Exit Your Comfort Zone: Rigid Personality to OCD
Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin
Date: 2021-07-01

Lidija Rangelovska described the connection between a lack of self-discipline and issues in self-control. When we lack self-discipline, self-efficacy is impaired.

Self-efficacy is the ability to secure good outcomes from the human and natural environment.

When it is adversely impacted, the result is generalized anxiety.
The response to this dread of change is to institute rigid control over oneself and others as well as ritualized coping strategies and processes. In extremis, this ossifies into obsession-compulsion.

Personality disorders and primitive psychological defenses are examples of such rigidity: they start off as positive adaptations and end up as straitjackets.

Every new information or behavior is made to fit into this mold, which is how addictions work.

What can you do about it?

1. Identify the constricting rigidity and magical thinking
2. Exit the comfort zone
3. Shift locus of control, develop self-efficacy where it is lacking
4. One day at a time, no grandiose schemes
5. Alternate between addictions until you are addicted to nothing and on one.

Rigid controls often lead to self-trashing.

Physical self-trashing: promiscuous self-objectifying drunk sex, alcoholism, drug abuse, heavy smoking, medical neglect, or self-mutilation.

These are all forms of self-rejection and self-loathing, a denial of life itself and its potentials, slow motion unfolding suicide.

Other, no less pernicious and life-vitiating forms of self-annihilation, perhaps because I am their most devoted practitioner: making all the wrong choices knowingly; self-sabotage; teaming up with wrong partners, institutions, or mates; buffoonish or obnoxious public misconduct; a lack of impulse control; inability to delay gratification; perfectionism; procrastination; rumination; avoidance; and numerous other forms of self-defeating, reactant, defiant, and passive-aggressive misbehaviors that constrict life and render it unlived.

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