must be similar to OCD.

Organically, within my own self, it feels like being overly sensitive to stimuli, that it is easy to be overwhelmed. But at the same time, it is possible to focus that sensitivity to a single point and become hyper-focused to the exclusion of everything else. I'd have a hard time falling asleep because there was so much chatter in my head, a million thoughts a second. Hyper-vigilant. I describe it as being bird-like, like wild birds around a bird feeder, triggered to take off at the slightest movement in the peripheral vision. The cost for me was a lack of sleep, fatigue, muscle soreness, depression. Interestingly, as I have been treated for the sleeping and fatigue problems and the muscle soreness, the feeling of being over-stimulated has dissipated, somehow I feel more "normal" and less prone to mood swings and such.

[QUOTE=meatthinker]OCPD is more about always being right, and insisting that things have to be done a particular way even when it is clear to everyone else that it is irrational, even when you yourself might finally recognize that it is irrational. You know how things [I]should[/I] be done as a matter of fact. OCPD people tend to hide their emotions, what is called a [I]flat aspect[/I]. Mary Tyler Moore's character in [I]Ordinary People[/I] is a perfect example of an OCPD person. For example, she and her husband are getting dressed for her son's funeral, and she has a problem that the dress shirt he put on has pin stripes on it, or something like that. You would think that under those circumstances you would be occupied with more important things, maybe even feeling sad, rather than picking on every petty little detail.

From what I have been able to piece together, my grandma appears to be the source in my family of OCPD behavior. When you grow up with an OCPD person, you develop strategies for coping with unreasonable demands, and a lot of energy goes into placating the OCPD person, or walking on eggshells to avoid a confrontation. Some people internalize the behavior while other people rebel against it. My mom adopted some of the OCPD traits from her mother, but I don't think she is full blown OCPD.

As a child, the experience of it was getting little praise and being criticized for petty little things. It wasn't that my parents were strict, I didn't even have to get straight A's or anything like that. It's more that the things that were criticized themselves weren't really important but should have been irrelevant. Some of it comes as "advice" that if you don't follow leads to argument, criticism, or sulking because you didn't do it "the right way." Your job is to read the OCPD person's mind and do things the way that he or she would do it him or herself, because it's "just obvious" that everybody should do it that way, and you're crazy if you just can't see that.

For example, I'm an adult man putting frosting on my daughter's birthday cake and putting sprinkles on it, and my mom comes and tells me that I'm supposed to write her name in sprinkles and I'm doing it wrong, so she grabs the sprinkles out of my hand and does it the way that it [I]should[/I] be done. I'm the idiot for not seeing that everybody should put sprinkles on the birthday cake that way. There's a sense of urgency or importance about it that should be reserved for matters of national security, like not putting sprinkles on the cake that way is going to allow Al Queda operatives to storm the Capitol building or something. But from her perspective, I'm the one who is irrational, because it should be obvious to me. Maybe it's a loss of proportion, seeing things with a distorted perspective where things that shouldn't matter seem incredibly important to extent that the big picture is lost.

Worry is a big part of it. My mom worries about everything, and always has a scenario for something catastrophic that is going to happen. Her alcoholic brother is going to come shoot her with a shotgun. My daughter is going to grow up unable to socialize with other people. About a year ago, I just sort of had an awakening that these were crazy thoughts and that I had been internallizing them and it was putting a strain on my marriage. At first, I went through a period where I was very angry, almost feeling like I had been betrayed and an idiot not to see what had been going on. I tried to talk to my mom about it, but everything that I said was perceived as an atttack and she just got defensive. Things are still strained and awkward with my parents and I haven't figured out what to do about it. It's like from my mom's perspective I'm just being a jerk and I'll come back to seeing things her way eventually.

