Lower level career in OCPD

[Prototypian]

My spouse has uOCPD.   She is a lifelong public servant and elected official.   Prior to moving into this she has an undergraduate degree with triple major and graduated summa cum laude then law degree. Board certified and keeps up the board certification religiously.

Within a few days of getting married she joined the local planning and zoning commission then went into elected politics.   She has been in that world ever since.   She took a job and came home thrilled.   It's a clerical job working for a local charity processing checks.   She was so excited with the job and told me it makes 11 dollars an hour and she blew a gasket when I laughed saying that the local ice cream shop pays 14.

I should state that we don't need the money.   Homes are paid off, no debt and my job is fortunate and has been blessed my whole career.

I was more surprised that she chose a role that was processing checks and answering phones for 11 dollars an hour being a board certified lawyer.   

She finally admitted that the reason she took that job was that they had not been able to fill it for 3 years (I think it's likely because the pay was below the local fast food places) and the supervisor agreed to give her 100 percent flexibility as a school board member to go to all meetings, trips to our state capital and events for the school district.

I've pondered this for a while and I've realized that a big driver of her OCPD is the feeling that politics is a fight against bullies and if she ever backs down or misses something the bullies whomever they are will win.   

In her unpaid volunteer life it's probably 70-80 hours per week of coordination, high level function, socializing and networking, problem solving, policy and writing, and organizational management.   When I ask if that might work for a job she says that "it's not fair to do that work for pay when schools need that help from me"

Our own children have often cried over her (not me the actual career parent) never being there for activities.   She is LOVED in the community and dropped anything for a call or email from a constituent.   She never misses a single event, not an elementary school breakfast with principal for parents, not a single grade or school pta meeting.   There are over 30 schools in the district and she goes to ever single event that exists at all of them as religiously as a cloistered nun attends mass.   We don't have kids at any of these schools now and no one else as a board member attends the local elementary school (one of 11)  4th grade PTA-vice principal cofffee and information breakfast meeting with the next three weeks being 3rd grade, 2nd grade and on down respectively.

The FOMO in these thjngs is so intense.

Right now she is preparing to run for city council in our town (not because she wants the role and would need to step down from the other to take it) but just to have someone run against a candidate she doesn't like who is running for an open seat.

One would think this is a "Karen" angry mom type of thing but it's much much deeper than that.   She actively can not handle at all not seeing local government run with every single detail completely understood, completely fair and completely controlled.

The job isn't her life I will say but the work can't be trusted to anyone else ever.

[Poison Ivy]

One thought that pops into my head is that there probably is a very low chance that anyone will tell your wife that she isn't doing something correctly when she is doing her unpaid volunteer work. In contrast, if she were working as a lawyer, there would be many critiques. (I'm not saying the critiques are a positive but they do come with the territory for lawyers.) So, your wife probably thinks that she is "perfect" at the unpaid-volunteer work because she can avoid some of the thoughts about not being perfect that are par for the course for human beings generally, especially those who are willing to challenge themselves professionally or work for bosses or in fields in which they have clients, customers, or patients.

[square]

She seems to have an intense fear not only that something might not be done right, but the idea that nobody would care about doing it.

So these PTA breakfasts or whatever, she can ensure that they are taken very seriously and cared about.

Possibly she feels the legal profession is adequately cared for, certainly people are studying and working to get in to such positions. So she is not needed to fill any gaps there.

Poison Ivy's take is also intriguing.

[Prototypian]

One thought that pops into my head is that there probably is a very low chance that anyone will tell your wife that she isn't doing something correctly when she is doing her unpaid volunteer work.

PI, I never thought of that.  Possibly....  It is probably a combination.  The city, school, state bureaucracy has a lot of discrete rules that are very well defined which is where she is happy.  That's what I think drives the desire for that kind of work.  I know that she also doesn't like anything to occur that doesn't "follow all the rules" and in bureaucracy, especially civic, that's always true. 

I've written about her "humor impairment" before which is the anger of making lighthearted comments.   I met a building inspector at the home I renovated to use as an office and is wearing he has an OCPD streak because of his love for all rules and his humor impairment.   The example was that he pointed out that there were two bedroom doors right next to each other (they share a wall) and he said that I needed two smoke alarms and not just one.   I know to never argue with these guys even over something that doesn't make sense since there is a smoke alarm in each room then the two doors are next to each other and code requires one smoke detector outside of each door.   The logic that they are 6 inches apart doesn't matter but again I was not going to argue over a 20 dollar smoke alarm.  I made the offfhanded joke that "I was actually just going to train a howler monkey to sniff smoke and yell to wake up anyone in the second bedroom"

What I thought was an obvious joke caused the guy to seriously lose it.  He was nearly shaking telling me "you cant do that, animals can't replace smoke alarms, did I realize how dangerous that would be". He insisted he was coming back and I had better not try to not install that smoke detector and that trying to get away with this was not going to me tolerated.   I kept insisting I was joking and he kept insisting that this isn't a joking matter because lives are at stake.

The odd thing was that my wife when I related this strange engagement was completely on his side.  To her these codes and rules are not a thing to joke about, they are there to protect people and would I joke about someone dying in the street.

I felt weird all around because the gap between a use case of a smoke alarm 6 inches from a second one and 5 feet from two others inside of each bedroom being replaced by a howler monkey is completely different from joking about someone dying in the street but this is what I find with OCPD.   And I think that business follows rules and at the same time interprets rules to
Make sure they are followed but to maximize benefit (for good or bad) and certainly to find loopholes.  I think that in the OCPD world loopholes are the worst thing one could have including trained howler monkeys.

[MaxedOut]

While the context is very different, I would say the baffling "gap between x and y" is super common. Having a PD go from joke-about-ridiculous-thing or that-does-not-practically-make-sense or I-think-this-would-be-better to catastrophizing and accusing the other person of gap jumping things is common. And often the point on the other side of the gap, gets used to coerce agreement by taking a relatively low/mid stakes difference of opinion and leveraging it into accusations/character criticising. That allows then to pop over into the Victim role in the Karpman Drama Triangle. I had this happen on numerous occassions due to issues around accumulating stuff, something I know you are familiar with.

Me starting with a comment or joke about where she will put, say, a box of 12 lint rollers when we already had plenty but no free storage space could turn *within minutes* into a dressdown about me always criticizing, being controlling, and not understanding that stuff like purchasing pain releif and assistive devices (?) for her physical conditions (?) shows I am financially abusive (?) and don't care about her quality of life and would prefer she just die (!?!?).

We are left thinking "how on earth did my monkey joke get to dead people in the street?" or "how did a jibe about where lint rollers go end with me wanting her to die?"

I think the answer has to do with shame triggers (PD core wound) mixed with a stew of the 100 traits like catastophizing, bullying, black and white thinking, confirmation bias, relationship hypervigilance, etc.