Originally published by: The Healthy Compulsive Project

In my last post I argued that it’s important for us to know that we are enough; that accepting ourselves as we are right now is an essential step in achieving mental health. In this post I’ll explore the other side of the coin—wanting to change, to grow and be more than enough. That previous post was about acceptance. This one is about the desire and drive to evolve personally.

I’ll be comparing two different mindsets as they affect the wellbeing of those with obsessive-compulsive personality: fixed mindset and growth mindset. A mindset is an implicit theory, an underlying and unconscious assumption that colors how we see ourselves and what’s possible in our development. Without our awareness, mindsets attribute meaning to the events of our lives, interpreting them as sure signs that we’re either on the road to ruin, or the highway to wholeness.

Fixed mindset believes that our capacities are static. Growth mindset believes that we can learn, grow and improve.

Identifying the Good Guy and the Bad Guy in this battle for your mind might seem like a no-brainer. But sometimes we’re low-brainers (i.e. not mindful) and get caught in the middle of the feud. Getting to know their stories will help you to see who you’ve actually been rooting for so far, and who you want to support going forward.

In one corner we have Fixed, who can manifest as either smug or deeply ashamed. In the opposing corner we have Growth, who looks curious and calm. They’re about to fight over which attitude runs your life.

I’m framing this as a fight because I believe it goes on inside of all of us at least some of the time.

Before the fight gets started, we need to look at the cultural mindset as it affects it.

The Medical Establishment Promotes Fixed Mindset

For decades medical students have been taught that personality disorders are fixed. Unchangeable. Insurance companies, at least in the past, would not reimburse treatment for personality disorders because they claimed there was no effective treatment.

I was recently explaining to a physician the work that I do with people who have obsessive-compulsive personality. She said, “But aren’t those personality disorders set for life? I mean there’s nothing you can do about them.”  To her credit she seemed open to what I had to say, but her initial belief was, unfortunately, typical of what most health care providers believe.

And while medications can be used to support deeper psychotherapeutic work, the belief that bad chemistry causes our problems (a fixed mindset) too often leads people to believe that their prognosis is not good.

This is a good example of a bad attitude–fixed mindset. Fixed mindset believes that resistance—in the sense of putting up a fight against the maladaptive use of personality traits–is futile.

Not all physicians subscribe to the fixed mindset. But much of the medical establishment has, by strong implication.

Fixed mindsets were around way before psychiatrists, their diagnostic systems, and Big Pharma showed up ringside to cheer on Fixed. But they gave status to an idea that has dogged the human race for thousands of years: you can’t change. So, as we’re watching this boxing match get started, fixed mindset just got the endorsement of the medical establishment, and their logo is all over.

The Capacity for Change

But more recent research tells us that one can test positive for a personality disorder one year and negative the next. And that psychotherapeutic treatment can be effective in treating personality disorders. The truth is, these conditions are not as fixed as we’ve been taught. (See my previous post on change in OCPD.)

So, growth mindset has gotten a leg up in the fight. But, so far, no endorsements. Since most people don’t read the American Journal of Psychiatry, they aren’t aware of the more recent developments.

Cultural context matters, but a more salient question is how this battle plays out in the mind of the individual with obsessive-compulsive personality. Research indicates that your mindset is a critical factor in whether you are able to make your traits adaptive or not. Your beliefs about how malleable you are can predict how successful you will be in evolving and growing.

For instance, do you believe that your need for control, perfection and order is just your fate? If you believe that you can’t learn to tolerate the anxiety that you’d experience if you didn’t control so much, you will avoid situations that can trigger anxiety, and you will deprive yourself of the principal strategy that could help you to overcome it. Fixed mindset wins.

The Benefits of Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck, Ph.D., a research psychologist at Stanford University, has studied the benefits of growth mindset and the perils of fixed mindset. Growth mindset is defined as the belief that we can develop our abilities with effort. But it’s more than a belief: it’s also an active process of valuing hard work, trying new strategies, and seeking feedback from others.

In her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Dweck tells many stories of students who had been labeled deficient, who went on to succeed once they were taught growth mindset. Test scores and measurements tell us what a student’s current ability is, not what their potential is. But too often those test scores set limitations for what we can expect from ourselves or others. And, unintentionally, their parents and teachers often convey those limitations.

Growth mindset values the process of learning, change and growth. Living in that mindset becomes more important than the outcome, or any absolute measurement of intelligence, personality or material success. This is not to say that outcome is irrelevant. It’s not. But if it’s primary, it causes problems.

