I’ve seen a lot of hocd posts on here recently like more than half are abt sexuality and it’s got me wondering if the growing acceptance of the lgbt community and popularized gay culture like on twitter has something to do with it. In my case I still suffer from it and am still working on it but i prefer to fight it by trying my best in accepting it and embracing the diversity of sexuality and in some weird way it helps ground me into understanding that the uncertainty doesn’t have any control over me and it’s helped me lose anxiety abt losing interest in guys or focus on being attracted to them while not avoiding girls or thoughts abt being with girls by just acknowledging them as thoughts and going back to how I used to see girls. Just wanted to let anyone out there know it is possible and you can do it! It can’t be like this forever it’s all about putting in effort and accepting that it’s still a process

I know a lot of you struggle with HOCD (I do too) so I just wanted to give y’all some encouragement and share with y’all how it has gotten better for me in the past month. I have struggled with HOCD as well as numerous other types of OCD throughout my life. HOCD was one of the hardest (oh and POCD too so if any of you deal with that, I am so so sorry) But with HOCD, I couldn’t seem to break free of it because I think women can be beautiful and that even boobs can be beautiful (something my OCD analyzes like crazy). However, I have only ever wanted to be with a man. One of my biggest dreams is to have a husband and kids. I think about men all the time, and I do not want to have a romantic/ sexual relationship with a woman. But because I think women are beautiful, I have unwanted intrusive urges/feelings of attraction that give me NO joy. What I realized is that you can think someone is beautiful (or handsome) and not want to be with them romantically. OCD twists our deepest desires into the things we do not want. So I encourage all of you and remind you that our feelings and thoughts DO NOT define us They are like leaves blowing in the wind. They do not mean anything. If we do not like them or want them (and OCD can trick us with this), THEN THEY DO NOT REPRESENT OUR TRUE THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS.

Hello everyone, I don’t know if any of you follow Florence given on Instagram but she is a feminist illustrator and author and she has recently shed some light on a topic which I feel has greatly influenced my HOCD and I hope by sharing this, this makes someone feel less alone. She asked her followers to write in to her about their earliest memories of pleasure - and thousands of predominantly women wrote in saying that at sleepovers when they were young they use to kiss their friends and “hump” one another or watch babystation or what not - the women reported feeling so ashamed of it and could not believe how many people had also done it! I myself am included in the thousands of young girls that did this before they even knew what sex or sexuality even was! She highlighted that these responses were not just from gay or bisexual women but a large majority of the women were heterosexual and they reported being very ashamed of these memories (myself included) however didn’t really bother them. This highlighted to me that I am not alone and loads of kids did this because we were kids and we “practicing” and didn’t really understand?. Unfortunately I suffer with anxiety on a very high scale and I found that my OCD presents itself when my anxiety is very high and my OCD is often centred around this! For so long I felt so alone in this experience and thought it must mean I’m gay despite not romanticising about women at all and online finding men attractive when I reached a sexually mature age - but it DOESN’T MAKE ME ANYTHING! Today I say no to OCD. I’m sure some of you have had an experience with someone of the same sex whether that be when you were a child or adult but it doesn’t define our sexuality. Sex contact, sexual attraction and sexuality are very different things. I’m proud to say yeah I find girls attractive but that doesn’t make me gay - Today I say fuck you to my HOCD.

If you have HOCD this one's for you. So to set some background I'm currently 20 and have had cycled through many, many of the different types of OCD since the age of 10. I've probably had every type by now. But when I was about 13 I had hocd and it was bad. Really bad. Had 80 absences from school that year bad. And I was only 13 I had no idea what the hell it was I was dealing with, I had no idea what ocd was let alone hocd. So I suffered and suffered until I finally found a fourm somewhere about this thing called hocd, and I finally had a name for what I was experiencing. I fought it by myself because I was too scared to tell anyone about it, in hindsight I should have though lol. But I just stopped giving those thoughts power. I accepted it and was like "yeah maybe I'm gay, maybe I'm not" or "yeah that guy in this movie is pretty good looking, does that make me gay? Maybe, maybe not" and eventually it lost it's power and faded away. Unfortunately my ocd continued to bounce to other topics I've had to fight that have also been hard. But I just want you to know if you have hocd you will get through this. I'm 20 now and have an amazing girlfriend and I literally can watch brokeback mountain lol (that woulda been impossible in my days of hocd)and just be like "hey that was a pretty good movie" without any ocd trigger or worry of being gay. You got this guys! Also one of my big compulsions was looking at male celebrities for hours and seeing if I had any attraction to them or what we now know as "groinal response" I know many of you might have a compulsion like that, and it's okay but you gotta try and not do that it'll only feed the ocd. I hope this may have given some of you some hope.