Hoarding seems to go hand in hand with worry. It's like you have this sense that some day you're going to be in this catastrophic experience and this one thing, whatever it is, is going to be the thing that saves your life, but you're not sure in advance what that one thing will be. It could be that teddy bear that your high school boyfriend gave you, or all the tinfoil and plastic bags that you've carefully washed out and reused. My mom hoards paper, especially newspapers, piles and piles of them that she swears that she is going to go through at some point. She's going to cut out all of the important articles and scan them into the computer. Somewhere in there is the article that's going to save her or someone who she loves from cancer or heart disease or whatever, but if she throws it away, all hope will be lost, and it will be her fault--that's one point where the feeling of OCPD must be similar to OCD.

Organically, within my own self, it feels like being overly sensitive to stimuli, that it is easy to be overwhelmed. But at the same time, it is possible to focus that sensitivity to a single point and become hyper-focused to the exclusion of everything else. I'd have a hard time falling asleep because there was so much chatter in my head, a million thoughts a second. Hyper-vigilant. I describe it as being bird-like, like wild birds around a bird feeder, triggered to take off at the slightest movement in the peripheral vision. The cost for me was a lack of sleep, fatigue, muscle soreness, depression. Interestingly, as I have been treated for the sleeping and fatigue problems and the muscle soreness, the feeling of being over-stimulated has dissipated, somehow I feel more "normal" and less prone to mood swings and such.[/QUOTE]
If one were to exhibit some, but not [I]all[/I] of these characteristics/symptoms, would that still mean one had it, but like a milder case of it or something?

[QUOTE=meatthinker]OCPD is more about always being right, and insisting that things have to be done a particular way even when it is clear to everyone else that it is irrational, even when you yourself might finally recognize that it is irrational. You know how things [I]should[/I] be done as a matter of fact. OCPD people tend to hide their emotions, what is called a [I]flat aspect[/I]. Mary Tyler Moore's character in [I]Ordinary People[/I] is a perfect example of an OCPD person. For example, she and her husband are getting dressed for her son's funeral, and she has a problem that the dress shirt he put on has pin stripes on it, or something like that. You would think that under those circumstances you would be occupied with more important things, maybe even feeling sad, rather than picking on every petty little detail.

[/QUOTE]

how does one seek treatment of OCPD? is the treament succussful? is it therapy, or is it medication? or both?

oh, and,

Do people with OCPD have a particularly hard time maintaining romantic relationships?

[QUOTE=hoipolloi]If one were to exhibit some, but not [I]all[/I] of these characteristics/symptoms, would that still mean one had it, but like a milder case of it or something?[/QUOTE]

I think it's difficult to draw a hard line between what is supposedly [I]normal[/I] and what is [I]abnormal[/I] or at least excessive. A good touchstone is to look at how the behavior affects the person with the behavior and the people around him or her. Are these relationships functional, without a great deal of friction and unhappiness? Do the people around you internalize their feelings? Do you attack people when they get upset with you? Do you feel like you are only surrounded by stupid, flawed people without any intrinsic value? Do you feel like you are the only good person, or the only person who knows how to do things correctly? Do you see yourself as the sole authority on what defines reality and truth, what is good or bad?

When I lived with my parents, I found it incredibly difficult to make decisions, even worse than Hamlet. Even something as mundane as whether to get chocolate or vanilla ice cream. Which flavor of ice cream is better than the other? I don't think my mother would really have cared which flavor of ice cream that I got, but even basic choices like that I was trying to think what she would have wanted me to choose. All of this was without any physical violence, no berating or haranguing. It was like I could never be sure which things that I would decide that she would care about what I decided, so I exercised the same caution with everything, or gave up and resigned myself that I was probably going to do "the wrong thing" because I could never be good enough, never be a complete human being.

My mother is not a bad or malicious person, and she does not show strong emotions, especially not anger. The problem is never that she is angry. It is always that there is some fundamental flaw in you that you did not do what was obviously right to do. I was her anger, externalized, sanitary, contained. It is a backwards way of looking at yourself and other people. I hope that [I]The Arm[/I] will hope explain it better from the inside, so to speak.

It's funny, but it just occurred to me that it's a lot like Ayn Rand, who thought that she could determine objectively what was good and true, and that if you couldn't see what was obviously true, then you are a flawed human being, in denial, and a liar and a hypocrit.

