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Motivation
Obsession: Paving the Path to Success or Demise
Obsession is a strategy to solve the problem of perceived inadequacy.
Posted July 23, 2024 Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Key points
- Feelings of insufficiency tend to induce obsessiveness.
- Obsession is often rooted in attempts to find internal safety and security through the external world.
- Once the goal is accomplished, there is a short celebration until obsession returns and they return to combat.
Obsession, when channeled positively, can help fuel persistence toward goals. It can serve as an emergency energy supply to persevere when most people’s gas tanks are depleted. Obsession can act as a compass—orienting daily mundane activities—to eat, breathe, and sleep positioned toward the object of obsession and ultimate goals. Fixation can function like a drug—maintaining focus on the prize and steering behavior in ways that make goals a reality.
Obsession is where passion transforms into action—and it can pave the ultimate road toward success.
Obsessiveness: Origin Story
Obsession is often observed to be rooted in a "villain origin story"—marked with a combination of early rejection, trauma, and desire for retribution—for example, Bane, who was born in a prison and raised without compassion, is driven to fight for his vision of justice, or Magneto, who survived a concentration camp, takes on extreme methods to protect mutants from persecution.
Similarly, people who experience obsessiveness coursing through their veins may have had early life experiences of mistreatment, injustice, bullying, or rejection. These experiences become fixed to their self-image as they carry these early scars with them throughout their life.
Obsessiveness combined with the slightly narcissistic grandiosity of believing they can achieve the unattainable is usually grounded in a person with low self-esteem who seeks to compensate for perceived deficits through external markers of success (e.g., the unavailable romantic partner or near-impossible career goal). The pain of their perceived shortcomings serves as rocket fuel.
Ultimately, feelings of insufficiency induce obsessiveness, as obsession becomes the strategy to solve the problem of perceived inadequacy and provides hope toward finally feeling enough if the object of obsession is achieved.
Most highly successful people have obsessive traits and feel strongly. Their emotions are amplified—often feeling on top of the world when in flow (in their work or personal lives) and experiencing strong feelings of anxiety when facing roadblocks or failures to their goals.
The Dark Side of Obsession
The very fuel of obsession that enables individuals to channel manic energy and prioritize goals above all else can place risks on their health, finances, relationships, and emotional state to achieve.
Obstructions toward their goals can feel immensely painful. Not just because of the perceived failure in the present but because it reinforces the old wound of not feeling good enough. That pain activates the "obsessive reservoir" and propels them to fixate on ways to prove their worthiness through the present challenge—usually manifesting in extreme devotion to work goals or the pursuit of a romantic relationship.
The downside is that moderation does not exist when the obsessive mode is activated. Obsession can drive a person into the ground to the detriment of all other aspects of their life. They easily become overworked, overextended financially, neglect relationships, and mistreat their bodies.
Obsession leads to high levels of criticism of both their performance and outcomes. Criticism and self-blame create the illusion of control. They begin to channel their deficient self-perception as the problem and eventual solution to not achieving their colossal goals—as if they could offset the ways they believe they are lacking by achieving the unachievable.
In sum, their goals aren’t actually extrinsically valuable—even if they are encased in financial compensation, achievement, or winning over a romantic partner—it’s really about the person trying to find safety and security in themselves through the external world. This strategy only provides short-term gratification, as they never learn to provide that security to themselves and, paradoxically, are reinforcing the belief that they are not enough on their own and only can feel adequate through lustrous external markers of validation.
Work and Love: The Two Main Channels for Obsession
Highly obsessive people struggle especially in work and love as once their goals are achieved (e.g., winning over the romantic partner or conquering the task), they quickly lose value. After expending all of their energy to reach the peak of the mountain, they find another Mount Everest at the summit and, despite their exhaustion, will themselves to keep climbing.
It’s like "Groundhog Day." They don’t realize that their internal world and self-belief will not change by manipulating the external world. Rather, their internal self-beliefs are frozen in an early trauma that they carry on their back.
Their romantic partners tend to experience them as distracted, detached, and emotionally distant. Highly obsessive people often project their own high levels of self-judgment and criticism onto the people closest to them.
The highly obsessive person usually experiences a circuit of emotions like stress, anxiety, low self-confidence, loneliness, and isolation. They tend to struggle to be vulnerable and admit to these emotions due to the fear that sharing them might give them more validity and get in the way of achieving their goals. Their isolation can become debilitating. It may also propel them into highly destructive distraction techniques to help regulate their emotions—through drugs, sex, and other addictive behaviors.
Externally, they construct a carefully crafted image of a person who is well put together and on top of the world. Internally, they experience agonizing pain and are crumbling.
The Pay Off
Often, their pain and drive propel them to achieve their goals. Once they succeed, they are able to enjoy the celebration at the finish line. Unfortunately, it is short-lived. As their obsessive switch flicks back on, they suit back up and return to combat.
Conversely, if they don’t achieve their goals, the outcome can be devastating. They’ve made immense sacrifices and have very little to show for it. It can erode their self-image and confidence and makes it harder to pick themselves up and take on a new challenge.
The fear of experiencing this feeling can be so debilitating that it prevents them from starting again. Initiation of stepping into a new venture is tainted with failure.
The reality is failure is inevitable. No one, especially successful people, is immune to it.
Learning to disarm obsession, intentionally loving themselves and the people important to them, and finding meaning outside of goals to fuel self-worth are crucial to disrupting the obsessive cycle.
Relationships are the ultimate guardrails for stability, consistency, and fulfillment. They have the power to heal wounds of inadequacy—because these wounds are often created in early life relationships.
Learning to care for their body and mind instead of being indoctrinated to live by obsessions takes time. It requires emotional honesty and vulnerability—but the payoff is the greatest gift they could give themselves: by allowing others to truly love them and, most importantly, learning to truly love themselves.