Fixed mindset conceives of our brains as made of stone rather than muscle. There’s not much you can do to shape stone except maybe carve away parts of it. You’re stuck with it. For life. But if it’s muscle, you can strengthen it.

I have a friend, a writer and economist by training, who at the age of sixty-nine still loves to learn. He already has a doctorate and is retired. But every day he takes out a science textbook, be it physics, biology, or, the bane of medical students’ existence, organic chemistry, and methodically works his way through it. All just because he loves to learn. And this is one of the many reasons he is my friend.

Score one round for Growth.

The Emotional Results of Fixed Mindset

Fixed mindset, on the other hand, tells you that what you’ve got is all you’re gonna get. If you’re told you’re gifted and talented, and that that’s what leads to success, Fixed can seem like your guy or girl in the fight. But the implication to many young people is that if you’re gifted and talented you don’t need to work hard. And if you do work hard, it means that you’re not gifted or talented.

You can get by like that for a little while, but eventually even the most gifted need to exert effort. And you have far fewer options with fixed mindset. It’s like fighting with one hand tied behind your back.

At least as bad, if your test scores are not high, and fixed mindset is in control, you will feel that there’s no reason to try at all. This can seem like a good thing because it’s not your fault and you’re off the hook. It’s palpably seductive to fall to the ground and give up rather than fight.

It also just seems like you’re being realistic, and hey, isn’t it a virtue to accept your limitations?

But fixed mindset can make you perfectionistic, over-sensitive and defensive. Any time you don’t succeed or you make a mistake, you take it as evidence that you aren’t so great after all, and never will be. And it’s understandable that you’d get defensive if you feel that that’s all you’ve got.

Fixed mindset feeds on competition and hierarchy: the need to be better than others, not better than you were yesterday. And it tends to be black or white: I’m either amazing or rotten to the core.

Dweck writes: “Believing that your qualities are carved in stone–the fixed mindset–creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character–well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.”  (Pg. 6) But note that this need to prove doesn’t actually encourage hard work: in fixed mindset hard work just proves you never had talent to start with. Instead, avoidance, denial and defensiveness are enlisted.

Fixed mindset can seem like a winner at first because you can use it to avoid difficult emotions. But, like sugar, it won’t sustain you in the longer battle.

Growing Personality—The Struggle to Not Just Tolerate Discomfort, But Welcome It

Dweck’s work focuses mostly on education, creativity, sports and business. But there are implications for personality change and clinical practice that are being explored by other researchers. The more I learn about fixed mindset, the more I see how it can prevent psychotherapy patients from getting better because it discourages the experience of negative emotions and encourages avoiding them altogether. That doesn’t win the fight. Growth mindset, on the other hand, welcomes setbacks as opportunities.

In a recent post I wrote that feeling that we are not enough leads to insecurity and compensatory overshooting. I suspect that a fixed mindset can both be caused by insecurity about facing challenges, and it can also amplify that insecurity. Psychology researcher Hans Schroder at the University of Michigan wrote, “Indeed, fixed mindsets of intelligence and personality are positively correlated with social anxiety, perfectionism, and depression.” What probably happens in most cases is that feeling inadequate and inhabiting a fixed mindset egg on each other to still greater heights of dissatisfaction.

The Role of Fixed Mindset in OCPD

The obsessive-compulsive personality is vulnerable to siding with fixed mindset. Here are some examples:

• I can’t stop cleaning. That’s just who I am.

• I can’t stop correcting my partner. I know how things should be and can’t just let this stuff go. These are the rules and I would feel like I’ve failed if I don’t follow them and enforce them.

• I know it’s crazy, but I just can’t stop working. My financial advisor tells me I have enough money to retire, but it makes me too anxious.

• I can’t stop avoiding conflict with others. I just can’t stand to have anyone angry at me or even disappointed in me.

• I just can’t stop making lists. It’s the only way I can feel secure.

• I get very upset at things that aren’t fair and I can’t stop thinking about them.

Fixed mindset leads to the assumption that making a mistake means you are fundamentally flawed, and to the need to be perfect. But this is not a constructive desire for perfection, but only the need to make it look like you’re perfect.

These are all indications that you believe you can’t change. True, some of the tendencies that can lead to such blocks will never go away, but it is also possible for them to become more adaptive, rather than maladaptive.

How Growth Mindset Helps in Becoming a Healthy Compulsive

The psychological philosophy at the root of the Healthy Compulsive Project is that people with obsessive-compulsive personality can use their personality traits in adaptive ways.  It holds that the compelling urges underlying the personality are natural and can have meaning when aimed accurately. But our attitude toward these traits determines how successful we can be in returning them to their original intended purpose.

