dear real simple, i`m a control freak. please help.

Written by Virginia Sole-Smith
Photographs by Chris Buck
JANUARY 2015
90
I T ’ S T H E T H I R D F R I DAY of the school year at
Vachel Lindsay Elementary School, in Springfield,
Illinois, and Julie Padavic’s first-grade class is
getting antsy for the weekend. One little boy
zooms around making airplane noises; several
girls pop up to use the pencil sharpener. But
when Julie begins to count in a calm, quiet voice,
all 24 of them scramble to settle themselves on a
big square rug in the center of the room. Julie, 31,
is small but commanding, with a trim black bob
and eyes that are warm but that miss nothing.
She sits on a chair in front of the class and begins
to read The True Story of the Three Little Pigs,
pausing every now and then to refocus her more
wayward charges: “Emma, can I trust you to be
still next to Sarah? OK, show me you can do it.”
“Max, can you do your best learning there, or do
you need to sit closer to me?”
When the story is finished, Julie guides the children, whom she calls her “friends,” back to their
desks, where they industriously convert brown
paper bags into homes for the aforementioned
three pigs. As they work, she circles the room,
pausing to admire a choice to use neon pink for
the brick house or turquoise for straw. A sign over
one bulletin board reads think big, have fun, be
kind, show love, which is a kind of mantra for
Julie’s philosophy of teaching. “I spend my whole
day telling my students that it doesn’t have to be
perfect and you’re wonderful the way you are,”
she tells me later. “But for some reason I just can’t
give that to myself.”
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GUTTER CREDITS TKTKTKTKTKTKTKTK;
“DEAR
REAL SIMPLE,
I’M A CONTROL
FREAK.
PLEASE HELP.”
DOMESTIC
PERFECTION
COMES
WITH A PRICE.
JULIE PADAVIC
GOT TIRED
OF PAYING IT.
I N FAC T, U N D E R N E AT H that calm exterior, Julie is
dangerously close to a breaking point. “My name is
Julie Padavic, and I am a control freak,” she wrote
in an e-mail to Real Simple this past July. “Other
adjectives that have been thrown my way in jest or
otherwise include anal, OCD, perfectionist.”
Looking around her bright and cheerful classroom, I start to see the problem. The space is
surprisingly tidy for the end of a school week.
Crayons, flash cards, and other supplies are impeccably organized in a wall of buckets, and in the
“Reading Reef” corner, dozens of picture books
are sorted into plastic bins, each labeled by genre.
By the time we leave, every student’s chair stands
at attention on top of its desk, and I notice that
Julie makes a point of correcting those that dare to
face the wrong way. A little anal, but fair enough,
you may be thinking; many of us have the urge to
restore order at the end of the day. But as we talk
further, I learn that Julie’s day rarely ends before
the wee hours of the morning. And it’s not just that
Julie is juggling a full-time job with coursework for
a post-master’s certification and many volunteer
commitments; it’s the extent to which she lets
these responsibilities, and many more, monopolize
her time. “Julie will answer a parent’s e-mail the
second it comes in at 10 p.m.,” her husband, David,
tells me. “Then she’ll be up for another three
hours worrying about whether she used the right
language.”
And if Julie is worrying, odds are she’s cleaning
or organizing. At the Padavic home, every surface
gleams and every carpet has been vacuumed in
precise diagonals. There is not so much as a spoon
in the sink or a sock peeking out of the hamper.
“I’ve been known to go in and remake the bed
after houseguests make it in the morning,” Julie
admits. “One of our friends even cried, feeling that
I found her bedmaking skills lacking.”
When she gives me a tour, Julie opens closets
somewhat shamefacedly—not because they’re
messy but because they’re perfect. Everywhere
I look, hair products, cleaning supplies, and toilet
paper are sorted into baskets, spaced precisely on
shelves, and labeled in her flawless teacher’s cursive. Even the dog’s toys are neatly arranged on its
bed. “Cleaning and organizing soothes me,” says
Julie. “It’s hard for me to relax by reading a novel
or something. I hate feeling unproductive.”
