- Date posted
- Yesterday
Has anyone experienced this?
I’m struggling because I feel like I can’t tell what I genuinely want anymore. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been repeatedly having intrusive sexual thoughts and images involving girls. I started intentionally imagining scenarios and trying to picture myself being into them just to see how I would react. I would do this during the day and at night, sometimes repeatedly, and I would constantly monitor my body and emotions for a reaction. Now it feels like my brain automatically sexualizes almost every girl I see. When it happens, I can get sensations like anxiety, lightness, a wave or shock feeling, needing to swallow, or a feeling that tells me, “You want this” or “You want to sexualize this.” Sometimes I also get an excited or almost fake-happy feeling anxious , and then I immediately start questioning whether I actually wanted it, whether I’m attracted to girls, whether I’m in denial, or whether my sexual preferences have changed. I’ll intentionally imagine the scenario again to check, sometimes pushing the thought until the feeling goes away, but afterward I feel even more confused and disconnected from myself. I’ve also had a lingering feeling from a vivid dream that I woke up from, and today I feel especially bland and like that dream feeling is one of the only things I can access emotionally. I feel off throughout the day, and it has made it difficult to tell what I actually feel toward my boyfriend. Yesterday I was crying because I became scared that my sexual desire toward my boyfriend was gone. When I was with him, I felt unusually bland and couldn’t tell whether I wanted to make out or whether I was enjoying it the way I normally would, and that really scared me because I love him and don’t want to lose my connection with him. Now I keep comparing my reactions to girls with my reactions to him, which makes everything even more confusing. I’m scared that repeatedly forcing myself to imagine sexual scenarios and checking my reactions has somehow changed my desires. I feel like I can’t trust my thoughts, emotions, or physical sensations anymore because I’m constantly trying to figure out what every reaction means. I really want help breaking this cycle and learning how to stop testing instead of constantly trying to figure out whether every thought, sensation, or feeling is “real.”