“Be a little bad,” my therapist said.
I sat there confused. I had just finished telling her how I lost my cool with a loved one—how he had been disrespectful for a long time, and I finally snapped. I said some harsh things, and afterward he made me feel like I was the bad one.
That’s when she dropped it: “Be a little bad. You’re too preoccupied with being certain you’re good.”
The Good Trap
She explained that she sees this often in her OCD patients. They’re consumed with proving they’re a good daughter, a good student, a good worker, a good person—so much so that they suppress themselves. They over-analyze every action, aiming for a kind of moral perfection that doesn’t exist.
The result? Paralysis. Self-doubt. A life lived for other people’s approval.
Bad ≠ Villain
She didn’t mean I should turn into some gleeful villain. The point wasn’t to become careless or cruel. The point was to let go of the relentless project of appearing good.
To risk saying how I really feel. To risk disappointing someone. To risk creating something imperfect.
Because when “good” becomes the cage, “a little bad” is what breaks the lock.
Where It Shows Up
I see it everywhere in my life now:
- When I hesitate to do something I want because it might inconvenience someone else.
- When I stop myself from sharing an honest thought because it might be judged.
- When I abandon a creative project because it isn’t the pristine version I imagined.
In those moments, I remind myself: It’s ok to be a little bad.
Scrupulosity’s Shadow
There’s a word for this moral perfectionism: scrupulosity OCD. It’s an obsessive preoccupation with doing the “right” thing, often tangled up with religion. That resonates uncomfortably with me—I can see the ways religious ideas about purity and goodness shaped my own obsession with being blameless.
That’s another knot to untangle. But even naming it helps.
A Practice, Not a Permission Slip
“Be a little bad” isn’t a license to hurt people recklessly. It’s a practice in loosening the grip of perfection. A way of reminding myself that being human—messy, complicated, sometimes harsh—isn’t failure.
It might even be the first step toward living honestly.