THE NEED FOR
CONTROL
T O B E C L E A R , Julie does not suffer from
obsessive-compulsive disorder. (See sidebar, page
97, for the distinctions.) But David still thinks
the problem is serious. “She says, ‘This is how I
relax!’ But relaxing is when you take a nap or go
for a nice, long walk,” he says. “You should feel
energized afterward. Julie wears herself to the
bone working on our house.” David is a laid-back
33-year-old with classic midwestern charm. (He
and Julie met in 2005 and married in ’09.) But
his frustration is palpable. Most of the couple’s
weekends are swallowed up by house chores and
projects. On a typical Sunday night, when David
wants to relax and watch TV, Julie will decide to
vacuum or start cleaning the windows. “She’ll
say she doesn’t want any help, but then I feel like
a jerk sitting there,” he says. “It’s like, Oh, here’s
David drinking beer and watching football while
his wife slaves away.” But Julie is quick to own
her habits: “I don’t do it because David expects
it—I do it because it puts me in control,” she
says. After all, this is also a woman who rewrites
e-mails on behalf of her colleagues, whether
they’ve asked her to or not. And Julie not only
planned every detail of her wedding—she choreographed the proposal, too. “I told David that
we’d get engaged at Christmas, when our families
would all be in town, and I picked out the ring,”
she admits. “There was no element of surprise. I
had already planned out the whole wedding—and
even booked the venue—the summer before.”
Julie knows that her type A habits are taking a
toll on their life. “I’m exhausted all the time, and
I get sick a lot because I expend so much energy
micromanaging,” she says. “I also know that I’m
being selfish. It’s not fair to David or the rest of my
friends and family when I get so consumed with
my to-do list and don’t make time for them.” Perhaps more important, she and David want to start
a family. “But I can’t even think about the lack of
control I’ll have over that entire 18-plus-year process,” says Julie. “I have to deal with this now.”
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“I love this
house, but I
do believe it
served as a
catalyst.
I feel so much
pressure to
keep it perfect.
Somewhere
along the way,
I got it into
my head that
we should
be living in a
Pottery Barn
catalog.”
LETTING GO
AT HOME
T H E PA DAV I C S AG R E E that one of their biggest
sources of tension is Julie’s desire to reorganize
David’s belongings in addition to her own. “I
leave a trail around the house,” David admits. “But
the thing is, I know where I’ve left something.”
Julie insists that mostly she’s trying to help
but acknowledges that she also gets annoyed
by David’s “piles and trails of things. They just
look like clutter to me.” She’s also constantly
reinventing the (already perfectly organized)
wheel and finding new places for everyday items,
so it can take David an extra 15 minutes to leave
the house because he’s hunting for Julie’s new
storage spot for his wallet, phone, and keys.
To help them sync up their housekeeping styles,
I call Julie Morgenstern, the New York City–based
author of Organizing From the Inside Out. Bringing in a professional organizer to help someone
who is already compulsively organized seems
counterintuitive, and when I first tell Morgenstern
about Julie, she jokes, “Maybe I should just hire
her!” But after their first meeting, Morgenstern
changes her mind: “Julie is trying to force them
both to be organized in ways that look good but
don’t necessarily function well for the way they
live and use their space.”
M O R G E N S T E R N A S K S if there was ever a point in
Julie’s life when she didn’t feel so compelled to
organize. Thinking back, Julie recalls the house
she shared with four roommates in college. The
common spaces were pretty messy, but it didn’t
bother her. “I could keep my room exactly the
way I wanted, and that was all I was responsible
for,” she says. But the house the Padavics share
now feels like “the hugest responsibility.” For
one thing, it represents a tremendous financial
investment. David works long hours as an
e-commerce entrepreneur, so Julie took on the
role of home manager. “I love this house, but I
do believe it served as a catalyst, because I feel
so much pressure to keep it perfect. Somewhere
along the way, I got it into my head that we
should be living in a Pottery Barn catalog at all
times,” she says. “I think I also believe that if
my house is in order, then my life must be in
order—even though, actually, my life is often in
the most disarray when my house looks great!”
Morgenstern agrees: “It’s time to take some of
that pressure off.”
Morgenstern instructs the couple to sit down
and discuss their house room by room, to decide
who will be in charge of which areas and tasks.
“They need a proper division of labor,” says Morgenstern. “So if Julie knows David is in charge of
the living room or of vacuuming—Julie likes the
way David does the floors—she can cross that off
her list. We can’t make the house smaller, but we
can shrink the footprint of her responsibility.”
They also need to figure out what’s working and
what isn’t about each space—like the coffee cupboard in the kitchen, which Julie has styled like a
magazine photo but which requires David to reach
past three things he never uses to find the mug
he drinks from every morning. By Morgenstern’s
JANUARY 2015
93
REALSIMPLE.COM
second visit, Julie has had an epiphany: “David
is actually pretty organized!” she says. “I always
thought he was leaving things around on purpose
to irritate me. But now I get that those scattered
objects are actually his to-do list. It’s like how some
of my students who have the messiest-looking
desks are the quickest to find their markers,
because they know exactly where they put them.”
