- Date posted
- 2y
HOCD/SOOCD so hard
I find it so hard to accept I have OCD and question wether I do so much. This entire condition is so hard. I just need to get this out there again. Wether this sounds like ocd. Up until my first ‘theme’, I’d been a happy 25 year old male. I was shy, and always felt I wasn’t as ‘horny’ as my mates, but I Only ever had fantasies about women, had GFs, and simply never had any thought/emotion/attraction about a guy. So I get to 25. I met a girl after trying hard to find a gf to share life with. We date for a few months and I’m feeling as confident and as alive as I’ve ever been. I feel infatuated. We become intimate, and some things go wrong. Performance anxiety from both of us. But nothing that worried me too much. One night I went to bed like normal, woke up the next morning and had a thought: “I feel nothing for this girl.” Instant panic and anxiety. And instant loss of all joy in everything. It was like a bomb went off in my head and body. I just couldn’t accept that. It was like I had to know why. Why would my mind do this, despite wanting to have feelings and loving that I did have feelings? Enter weeks of obsessively asking friends, family, discussion forums, googling for anything I could find that would explain me losing feelings over night. NOTHING explained it. I had to break up with her. Even after the breakup, my head felt faulty. I had constant anxiety about why I had lost feelings overnight. What it meant. Cried a lot. My entire existence was about why I had lost feelings and why I didn’t have the ability to feel anything but anxiety and fear. In my obsessive figuring it out, another thought popped up. “You are gay”. And just like the first thought, this one took off. I thought I couldn’t be anymore anxious and afraid and then BAM, it was like turning it up a notch. Instant googling, looking for advice everywhere. I started to immediately take notice of men, everywhere. Started to have thoughts about kissing guys. Started to go back and forth (writing down) my entire romantic history and childhood. Compared my self and every aspect of who I was to gay people I knew. Even down to how I spoke. It was like (just the same as loss of feeling) that my brain had a thought and was like I believed it on enough of a level that it became real. Ended up seeing my first psych in my life. She said it was ocd. After a few weeks I couldn’t believe it was ocd, so I tried another psych. She said it was just anxiety, and tried logic CBT. I became addicted to that therapy as the days afterwards would always make me feel great. Over time, it was like I completely numbed everything. I wasn’t having the thoughts and anxiety as much, but still felt nothing. I had lost all my friendships and family from hiding myself away from the world. It was like I had no drive for life. I ended up dating a few girls, almost situationships. I barely felt attraction, and I don’t even know what, but something inside me said I wanted to be with a girl. Eventually I met someone who is now my wife. I feel guilty, but it was kind of the same as above. She ticked all the boxes I would have once found incredible. We got along like best friends and it just progressed naturally. I still had these thoughts in the back of my mind that “you don’t feel enough”. Most of the HOCD thoughts weren’t there. Then I had a workshop for work and sat next to a woman that for some reason, really attracted me. The thought popped into my head “here’s evidence you are attracted to someone other than your partner, you never felt attracted or loved your partner.” Enter over a year of the same obsessive figuring it out. Constant anxiety, constant fear of hurting my partner. At this point I was starting to believe it was ocd. And that my brain was broken. I booked a psych that specialised in ocd. She never said it was ocd, but I can see now she treated it like it was. I never got to proper ERP and I became numb again until it went away. Covid hit. And over time, I felt as good as I’d felt since my very first theme. I was having fantasies about women I knew, I was happy with my now wife and life was as good as I could have hoped for. I was content, still with some thoughts but no anxiety and seemingly space to find drive for life. I was on 100mg of Sertraline and decided it was stopping me from feeling completely normal. I came down 50mg. At about the same time I started to feel a little anxious, about nothing. But then the thought that I was gay popped up again. And it has again taken off. I am seeing an ocd psych and have been for around 4 months. I’m back on 100mg Sertraline. The psych tells me it’s ocd. She has clearly tried not to give me reassurance, but said I’m diagnosed with ocd, and that my symptoms are consistent with her other clients. That nothing I’ve told her suggests it’s not ocd. I’ve got myself to a point where I understand ocd incredibly well. I understand that it’s not these thoughts that make ocd sufferers different, it’s the reaction we have to them and the behaviours because of them. I understand that the theme and content of the thought is irrelevant and almost always, an untrue fear. I understand the need to treat the thoughts as noise and force yourself to be OK with the unknown about everything. My issue. - I’m so frightened I am gay and I’ll have to hurt my wife. - I’m so frightened that a part of my brain believes it. - I doubt it’s ocd all the time. And nothing is enough. - that my thoughts seem to want to prove that I am gay in anyway they can. I just want to go back to who I was before this happened. Any advice? Support?