u/throwaway7386677

My SO-OCD has been taking a massive toll on me these last couple years and in that time I’ve gotten into a relationship with a girl I’ve had feelings for for years. Shes my best friend of 10 years and I love her to bits but lately I’m scared that I’m not actually that attracted to her. I know I used to be but now I’m scared that I’m not and I’m just convincing myself that I am and lying to myself because I’m in denial about it. I worry that I only like her because she likes me and that I just like feeling loved but I hate that feeling because I genuinely want to spend my life with this girl. Lately I just can’t even feel happy around her when we kiss I feel no serotonin it sucks I hate it.

Recently I’ve been trying really hard to get away from research compulsions and also quit pornography and it’s made my life incredibly hard. I love my girlfriend and I know that but lately I can barely feel it, I’m scared that it’s fading and I don’t want it to. Every time something comes up about change I get nervous. For instance I was talking about how I used to love my old car but now I want a new one because I want to drive manual, and my brain immediately takes that and starts saying “if that can change because you tried manual then maybe you’ll change your mind if you try getting intimate with men” and then I just feel a pit in my stomach.

I also noticed I’m just always scared of the future. Today I had the thought of “I haven’t really been happy lately or the last couple years so maybe I’m going to end up being one of those ‘I wasn’t happy until I found my true self’ stories” and that made me feel awful. The thoughts ruined sex for me last night with my girlfriend and I woke up feeling super anxious and I just hate this constant dread I feel within my relationship now. All I want is for this all to go away, I just want to be with her.

Like the title says, I’ve been trying really hard to get out of my SO-OCD loop lately. I want a better life for myself and my girlfriend and so I’ve been fighting for it, for a good while it was really working! But after I got triggered really badly at the bar the other day it’s been downhill for the past week or so. I try to get through a day with no googling or AI (my worst compulsions) but it becomes so unbearable and it feels like I’m turning gay or coming to terms with my “truth” more and more by the hour and I just end up breaking and giving in to massive compulsions loops.

I’m really struggling because I know I’ll never get better if I don’t start really taking this seriously, but I’m so scared that taking it seriously will lead me to the result I am most afraid of, subsequently ruining my future with my girlfriend and the life I used to love. I start off feeling like I can do it but then as the day goes on I start feeling like I’m an in denial liar and that its all inevitably going to creep up on me. I wish I could just choose to never care about any of this and only focus on her, but I can’t, so I have to get through this first day.

How did you get through your first day? Do you have any tips for when the thoughts get really bad/convincing? Please give me all your wisdom, I don’t want this life of OCD suffering for me or her.

My HOCD has been getting much worse the past few weeks. I had a break from it when I went on vacation but when I came back it was so much worse. I’m feeling horrible anxiety, like turning gay is inevitable or that maybe I’ve always been gay and I’m just forcing myself to admit it now. It feels hopeless. All I want in my perfect world is to just live my life out with my girlfriend, if I could have a guarantee we’d be fine I wouldn’t ever care about the rest. I just want to be able to enjoy my time with her and be happy with her, but slowly I feel myself being less capable of enjoying her company and I feel like a liar constantly. It feels like the life I’ve known and liked is gone and now I’m just left to be what I really am when I don’t want it.

I’ve been dealing with this for almost 2 years now and for the first time the past few weeks the arousal has started to feel so real. I was walking around at work and wondering why ERP wasn’t making me anxious and if maybe I was doing it wrong and then I started imagining a flirty/flamboyant gay guy flirting with me and trying to give me a HJ and I started to get aroused and turned on and had the urge to masturbate. I’ve never had this happen until recently ever since a gay guy tried flirting with me at a bar. It feels like I really am fucked this time, I’m just gonna end up being gay and my life with my girlfriend is over.

I have been in the process of overcoming my HOCD for over a year now. Recently I went on a trip and I had little access to porn or social media and I noticed that my intrusive thoughts and my OCD generally felt far less intense. Does anyone else find that their intrusive thoughts get less intense when avoiding those kinds of things?

I went on a trip for 5 days with my friends and my girlfriend and 99% of the trip my HOCD was non present and I ended up having such an amazing time with my girlfriend. Before I had been so anxious that it was hard to really focus on her and enjoy her company so we hadn’t really gotten that honeymoon phase, but this trip felt like it really caused that connection to form and we were having an absolute blast together.

Now that I’m home I feel my HOCD creeping back in and I can already tell that I don’t feel the same because my stress is back. Which my OCD has also turned into an issue because now I’m paranoid I was just faking it but I know it isn’t true. I love my girlfriend and I loved the time I got to be with her and feeling normal. It’s kind of a refreshing idea that I CAN actually feel normal and experience those things genuinely and that maybe if I really do put my mind to recovery I’ll be able to get somewhere!

I’ve been stressing all morning because I was thinking about when I’d have sex with my ex girlfriends and I would usually want to but sometimes I’d just get into the mood because I thought it was a good opportunity or like It’s what I should do whether I rly wanted to or not. I didn’t necessarily not want to I just didn’t explicitly want to so I’d choose to anyway and usually enjoy myself but if I had to force myself into the mood maybe it wasn’t real. I’ve been stressing a lot about my past such as how I used to feel with partners, how I dressed, what kind of music and games I liked, and crushes.

I had crushes on like almost every girl I ever met or at least some sort of interest in them throughout high school. There was one girl I knew who I didn’t rly like but thought she was really hot and there were girls who I had little crushes on and sometimes big. I dated a girl who I had been on and off with for like 6 years and the sex was great but it would slowly devolve because I couldn’t stop overthinking (My HOCD was starting to flare up around now).

I’m worried that maybe all the crushes I had were just comphet or something and maybe my entire past is bullshit to keep me in denial but I was happy back then so I don’t know. I know this is all intrusive but it’s eating me alive.

Whenever I quit porn and start doing ERP for a few days my anxiety gets so much worse. I start getting really graphic sexual images in my head and I react to them physically and it ruins my entire day and I spiral back into it. I constantly worry that doing ERP will “let the thoughts in” and then my “natural feelings” will show themself and I’ll end up just being fully gay for real. It’s like my resistance is the only thing keeping me from it and I hate that feeling. I miss when I was into women and I didn’t think about this stuff.

I’ve been doing this for 2 years now. Everytime I try to quit porn and do ERP I start getting intense images in my head of doing things with feminine men and I get more aroused by that than thinking about women. Then I just freak out and fall back into porn and go down a rabbit hole of googling. It doesn’t even always feel like ocd anymore it just feels like I’m genuinely denying myself the things I want and I hate that feeling. I don’t want this to be my future but it seems inevitable.

I used to know deep down that I liked women but now I don’t even have that feeling. Reassurance does practically nothing for me and I’m just depressed and numb all the time. Everytime I try to get better I fail because I don’t want to have to accept that I might be gay to get better mentally. I don’t know how to move past this, the only way to move forward for me is to accept the things I’m afraid of but I can’t stand it because it feels like accepting those thoughts just “lets them in” and then I’m going to end up just having to come to terms with being gay. it really feels like my whole life is upside down and I’m just always feeling like shit.