I N FAC T, T H E PA DAV I C S are what Morgenstern
considers a “classic mismatch” of organizational
styles. “Julie thinks it’s organized when surfaces
are clear and everything looks good; David
thinks it’s organized when everything he needs
is where he can reach it,” she says. Her strategy
for promoting marital harmony as quickly as
possible is to find a way to blend the two styles:
“The Padavics need a ‘project bin’ with a lid in the
corner of every room,” she says. “Then David can
leave things out where he needs them, but if
the piles drive Julie crazy, she can stash everything
and he’ll know exactly where to look.”
Julie’s next epiphany comes when Morgenstern
explains that organization isn’t supposed to be the
end goal; it’s a tool that Julie can use to give herself
more time to enjoy her life. “I’ve had this idea that
I have to keep redoing every space in our home
over and over—that this is what you’re supposed to
do as a good homeowner,” she says. “To hear [from
Morgenstern] that actually, no, you can organize
a space and say, ‘It works—it’s done now!’ Wow,
that’s a huge relief.”
But tackling the practical side of Julie’s organizing is only the first step. “When someone is
organizing and reorganizing to the degree Julie is,
it’s not just about finding a better system,” Mor­
genstern says. “At 2 a.m., Julie’s not doing these
projects to make their home better. It’s almost an
abuse of organization, the way someone might
abuse drugs or alcohol.”
LETTING GO
AT WORK
T H E I D E A O F A N “organization addiction” sounds
extreme, but to Julie it’s a relief to admit to this.
“I organize to avoid my feelings,” she says. When
she’s worried about a struggling student or a
fight with David, the urge to organize comes on
ship role in 10 years. “When I was a new teacher, I
felt like I had to earn my keep, since I didn’t have
as much experience as my colleagues. So I took
on all the odd jobs, like cleaning out our supply
closet and making all the photocopies,” says Julie.
“Over the years, that’s turned into feeling like I
have to keep doing everything, because I want to
control every last detail, especially if it’s a project
that feels ‘onstage,’ like orientation night or a
letter going home to the parents.”
strong, no matter what else she’s doing or how
late it is at night. It seems easier to take apart the
bathroom closet than to deal with the real source
of her anxiety. Unlike most addictions, this one
gets positive reinforcement. “Part of the reason
it’s so hard for me to relax is that people notice
when you keep an impeccable house,” says Julie.
“I’m known for being super-organized, and that
creates even more expectations.” Julie notes that
she grew up using schoolwork to escape in a
similar fashion. Diving into her studies resulted
in academic success. The external validation
this produced became a key to her sense of self.
Says David, “It’s like no one ever told her that
you don’t have to get a 4.0 all the time.” Julie
now throws herself into work in much the same
way, holding herself to high standards in terms of
performance and parent evaluations while setting
ambitious goals, like taking on a school leader-
JANUARY 2015
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Julie has
spent her
whole adult
life viewing
sleep as a
waste of time:
“You can
humble-brag
about how late
you stayed
up finishing a
project, but
nobody wants
to hear how
you took
good care of
yourself.
There aren’t
any bragging
rights
to sleep.”
T O H E L P J U L I E A D D R E S S what might be
better termed “achievement addiction,” I call
Pamela Mitchell, a coach and the founder of the
Reinvention Institute, in Miami. Many of Mitchell’s
clients are, like Julie, people who have become
obsessed with achieving for achievement’s sake.
Explains Mitchell: “Julie has been checking off
boxes based on what looks good to the world.
After you teach for a few years, you’re expected to
want to move up to become a principal. But she
has never asked herself what kind of emotional
payoff she wants from accomplishing those goals.
When you get caught in that trap, your successes
are empty and it starts to feel like nothing will
ever be enough.” This triggers what Mitchell
calls “the anxiety-activity circle,” in which Julie
becomes anxious because she feels as if she’s
not doing enough, takes on more (at work and
at home) to avoid dealing with that anxiety, then
feels overwhelmed, which sparks more anxiety.
To break the cycle, Mitchell says, Julie needs
to identify the emotions that she wants to feel
when she attains a goal, then pare down her
responsibility list to focus on the activities that
truly elicit those rewards. “This will mean less
micromanaging and more delegating. Julie can
reframe what feels like ‘letting go’ as ‘creating
space’ to pursue her true goals,” says Mitchell. To
help identify what those goals might be, Mitchell
asks Julie to dream up her ideal day. What would
she do if there were no work deadlines or to-do
lists to consider? “I would have breakfast and relax
with David, and then we might go apple picking
or just enjoy the fall day with family and friends,”
Julie tells me a few weeks later, when we meet. “I
would feel contentment, wholeness, and warmth.”
