From the outside, the compulsive behaviors of people with OCD are often perceived by others as a lack of impulse control. This feature of the condition contributes to it frequently being seen as a character flaw. Compulsive behaviors aren’t impulsive and they aren’t the result of a lack of discipline. In fact, the reality is the opposite.
The amount of energy I have expended over the course of my life to suppress compulsive behaviors is impossible to calculate. It takes extreme discipline to keep the behaviors bottled up.
Even when it feels like they would bring relief from worry and obsession, I have tamped the urges down. I obsess over planning compulsive behaviors almost as much as I do the intrusive thoughts that make them seem like a necessity. Whatever I am doing to try and make the obsessive thoughts abate may look like it came out of left field, but is something I have been thinking about for a long time.
Developing an understanding of the profound effect OCD has on someone’s life and cultivating empathy is challenging for those who have never experienced it. When you are someone who can put negative thoughts out of your mind, even if it takes effort, then it may be tough to conceptualize someone else being unable to do the same, no matter how hard they try.
Consider that the rash action you believe someone else is taking may not be hasty or impulsive. It may be the one thing they believe is in their power to do in order to make the stress and anxiety they feel go away.
The compulsive behavior may not be objectively the best course of action. The person with OCD likely knows that. And, it may be what their brain is telling them they must do to regain a sense of control over their own thoughts.
This reality is one of the hardest aspects of living with OCD, in my experience.
From history major, with side quests in Medieval Studies and chemical engineering, to nonprofit finance leader, Big 4 tax partner, technologist, researcher, and now co-founder of Divine, nothing about my career has been linear. The throughline has always been systems: financial systems, organizational systems, technological systems, and human systems. I have an MBA in Operations and Supply Chain Management and a PhD in Organizational Leadership Psychology, and I’ve spent my career trying to understand how complex systems shape people’s choices, opportunities, wellbeing, and sense of belonging. Today, my work sits at the intersection of psychology, technology, human-centered design, and digital trust. I am co-founder of Divine, an open-source, decentralized social video app built to put creativity back in human hands and replace doomscrolling with joyscrolling. Divine is part of a bigger question I care deeply about: how do we create online spaces that support safety, creativity, identity, and belonging without defaulting to surveillance, extraction, or control? At Divine, I wear a lot of hats across engineering, finance, operations, and strategy, while helping shape the app’s trust, safety, and values work. I focus especially on teen online safety, human-generated content, participatory design, and healthier relationships with technology. I am a postdoctoral alum of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Computer Science, where I worked with Dr. Pam Wisniewski’s Socio-Technical Interaction Research Lab. I continue to write, speak, and research at the intersection of online safety, digital trust, decentralized technology, and youth wellbeing. I was named a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Data Integrity in 2023. In 2025, I had the honor of serving as President of Division 13 of the American Psychological Association, the Society of Consulting Psychology. I also live with major depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In 2020, I took a leave from PwC to focus on my mental wellness, and I now speak and write openly about mental health, especially in the workplace and in relation to digital wellbeing. This blog, Seriously Jerk Brain, chronicles much of that journey.
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