Many of my readers and listeners write to me asking how to better help their spouse or partner who has OCPD. After writing my book on OCPD - 35 Underlying Causes of OCPD, I jumped directly into researching everything that I could in order to help these couples to find a way to grow together. I knew some of the steps that helped OCPD couples because of my own experiences in growing and learning with my OCPD/Aspie spouse, but I wanted to find a much more "big picture" way to approach and "cure" or lessen OCPD tendencies.

While doing my research, I stumbled across information on different types of monkeys and apes which explained the various types of brains and levels of empathy, emotional maturity, and social skills that are evident in society today. There are three types of great apes that are said to relate to the different types of personality disorders that are evident if you look at the human race and normal human behaviors.

The concept is that the Bonobo apes represent the humans who have traits and tendencies typical of avoidant personality disorder and dependent personality disorder. The chimpanzees represent antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and histrionic personality disorders. The last subset of apes that fell on the chart are the orangutans, which are largely representative of paranoid, schizoid, and schizotypal personality disorders.

The purpose of looking at this link between human and apes is that it is possible that the differences in human empathy, social skills, and personality are not so much "abnormal" as they are simply slightly more primitive and animalistic in nature.... Essentially, these personality traits that we are classifying as "abnormal" are actually somewhat normal range.