I ask her how much time she would spend organizing or cleaning, and we’re both surprised by her
answer. “None,” she says, after thinking about it
for a minute. After all, that’s what she does to numb
JANUARY 2015
95
feelings. “There’s no emotional payoff there.”
After working with Mitchell, Julie sets reminders on her phone so the words “contentment,
wholeness, and warmth” pop up several times
a day. When she gets crazed at work (rewording
a memo to parents that her colleague already
did a perfectly fine job on, for instance) or at
home (feeling compelled to buff fingerprints off
every stainless-steel surface), Julie uses those
pop-up reminders to evaluate each task. “If I
can’t see how it will help me cultivate that sense
of warmth, contentment, and wholeness, then
maybe I don’t need to do it,” she says.
A few weeks into the school year, Julie spends a
day at a work conference. On the drive home, she
begins worrying about what might have happened
in the classroom during her absence. In the past,
this would have meant driving straight to school
and spending several hours straightening up desks,
organizing books, and preparing for the next day,
even though she knew that her coworkers would
have this covered. “Instead I asked myself what
I really wanted to do,” Julie reports. “And I realized, actually, that it was a beautiful day and I just
wanted to go home and take the dog for a walk. So
I gave myself permission to do that instead.”
LEARNING TO
RELAX
A F T E R A F E W W E E K S , Julie finds that going
through the task-evaluation process can be
exhausting, and sometimes she slips into old,
familiar patterns. I call Michelle Segar, Ph.D., a
motivation psychologist in Ann Arbor, Michigan,
and the author of the forthcoming No Sweat:
How the Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring
You a Lifetime of Fitness, to find out what Julie
can do to keep herself on track. Segar studies
what it takes to make a sustainable change in
behavior: why most of us break those New Year’s
resolutions or regain the weight after a diet,
and why some manage to stay the course. Her
research shows that we’re most likely to make
a new habit stick if we’ve already ensured that
our “foundational self-care needs” are being met.
She explains: “We each have a slightly different
hierarchy of foundational needs, but for many of
us sleep is the most important. Every time Julie
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half my book-club book while he golfed, so we
were both happy!” she says. David is delighted
they spent the time together and impressed that
Julie left dishes in the sink while they did it.
Other victories include Julie’s decision to stop
making the bed on hurried weekday mornings
and to respect the “David zones” in the house (for
example, his bathroom drawer). David is being
mindful of the trail of destruction that he can
leave. “I’m trying to be more careful when I shave
or brush my teeth so she doesn’t freak out about
the bathroom,” he says. “And I’ll mow the grass
in the diagonal stripes she likes, even though it’s
a pain with the shape of our yard. I know these
things are important to her. If I help in certain
areas, it might stave off one of those five-hour
cleaning binges.” Julie is grateful for those small
changes. “We’re being gentler with each other,”
she notes.
At work, Julie has found herself saying no a little
more often and asking for help when she needs
it. She’s also focusing on the wealth of talent her
colleagues bring to the table instead of dwelling
on tiny details that she would handle differently.
“David and
I are being
gentler with
each other. I
still get that
pull to control,
but I can use it
to ask myself
what I really
need instead of
pushing down
my anxieties.”
confronts that urge to organize, she has to make
a tough choice. And because she skimps on
sleep, every one of those choices is even more
difficult. She’s depleted, making it harder to
change old habits.”
Through working with Segar, Julie begins to
understand just how much she has devalued rest.
“There aren’t any bragging rights to sleep,” she tells
me. “You can humble-brag about how late you
stayed up to finish some killer project, but nobody
wants to hear how you took good care of yourself
and got lots of rest.” In fact, Julie has spent her
whole adult life viewing sleep as a waste of time.
“David loves going to bed,” she says. “And in the
past I’ve pooh-poohed that and even gotten angry
when he didn’t stay up late with me to accomplish
a task. Sleep feels like such an inefficient use of
my time.”
Segar tells Julie to start keeping a log of how
much she sleeps and how that affects her energy
JANUARY 2015
96
and stress levels the next day. “Julie needs hard
data to show her how much better she can function with sleep,” says Segar.
