That Urge to Correct Others

I was talking recently with a friend who has an urge to correct people, just as I once did. They were struggling with how other people took these corrections. And I shared with them a couple insights that had helped me, which they found really helpful for them; and it made me think: maybe I should share these with other people, too. So, here you go:

I remember once in a college botany class, some girl gave a presentation and said “cactus” originally came from Latin, and this really bothered me because it originally originally came from Greek κάκτος, so I wrote this down on a notecard and gave it to her as she returned to her seat.

I talked about this in therapy, and my therapist pointed out that [1] she would have been stressed about presenting in front of the class and would not have been receptive to the correction, [2] getting corrected probably made her feel even worse, [3] it literally does not matter in any big picture whether she knows that cactus came from Greek, and [4] I was ultimately doing it to sate my own anxiety, not the other reasons I rationalized that anxiety by.

I think this was the turning point for me. That, and this: “The therapy for 'just-right' is 'just-wrong'.” — The more you lean into the wrong feeling, the less you feel the wrong feeling.

Years later, I no longer have this same urge to inappropriately correct people.

This urge, by the way, is what's called the “Obsession” in OCD; and the correction is the “Compulsion”. The two reinforce each other, and disrupting this by not resolving the obsession weakens the OCD.