Okay, I think it’s going to be a long post I’ve been doing extremely well for over 9 months, I truly see in myself positive changes, I’m not overwhelmed by anxiety when I see something gay related, I don’t shy away from gay content etc etc. Nevertheless, sometimes I would get these very agressive groinal responses out of nowhere, those are really disturbing. They are the main cause which forces my brain to overthink and begin this vicious cycle of constant rumation. Yes, the rumination does not affect me nearly as much as it did in the past, but it is still like a worm in my head that eats me alive. For a couple of days now I’ve been having an idea, related to the Jung theory of the shadow self. Those familiar with it will understand what I’m trying to say. Basicaly, I started to analyze that maybe, the pure obsession that I have, related to my sexuality(hocd) could be a sign of my shadow self. Jung highlights the importance of the integration of the shadow self with the self, and he also points out that the shadow self sends us messages from the unconscious mind, our pure desires and needs. So my intrusive and obsessive thought lately has been regarding this theory. What if this means that my deepest desire is to be with a woman, to have a passionate love with a woman etc etc. Once I started to delve deeper into the subject, I found out that these signals of the shadow self are present since childhood, but, knowing that we are doing something prohibited, we as children tend to hide these kind of things. When I was about 6-7 I would always make my barbie have sex with a doll man, I would watch porn, I even wanted to be a pornstar because it would have meant that I would have sex every day. I would masturbate sometimes daily. With other words, I was a very sexual child. But there is one thing which alarms me, and my brain sees it as a reflection of my shadow self. When I was about 9 I wanted to teach my friend how to masturbate, and it all progressed till touching each others intimate parts. It is worth noting that this activity aming girls was popular in my neighbourhood. Morover, I wouldn’t have done it, if I didn’t see other girls do it and it seemed interesting to me, not to mention that I knew how pleasure felt like. Now, as I have these obsessive thoughts about my sexuality, I’m starting to have false(or maybe not) memories. For instance, I kind of remember thinking to make two of my barbies have sex, but knowing it was not something okay, I didn’t do it. Again, I’m not 100% sure of the credibility of this memory, but it definetely made me very anxious. My questions: What do you think about the shadow self theory? How could you explain my very sexual behaviour as a child? I remember that I wanted to have hetero sex so badly, but now I am totally anxious when it comes to sex. How can I change that?

I tried checking if I like gay stuff and it’s genuinely disgusting to me. I can tell whether or not a man is attractive and when they are it does scare me and makes me question myself yet, it’s always the same response, I don’t get how you can do that with another man. Doing anything sexual just feels so gross and wrong. I don’t think that I am magically turning gay. I don’t think my orientation is changing or hasn’t been explored. I simply find that stuff gross. I have never had anything wrong with gay people and I am a true believer that people have choices they can make with free will so it’s not that I’m homophobic, just keep that stuff away from me lol. Saying so, I don’t get why I am getting these thoughts. These images in my head, constant need of checking if I fall in the spectrum, constant checking whether I like someone of any gender, constant checking whether or not I am getting groinal responses. No matter what answer I get, my mind still wants an answer, an answer to the next question that it’ll create after answering the one before it. I have always liked girls and always been so proud of it, I am in a relationship right now with a beautiful girl I’ve had a crush on since 2nd grade. (I am 19) Whatever mental illness I have has ruined our relationship. Everything feels forced on my side, I don’t remember the joy I had before this but I have glimpse throughout the days of the things we’ve done together that makes me happy and look forward to life. I am constantly checking to see if my attraction is still there for her and the scary part is, when I am stuck in my head, I am not but, to alter that, when I get that freedom and feel like my normal self, I get a hyper amount of love for her and it feels so nice. These thoughts all began after me and my girlfriend had an argument, 5 months ago we got in an argument over her not giving me enough space. She always wanted to be a part of a plan with my male friends. I never minded her when it was just us two so it’s not that I hated being with her, it was just that I had no time to be independent. ( I also had no job and nothing going for myself. ) One odd day after spending so much time stuck in the house due to weather, I had random thought on whether or not I truly loved her. We were only 4 months into the relationship so I didn’t have an answer and since it felt like I needed an answer, it became obsessive, I couldn’t stop checking. After hours with that thought, I started to wonder whether or not I was interested in other things like K I D S. This thought was an automatic no and I began to fight it. I wasn’t going to accept that, each day felt like a living hell. The questions would change each day, do I miss my ex, was my ex better, do I like my M O M, do I want to K I L L so and so, do I want to kill myself. One day I woke up and had it all in control, felt like magic, after I watched a video on ROCD and realized, oh, I am not the only one but, this is where my compulsions got even worse. I couldn’t stop checking the internet, seeing if I relate to others, watching more videos. I regret this everyday because this compulsion created so many new thoughts and questions for me to answer. About 2-3 weeks went by and a thought passed by that has been stuck with me since