A NEW
BEGINNING
I T O U C H BA S E with Julie and David a few weeks
after our first meeting to find out how they’re
doing. “What I’m most excited about is having
a better perspective,” says Julie. “I still get that
pull to control, but I can use it to ask myself
what I really need instead of pushing down
my anxieties.” They’re both enthusiastic about
what they did that past Sunday: Julie surprised
David by booking a tee time and going with him
to the golf course instead of staying home to
clean. “I got to commandeer the cart and read
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T H E E L E M E N T O F T H I S whole experience that
has resonated most for Julie was an assignment
from Mitchell to keep a daily “success journal.”
Every night before bed, Julie jots down four
triumphs from her day; big, small, at work, at
home. (“Played ball with the dog instead of
loading the dishwasher”; “enjoyed the look of
the fall leaves on the yard instead of feeling
compelled to rake them up.”) Explains Mitchell,
“Part of the reason Julie had gotten so hardcharging and goal-oriented is that she wasn’t
taking the time to appreciate everything she was
already doing so well.” Julie likes that the journal
lets her end the day feeling accomplished,
instead of spiraling about all the things she has
to do the next day.
Sleep is still a work in progress. When David
turns on the morning news, he often finds the TV
on a channel that broadcasts CSI reruns all night
long. But the couple are optimistic about how
even the small changes they made are adding up
to something bigger. “The baby conversation has
become a when, not an if!” Julie reports. “We both
feel ready for the challenge. And even if having
a child throws me back into a tizzy, I know I have
the tools to deal with it.” n
CONTROL FREAK
OR OCD SUFFERER?
“Control freak” is not a
medical term, so asking a doctor to speak to
it is tricky. What Real
Simple learned talking
with Helen Blair Simpson, M.D., Ph.D., the
director of the Center for
Obsessive-Compulsive
and Related Disorders
at Columbia University,
in New York City, is that
when something is in
the range of normal
behavior, it’s not OCD
(obsessive-compulsive
disorder). Perhaps the
behavior is even interfering with some elements
of life, but it’s not turning someone’s world
upside down. Simpson
chalks some controlfreak behavior up to societal pressures. “I think
women, particularly
working women with
kids, believe there are so
many things we’re supposed to be doing,” says
Simpson. “And there’s
some problem with you
if you can’t handle it all.”
OCD is something else,
and Simpson shared
the red flags to help
us understand it. She
explains that if you experience red flag No. 1 and/
or No. 2 along with No. 3,
you should ask your doctor for information.
JANUARY 2015
97
OCD RED FLAG NO. 1:
I N T RU S I V E
THOUGHTS
Ruminating over a
question or a concern
is not unusual. “We all
get intrusive thoughts
from time to time,” says
Simpson. “But in OCD
these thoughts impair
functioning and last for
at least an hour a day—
often much longer.” The
topic of these worries
can vary. Contamination and cleanliness are
classic OCD obsessions,
but OCD patients also
struggle with intrusive
thoughts, images, or
urges related to causing
harm; achieving symmetry or making things “just
so”; or “taboo” topics,
such as violence and sex.
OCD RED FLAG NO. 2:
REPETITIVE
B E H AV I O R S
O R R I T UA L S
People with OCD will
compulsively repeat
certain behaviors or
rituals, such as washing the kitchen counter
in a very particular way,
touching doorknobs a
certain number of times,
or unplugging appliances. “Checking twice
that you have your ID or
passport before going to
the airport is not OCD,”
says Simpson. “Distress
around repetitive behaviors is a key component.”
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OCD RED FLAG NO. 3:
D I ST R E SS T H AT
I NT E RFE R E S W IT H
FUNCTIONING
Up to 89 percent of us
will experience intrusive
thoughts and compulsive behaviors at some
point. “It’s normal if you
find yourself standing on
the roof of a tall building
to have an urge to jump,”
says Simpson. “It can
be unsettling. You might
think, Whoa, where did
that thought come from?
But this is normal.” The
difference in people
with OCD is that these
thoughts or compulsions
are recurrent and persistent—and cause intense
anxiety or distress. People with OCD may also
believe that they have to
follow through on their
compulsive behaviors to
keep themselves from
doing something “bad”
or to prevent a disaster.
“They wrestle with these
issues constantly and
struggle to get through
the day,” says Simpson.
If you find yourself
fraught with anxiety
as a result of intrusive
thoughts or compulsive
behaviors for an hour
a day or more, your
doctor can help. Says
Simpson, “We have great
treatments now, both
in terms of cognitive
behavioral therapy and
medications.”