And while I suspect that people with any of the personality disorders can change, I believe that we have particular reason to believe that people with OCPD can change—despite its reputation as a difficult condition to treat. As I’ve explored in a previous post, I believe that at the core of the obsessive-compulsive personality there is a strong inclination to achieve mastery, the desire to solve problems, learn and build. Mastery is also at the heart of growth mindset. When that desire for mastery is enlisted for psychological change, the results are significant.

Too often the deep desire to master is focused only on the outside world, not on the self. You might get a law passed for your town to have a more flexible election process, but can you let go of your own rigidity in how you make decisions?

The determination to achieve control and perfection are baked into the obsessive-compulsive personality. And they can be used to change it. Growth mindset encourages us to see and pursue our potential, rather than assume that we can’t change.

Many people with a personality disorder, including OCPD, will not change. But that inability to change is not due to the nature of a personality disorder or OCPD—it’s based partly on whether they adopt fixed mindset or growth mindset—their attitude toward themselves.

People with OCP are reluctant to delegate. This also means that they can be reluctant to ask for help or accept feedback. Initiative and independence are good skills to have, but the loner approach is the opposite of growth mindset—which is willing to say “I don’t understand, can you help me?”

There is another angle on this to consider: how “successful” you are in outer achievements may be less important than having engaged in the effort to change. That effort may be more satisfying than the outcome. That’s how to win the fight for fulfillment.

For parents, teachers and therapists, it helps to focus on the learning processes of our children, students and patients, not their abilities. I remember my first therapist saying that how psychologically talented someone was determined their capacities as a therapist. She didn’t say it directly in regard to me, but the seed was planted that I could have limitations in my work as a therapist–depending on how psychologically talented I was—whatever that means.

The Limits of Growth Mindset

None of this is to say that anything is possible. We do have limits, and a misunderstanding of growth mindset might set us up for failure if we don’t accept those limits. I’ve seen many clients who feel that they should be able to control themselves and everything around them by trying harder. Willpower becomes their religion. Injuries from trying too hard are common among people with OCP. These injuries run the gamut from bursitis to burnout.

I worked with one man whose company set goals for him that put him in a completely impossible position. For six years he kept trying to stretch himself to meet their demands. He finally got out, but he feared that his morale had been permanently damaged. He did recover, but it was very painful. The idea that he could will himself to take on anything was dangerous for this man because he continually blamed himself for not being able to do the impossible.

No matter how hard I try, I’m never going to play for the NBA, solve an infamous math problem, or dance with the Boston Ballet. Or Taylor Swift for that matter.

How to Win the Mindset Battle

If you want to support Growth in its ongoing battle for your mind, here are some steps you can take.

First, take take a quiz to see who’s winning the battle.  That’s a start, but you’ll eventually need to dig deeper because you may have a fixed mindset about some things, and a growth mindset about others. For example, you might believe that you change how you express your anger, but you could never allow anyone else to take care of your dog Spot for a few days.

Rarely is one side completely dominant. When I took the test I knew what all the “right” answers were. And I could also feel a part of me that didn’t completely buy into those answers. Reason and feeling were not entirely in harmony. Changing mindset is not just an intellectual task. It also takes courage, the willingness to take risks, and the willingness to seek and receive help.

Here are some things you can do to cultivate growth mindset:

• Empathically identify your specific fixed mindset mantras. For example:

• I’ll never be able to tolerate anxiety much less welcome it.

• I just need to have a perfectly clean house.

• If I don’t take charge and plan everything, everything will be terrible.

• If I make a mistake, I’ll never recover.

Identify what triggers lead you to let fixed mindset take over. For example:

• Annual work reviews

• Visits to your parents

• New tasks

• Competitive colleagues

• Not knowing

Personify your fixed mindset for quick identification: Judge, Policeman, Genius, Fool, Cynic. Tell it how it affects you.

Identify the purpose fixed mindset may have served for you:

• Reassuring and gratifying if you were told you were gifted?

• An excuse not to try if you were not identified as special?

Replace the fixed mindset mantras with more constructive ones. For example:

• Facing my fears will help me overcome them.

• I can learn to welcome anxiety.

• I can handle whatever comes up.

• If I make a mistake I will learn from it.

Savor challenges and mine setbacks for learning opportunities.

Consider other ways to do things when you don’t succeed. It’s not just about hard work, it’s also about being flexible.

Remember that this process is not once and done. We all regress at times, and that should not be a cause for discouragement. It’s more reason to cheer for Growth.

References available in original article on The Healthy Compulsive Project.