along with other thoughts. I thought back to what I did as kid and in the past. I remembered a traumatic event where my brother touched me (5yr old M) inappropriately. This made me question whether or not I liked it and I couldn’t find an answer, couple years (10yr old M) after that I unfortunately did the same to my cousin (8yr old M). I feel so much shame and guilt for it. My mind turned black and white, “Maybe this isn’t a do you like your girl or not but instead, maybe you just like boys I mean, you obviously never asked yourself if you like what you did so”. This question was terrifying for me because it meant that I could no longer love my girl, my whole life till now has been a lie. So I began to question everything in my past up to date to find an answer. No matter what answer I fed my mind, it would not be satisfied and simply create more questions. It felt like my mind was forcing me to be gay, whether or not I liked it. 4 months has passed and the questions have just gotten worse, something I was initially so afraid of. I am in constant fight or flight mode, I am always anxious and I can’t feel nothing. I get times of relief when I am reminded of my past, when my gf turns me on, or when I find an answer to question my mind conjured up. I started to go to church but it’s always been a struggle for me to believe. I can’t go to the gym anymore because everywhere I look I am questioning myself. My porn addiction has went away but mostly because I can’t find anything attractive anymore. I can only find comfort and discomfort. Something that was once so easy for me would 1 day be nonexistent and hard to live without. I don’t know what the truth is anymore. My life feels like a made-up lie. Though I have always loved women, fantasized about them, get extremely nervous around them, pray for them, romanticize them, etc. I now have no idea what it feels like to be in love, interested, or even happy for a woman. My attraction hasn’t vanished completely, I still can look a girl and be stunned, l simply just can’t destroy the feeling it gives me. I get so anxious and begin to question everything about the women, the feeling, myself. I am having a crisis.

I’ve always been straight my whole life and I’ve never considered being different nor have i ever had attraction to women but lately I’ve been going through a lot of different thoughts that definitely feel unlike me. When I was a kid and I don’t remember how old I was but im sure like 7 or 8 and my cousin that was I very close to had me do inappropriate things to her that I didn’t really know anything about at that time. After that happened to me I knew it was wrong and I felt so bad and disgusting and scared but at the time I didn’t really know anything and I remember when my mom would drop me over my grandmas house while she would work, I’d take my grandma’s phone and I looked up kissing videos and I saw the kissing scene from Jennifer’s body and looking back on it I just feel so much shame and confusion bc it certainly feels embarrassing. My cousin always liked girls but I never did. I loved sitting and watching Disney movies preferably princess and the frog and wanting to be a princess getting married to a prince just like in all the movies. I knew who I was from a very young age and that never changed about me. When I learned what porn was at an older age, I started becoming hyper sexual so I watched tutorials videos of women to learn how to pleasure myself. When I was a kid and to now I’ve never looked at women in that way. I’ve had best friends and sleepovers it’s never been anything sexual, romantic, or intimate. Just simply innocent friendships and hangouts. When I got to high school that’s when i started remembering what happened to me and i remember how the girls would talk about their first kisses and i remembered my sa and how I felt so scared to say anything to anyone bc I didn’t want people to think badly of me simply bc my first kiss was like that so I would simply just not say anything. Lately I’ve been having obsessive thoughts out of nowhere wondering if my sexuality has changed or if im bi or is it just my thoughts? I’ve always had ocd and even in school, the kids would pick at me because I always eat my food in order and by the lightest color. But lately it’s gotten worse. It’s like I’ve never had thoughts like this nor have I ever been like this. Not even when I was a child. And humans question themselves of course but this feels like something different. I’ve gotten distant from my best friend who’s also a girl and I’ve just cut off social media and female friend relationships at all because for some reason my brain tells me that it’s “gay” to even hug your friends or hold their hands anymore like you used to do when you were kids. I even got to a point where I would watch women porn and try to masturbate just to see if I was attracted to it or not like that’s how bad the thoughts got. It felt like an evil voice was in my head trying to convince me and sweet talk me to do and enjoy those disgusting things even when my body didn’t want to. I eventually had confided in my bf about it because he was also a victim of sa and so he helped me through it and I stopped doing it but then and my bf (now ex) broke up a couple days ago and now ive been dealing with this alone which feels like the hardest part for me. So I’ve texted my bff a lot to catch up because I’ve been distant dealing with this and I was just checking my phone awaiting for her responses to my texts because she tends to type slow and usually I never think anything of it because I used to check my phone all the time when I would await my boyfriends reply or simply just a text from him and so now im having thoughts like “why am I awaiting her texts” “do I like my friend?” Its just so many obsessive thoughts and so much overthinking that I am getting tired of because It’s been going on for months so I know this is a lot but please if anyone can please help me I beg, it would be such a great help appreciated bc this has became a really big impact on my life and not in a good way lol. Thank you !!