[QUOTE=snuffy]oh, and,

Do people with OCPD have a particularly hard time maintaining romantic relationships?[/QUOTE]

OCPD people do best with other people who are "pleasers" and are willing to try to fullfil their needs without complaining. My father grew up with an alcoholic mother and father who was a pleaser, and he is a pleaser himself. In a lot of ways, he does not exist for me as a separate person, but as an extension of my mother. What she thinks, he thinks. Whatever I say to him, I say to her, and vice versa. They are of one mind.

The danger is that there is a real potential for violence, but it depends on the nature of the people involved. I think a lot of abusers are at least to some extent OCPD. I think a lot of OCPD has to do with externalizing your emotions, making other people vessels for your feelings, while you yourself are in control, unemotional. If you do get angry, it is because the other person did something wrong that made you angry, not because you had an unrealistic expectation yourself. It is the other person's fault, so you are not a bad person to punish the other person. She made you beat her.

My grandma would fly off into uncontrollable rage over silly things, and my grandfather was the pleaser, the martyr, who bore her tirades. My mom witnessed this behavior and decided that she was not going to be like that, so she located anger outside herself, in other people, not in herself. I think there are a few different coping strategies that can arise to deal with being a planet in the gravitational pull of an OCPD person, but I don't know what all of them are yet. Many of these strategies perpetuate the cycle, infect other people with the disease.

If you are the martyr and the pleaser, then you are an easy mark for bullies and con men. You give $10 to the pushy guy from the wildlife foundation or whatever, even if it means that you pay your rent late or causes other problems for you. All you want is to be helpful. You want other people to like you, and you feel deeply upset if they don't. No one is an asshole, you are just a flawed person who makes other people not like you.

what about treatment?

i've always thought of this type of behavior as being good old pathological narcissism...

which. OCPD?

"OCPD people do best with other people who are "pleasers" and are willing to try to fullfil their needs without complaining. My father grew up with an alcoholic mother and father who was a pleaser, and he is a pleaser himself. In a lot of ways, he does not exist for me as a separate person, but as an extension of my mother. What she thinks, he thinks. Whatever I say to him, I say to her, and vice versa. They are of one mind"

the whole [I]having[/I] to be right... doing best with people who are "pleasers"... dominating the thoughts/feelings of anyone who will allow it...

at the same time, according to meaty, it really hurts the OCPD person as well. so, the pleaser dynamic has to break down at some point.

[QUOTE=lofivinyl]i've always thought of this type of behavior as being good old pathological narcissism...[/QUOTE]

I think there are a lot of similarities, and I'm not sure what the differences are. One difference is that my mother doesn't fawn over herself or think that she's perfect or beautiful like I would typically think of someone who is stricly narcissistic. My grandmother has the ability to be generous, even to a fault, but often it comes back to haunt you later with an expectation of reciprocation. You can't just give anything to my grandmother, or she feels obligated to give you something back in return or it is unequal. Maybe it's a bit like it diminishes her somehow.

We tried to take care of my wife's pre-teen niece for awhile, and she was absolutely classically narcissistic, and that was a whole different experience. It was a trial to see if we would take her on as legal guardians, the circumstances and the story how this came about was a bit complicated, part of it that her biological father is almost exactly like her. Unlike my mother, she had to be the center of attention and wanted other people to tell her how beautiful and wonderful she was. One day in gym class, she got to pick the girls to play basketball on her team, then the next day, she's telling everyone that she's the captain of the basketball team at her school. Everyone else just thought that she was obnoxious and a liar.

One weird thing was that she would give her personal things away to people to try to make them like her, almost like it was this game to pretend she was rich and she could just give away a calculator or whatever and it didn't mean anything to her. She wanted me to drive her to school because my car was cooler than my wife's car. We worried that she was a klepto and would steal things, and my wife kept an eye on her stuff, but we never caught her. I think it's very likely that she would steal things then give them to other people to pretend that she is rich.

