u/NotDrowningAnymore95

Last night I had sex with someone I met in the rooms. They were likewise acting out and after it was over they cried and said I should have known better than to reach out to someone I met at a meeting. My soul felt like it had been slashed with a knife and I knew I had fucked up. Needless to say I’ll never contact that person again (especially since they won’t be living anywhere near here fairly soon). I’ve got so many feelings flying in so many directions and I feel so ashamed.

Hi everyone,

I’m 31M and fairly recently coming to terms with being bisexual but not in the typical way. I started noticing girls at first when I was in puberty and then boys shortly after. When I was in middle school I was being bullied and there was a girl I liked. The kids that were bullying me made up a rumor that I was planning to rape her. I lived with that over my head for three years and had no one to turn to, and I even attempted suicide at 14. It was something that no child that age is emotionally equipped to deal with and it was extremely traumatic. This was in addition to being sexually abused at 10 by a male cousin.

Later that year at 14 the fact that I liked guys broke through the denial and religious trauma I had at that time. Once I came to terms with it I began identifying as gay, swearing off women forever because I was never going to get hurt like that again. I became very misogynistic (something I was taught by my asshole father who thought that women should just be objects) and I mistook my disdain for women as not being attracted to them.

Fast forward to recently. I’m in sex addiction recovery and coming to terms with the fact that I like both men and women is something that I’m getting more comfortable with. I’m out to my whole family as gay though, and I’ve begun dating a man recently. Don’t get me wrong I’m excited to be around him and I enjoy his company, but I keep having FOMO thoughts about having never had sex with a woman. When I’m out in public men are 90% of the ones who turn my head but when I masturbate recently I’ve pretty much exclusively been thinking about women. I have family members who are gay/lesbian and were once married to people of the opposite sex and the thoughts I’m having sound eerily similar to what they described during that time. I get that these are intrusive thoughts but sometimes I wonder if my feelings for men are just lust as a result of being molested. I know intellectually that this isn’t the case but my feelings don’t match up.

Has anyone else experienced this? I just want to find peace. It’s only in the last few months that I’ve been able to talk openly about what happened in middle school and it’s a very scary and overwhelming feeling opening up that part of me again.