(Possible TW; mentions of taboo sexual topics.) Hi, I (22M), have been suffering with OCD for many years now since I was a kid, and I suffer with POCD in particular as one of my main themes. On top of that, since I was young I've also had quite an excessive use of porn, which led to me to watching or reading quite a lot of different taboo porn/hentai and erotica. I engaged with a lot incest content, and when I was younger and going through puberty, I (unfortunately) even looked at a lot of animal hentai/erotica too (most of it being fake obviously, but I did seem some real stuff too which also aroused me. This is another main theme of my OCD, and I should stress that I very much regret, and I haven't interacted with such content for many years, nor have I felt the desire to, and the fact that I ever did makes me feel very disgusted and ashamed of myself). Now, groinal responses are one of the parts which I struggle with most, mainly because the feel incredibly real. Often times, my brain will create these very graphic and detailed sexual thoughts, surrounding whatever taboo theme, (it doesn't matter really; I struggle with pretty much all kinds of themes you can think of lol) and a lot of the times, I try and let the thoughts just pass without freaking out or reacting to them, but it feels like the longer I allow the thoughts to sit in my mind, the higher chance I have of becoming "aroused". For instance, if I have a sexual thought about a close family member, and simply let it happen, it feels like my brain focuses on the taboo aspect of it and tries to make the thoughts seem more detailed, or "erotic", and it causes an intense erection, very similar to how it feels when I look at any kind of "kinky" or taboo porn. Obviously this makes me worry even more, because it makes it feel even more real which only makes me question myself even more. It's like there's a disconnect between my brain and my body, because no matter how horrified of these thoughts I am, and how much I want to avoid any of those topics, my body feels like it's on a different page altogether, and becomes aroused, and sometimes even more intensely than it is with "regular" arousal. Another example is through my years of excessive porn use, I looked at a lot of (again, fictional) incest porn, a lot of which was centered around mother-son relationships. In all honesty, I probably do have a bit of an incest kink, but only between people who AREN'T my real family. I don't fantasise about my own family members, instead I usually just imagine made up, fictional characters. I'm so worried that now I've created an association within my brain between that topic and arousal, because of two reaons; One, I even experience arousal when I see people recalling real events of incest (I should mention that through the posts I've seen, it was all between consenting adults. Not that it makes it necessarily much better, but I thought I should clarify). Even though it seems to arouse me, at least physically, I try to do my best to avoid such content because it just feels wrong given that it's real. Additionally, my brain will throw intrusive thoughts at me of my own real mother, and it feels like it causes this same "taboo arousal" that the porn itself does. I do not want to be aroused or attracted by mother in any way, so this in particular is quite bothersome for me. So my question is, is it possible that over the years of watching different kinds of porn, I've trained my brain to become aroused by "forbiddeness" or taboo aspect, and THAT'S why I feel physical arousal from my intrusive thoughts? It feels like in my mind it makes sense, because as I mentioned before my body seems to react to ANY kind of sexual taboo, even ones I never had any interest in at all (enter POCD). But at the same time, my mind is trying to convince me that I'm just lying to myself to make myself feel better lol. I'm trying to look for reassurance, but I would like to know if anyone has any information on this kind of thing. I'm not currently in therapy as right now I simply don't have the funds for it, but I am working on finding a therapist as soon as possible. I apologise for the long post, and thank you all for any help. :)