It didn't work out because she was the Cuckoo's egg. We had our own daughter to take care of, and the niece just could not tolerate sharing our attention with anybody else. It was just unfair to our own daughter. The niece was so far behind in everything and took up so much of our time and resources just to try to get things under control that it was hopeless. We took her to Sylvan, and her skills were barely at the first grade level, but she should have been in eigth grade. So now she's with her biological mother, who is also exactly like her, and the future does not bode well for her. If she didn't have bad personal hygiene and was actually attractive, she would probably be pregnant by now. It's only a matter of time before she hooks up with someone who is even more of a loser and doesn't mind the smell.

I think [I]Mommy Dearest[/I] the story about Joan Crawford is a good illustration of a narcissistic person as opposed to an OCPD person. It's like our niece would get pregnant and have a baby so that baby would love her and tell her how wonderful she is, which is kind of like the purpose that she herself had once served for her mother until she wasn't cute anymore. A child could be like a trophy, proof of what a wonderful mother you are for making such a wonderful child.

[QUOTE=snuffy]what about treatment?[/QUOTE]

OK OK OK [I]treatment[/I] already. My treatment started with therapy when I was in high school. It was funny, though, because one therapist told my mom that she needed to back off, so we stopped going to that therapist and went to see a different one. She said that I "needed someone who was more [I]action oriented[/I] and this guy just wasn't action oriented enough."

The second part of my treatment was plunging into the world of Landmark Education Corporation, make them like my surrogate family for awhile. LEC will tell you a zillion times that it is not therapy, and if what you need is therapy, you should get the hell out, and maybe I should have, but I can't turn back the clock and do it over again without LEC to find out how it might have turned out differently. What it did do for me is that I started being able to make real choices and not be paralyzed all the time when it came to making decisions. The other thing it did was really piss off my mother, because she thought I was going to go back to being a happy little robot and do what I was supposed to do, but I didn't. She thinks that LEC used me, exploited my time, and took advantage of me.

The problem with my stint with Landmark is that I still wanted to be perfect. I looked at the course leaders, and I thought that they were darn near as close to perfect as a human being could be, and I wanted to be just like them. So, I set out to be a course leader, but the whole premise was that I still wanted to be perfect, that I wanted to use LEC to rip out all of my flaws and imperfections and become a better person than I am, but it just doesn't work that way.

A good part of my experience with LEC was that from spending a lot of time close to LEC course leaders, I got to see that they were human, too, and they were not as perfect as I had imagined. Then I realized that maybe nobody could be perfect, that I was striving for something that is just not possible. It was a hard disillusionment, and I think for awhile I was angry just about that, felt like I had been cheated or let down, betrayed.

I think a more useful way to look at Landmark is that it's like, [I]So, this is the machinery that you got, and it's what you got to work with, but you cannot get other machinery or replace it.[/I] If you're an asshole, maybe you can't not be an asshole, but at least you could try to be decent about it. Maybe it's like your fumbling around blind and you can't see where you're going, and you step on people's toes, at least now you: a) realize that you're stepping on people's toes; can go back and say, "Sorry, dude, it's really not personal, I'm blind and I just can't see where I'm going." Or maybe better still, you could ask someone to help you out and be willing to admit that you aren't perfect.

In some ways, LEC courses feel a lot like the [I]experience[/I] that's described in [I]Fight Club[/I] this intense senses of awareness and being in the moment, of accepting your own death and all that you are and being a complete, whole human being and not being afraid of other people and not caring what they think about you or if they think you are a pervert or whatever. [I]I own it,[/I] is the deal, integrity, responsibility. Yeah, I fucked your dog, and I'm really sorry about that, Is there anything that I could do to make it up to you so that you could forgive me? If not, I understand, I accept that as the consequence of my actions, and I forgive you for not forgiving me, I understand. Maybe it sounds like bullshit to write it down this way. Maybe it's just not the same as when you're there.

So, the bottom line is, [I]If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him.[/I] No other person can be your savior, only you can be your own savior, and only in this one chance at life. Fuck the afterlife, fuck reincarnation, that's all just a crock of shit written by fucking idiots who didn't know what the fuck Jesus and Buddha were talking about. The only [I]real[/I] salvation is here. now. in this fucking second.

