Q: Dearest Dr. Neuman. I suffer from severe OCD directly linked to a fear of losing my job. I am a writer and will check my work over and over and over again to make sure I remembered to include an a or an or wrote hiring instead of hire or consult instead of consulting. I have tried everything to stop the obsessive behavior. Please doctor give me advice on how to stop the double-checking permanently.
– Arlene B
A: I thought writers were supposed to check their work over and over again. I am really careful about the novels and the other books I write, but I check even a blog post about 15 or twenty times. Other kinds of writing, of course, need not be checked at all (notes I write on patients’ charts, I find, are illegible when I do check them.)
This is my strategy: If I am writing something creative, I keep checking it–often from the beginning– until I do not find any mistakes. Then I stop. Then I give it to my wife to read. She often finds an additional 2 or3 mistakes. Even this much checking will not prevent sometimes embarrassing mistakes. (The back of a recent novel got the name of the protagonist wrong!)
Still, let me respond to you in the terms you present yourself–that you are, indeed, compulsive.
First, you must be able to accept the fact that you will make mistakes no matter what you do. Almost never are these mistakes critical or even serious. Even when they are, they often go unnoticed. ( I once read a famous psychoanalytic textbook and discovered that one sentence directly contradicted the previous one because “not” was left out. No one else noticed.) I have a copy of a textbook drawing of a new-born baby which was drawn to have two left feet. The artist and editor did not notice. The editor who reprinted it to another textbook did not notice.
2. As in any compulsion, the more checking you do, the more you want to do. Set an arbitrary number of times to check and then stop.
As for losing your job, I am impressed by how some people hold onto their jobs no matter what sort of mistake they make. In my experience, a $200,000,000 mistake is the record. (an insurance company executive); and he did not lose his job. See below.
– Dr. Neuman