[QUOTE=meatthinker]I think it's difficult to draw a hard line between what is supposedly [I]normal[/I] and what is [I]abnormal[/I] or at least excessive. A good touchstone is to look at how the behavior affects the person with the behavior and the people around him or her. Are these relationships functional, without a great deal of friction and unhappiness? Do the people around you internalize their feelings? Do you attack people when they get upset with you? Do you feel like you are only surrounded by stupid, flawed people without any intrinsic value? Do you feel like you are the only good person, or the only person who knows how to do things correctly? Do you see yourself as the sole authority on what defines reality and truth, what is good or bad?

When I lived with my parents, I found it incredibly difficult to make decisions, even worse than Hamlet. Even something as mundane as whether to get chocolate or vanilla ice cream. Which flavor of ice cream is better than the other? I don't think my mother would really have cared which flavor of ice cream that I got, but even basic choices like that I was trying to think what she would have wanted me to choose. All of this was without any physical violence, no berating or haranguing. It was like I could never be sure which things that I would decide that she would care about what I decided, so I exercised the same caution with everything, or gave up and resigned myself that I was probably going to do "the wrong thing" because I could never be good enough, never be a complete human being.

My mother is not a bad or malicious person, and she does not show strong emotions, especially not anger. The problem is never that she is angry. It is always that there is some fundamental flaw in you that you did not do what was obviously right to do. I was her anger, externalized, sanitary, contained. It is a backwards way of looking at yourself and other people. I hope that [I]The Arm[/I] will hope explain it better from the inside, so to speak.

It's funny, but it just occurred to me that it's a lot like Ayn Rand, who thought that she could determine objectively what was good and true, and that if you couldn't see what was obviously true, then you are a flawed human being, in denial, and a liar and a hypocrit.[/QUOTE]
What if the person didn't want to be the way they are, and was tired of telling everyone what they really think, i.e. 'the right way to do things' or that said person felt they were pretty much the only one right of anyone they know? So instead of telling everyone this, perhaps the person supressed the urge to do so, but still felt it strongly, or maybe even emotionally trick everyone, like the famous "walls" alot of people have. Basically, I'm asking if it's something you can, to some degree, control, but still "have" it. . .? Like a, heh, closet OCPD? Or would someone like this be a totally different thing?

[QUOTE=meatthinker]
Yeah, I fucked your dog, and I'm really sorry about that, Is there anything that I could do to make it up to you so that you could forgive me? If not, I understand, I accept that as the consequence of my actions, and I forgive you for not forgiving me, I understand. Maybe it sounds like bullshit to write it down this way. Maybe it's just not the same as when you're there.
[/QUOTE]

No, it's not bullshit. I understand this. I think I have the most success with people, whom I have wronged, when I act the way you have described. (not the dog fucking part). it's difficult to be consistant, though.

[QUOTE=hoipolloi]What if the person didn't want to be the way they are, and was tired of telling everyone what they really think, i.e. 'the right way to do things' or that said person felt they were pretty much the only one right of anyone they know? So instead of telling everyone this, perhaps the person supressed the urge to do so, but still felt it strongly, or maybe even emotionally trick everyone, like the famous "walls" alot of people have. Basically, I'm asking if it's something you can, to some degree, control, but still "have" it. . .? Like a, heh, closet OCPD? Or would someone like this be a totally different thing?[/QUOTE]

> sigh <
rolls eyes, storms off...

[QUOTE=meatthinker]> sigh <
rolls eyes, storms off...[/QUOTE]
*winces*
sorry . I'm dumb. I was getting tired, lemme alone. . .

[QUOTE=hoipolloi]*winces*
sorry . I'm dumb. I was getting tired, lemme alone. . .[/QUOTE]

No, silly, I was demonstrating what a closet OCPD does

Another tactic is to get underhanded.

Closet OCPD: So, you're going to wear [I]that[/I] tie? Hmm. It's nice.

Translation: That is the ugliest fucking godawful tie I have ever seen in my whole goddamned life, you shit for taste asshole!

Closet OCPD: So, do you think you might drive to the store today?

Translation: Give me a fucking ride to the mall!