I'm so so scared. Please someone help. I made myself think of women sexually over and over again last night and it really felt like I liked it. Then I thought of boys and I knew I liked it without a doubt. But now I fear this is the truth and that I'm bisexual and I want to take my life. I dont want to be with or think of women. But I'm getting everything saying i do I feel forced too. I don't want too. Please help

Also the big issue and thank you for this post is the fact that I don't know if I like it or not it feels as if I do. I don't want to be with women or have these thoughts but maybe I don't because i know it is true or something.

@Lina I know that at the core of it you don't know whether its true and think it could be some kind of denial. That point is not lost on me. I promise that you can get perspective on whether it's true or not by treating your OCD. We never get answers by playing OCDs game to try to find them. It's a leap of faith. ERP isn't about sitting with the thoughts/feelings while telling yourself "it's not true, it's OCD". You have to actively avoid reassuring yourself that it's not true AND no agreeing with it or debating it either. Just "maybe, but I'm not going to do compulsions in an attempt to find out". You have to feel ALL of the anxiety of not having an answer without using anything at all to escape it. You can survive feeling bad for a while until you've processed the feelings fully.

@Scoggy That is why I find it hard to stop performing compulsions and do the erp. Once I'm recovered, I'm afraid that I'll find out my fear is really true. I know that is a risk I have to take but it is super hard.

@Lina That's true, you have to be really brave to do ERP actually. Imagine how much stronger of a person that will make you, proving to yourself that you can be flexible and take on fears head-on. You'd be unstoppable. You'd be strong because of being flexible and insightful, and you'll be able to give great compassionate support and advice because you've suffered too. One of the results of ERP is usually that the mind is able to stop thinking in fully black and white ways because it doesn't feel so under threat anymore. The feeling that you can be forced into it will start to go away. All the ideas which you've attached to it which make it so life threateningly scary will start to make less sense and seem much less inevitable. By the time you get to where you're able to ask what your sexuality is without OCD playing a part, it will be a much less threatening topic. You'll be free to decide how you want to live your life. I know it feels like "am I not straight?" is the core issue which all the disaster is centred around, but the fear and the meanings you link to it are what's really causing you distress about it, the ideas that you can't be or have the life you want. With treatment they'll go away. It's a leap of faith, but it's the only way to stop things from carrying on the way they have been.

@Scoggy I appreciate you taking the time to right such thoughtful and detailed comments. One more thing, how do I get over it feeling like I like it. It is what makes me give in and make myself think of women because if that truth is just going to come out later why not make myself do it now. It feels so real and true.

@Lina I understand what it's like for the conclusions you've drawn from obsessing so much to feel like they must be true and you have no choice in it and should just give up. But we treat it the same as with all concerns within OCD: ERP. ERP only means refusing to answer these worries with any compulsions, including ruminating. It means not giving in and agreeing with them, or arguing with them, just letting yourself have all your feelings. It's important to seperate feelings from cognitions. You can find lists of feelings online, some are very detailed and they can help you pinpoint and name what you're experiencing. But feelings are different from cognitions. So your conclusion doesn't 'feel' real and true. The OCD thoughts bring you feelings like dread and anxiety and guilt and confusion and sadness. Because those feelings are paired with those thoughts, and they're so consistent (always the same) and persistent, you then reason and think (a cognition) that they might be/probably are real and true. ERP deals with the feelings bit, without involving the thoughts- no debate, no going over the same old thought loops, no arguing, no agreeing, no testing, no checking, no imagining, no remembering. In fact, actively not thinking during ERP by focusing intently on how your body feels can really help. Emotions are felt as sensations in your body. You've found them intolerable because you've responded to them with scary thoughts so often that you've started immediately attaching obsession-relevant meanings to different feelings and then trying to escape them. It's made the feelings even more intense over time because you've let them build up. Feelings are just feelings, they don't come with meanings. Anxiety and excitement are physiologically almost identical, the only reason we interpret them as different to eachother at all is context and the meanings we add from that context (confronting a brown bear Vs suddenly being given surprise tickets to a concert of someone you love). By processing the feelings, feeling them until they go away on their own, we start to get to decide what, if anything, they mean. You'll be able to have the feelings and decide that just because you had them doesn't mean they have to say exactly what you've been thinking they mean. The answers will get more clear and the questions you have will also change, once you start feeling your feelings. They can't hurt you or make anything come true. Allowing them to happen won't turn you gay or make you realise you're gay. Feelings are just feelings, not iron-clad statements about you or about reality. You'll notice that, after you do the feeling. Idk if you've seen me make the recommendation before as I do here all the time, but a book called Letting Go by David R Hawkins is what taught me how to do this. It's got some woo woo stuff in which you can ignore if you don't like it, it doesn't change the substance of the book. It teaches you how to feel and walks you through feelings Vs facts in a lot of ways, and addresses a lot of different emotions in examples of the exercises. I had to feel lots of guilt using the book which seemed to say awful stuff about me that I was petrified of. I had kept just going between fighting it, despairing about it and resigning myself to the idea that it was all true. I read and then did the exercises in the book, after reading about self-compassion. It took a few days of feeling like shit, still super guilty but not getting in my head trying to get rid of it, before it was all gone to a decent degree. I felt extremely peaceful after that. Then I mentally went through the self compassion stuff and was able to see how it could apply to myself much better. At that point you should do the same thing, I think. And then, you can start thinking about the topic and you'll find you can see it a lot lot LOT more clearly and fairly, less black and white about yourself and about sexuality, less self judgement, less catastrophising from one thing, less feeling your life is surely out of your control. It's just important that if thinking about it at some point causes your anxiety to get very high or you're doing the same old OCD black and white thought loops of doom without challenging them, that you go back to more processing. And that when challenging them, that'll cause more emotional spikes and you need to feel them too. Always feel before doing something or concluding something based on a feeling. The book will really help. Short answer: ERP will show you how to get over it by you learning how to have feelings without drawing conclusions from them which upset you. And get the book! :p

@Lina Pretty tired so sorry if that was long and rambly. I know you have reservations and a lot of different questions and worries. If you do the ERP, you'll find the answers yourself. It happens like that. You don't tend to get a concrete answer to the fear, you just get insights which make the ways of thinking which caused and maintained the fear, disappear in a puff of smoke.

@Scoggy Ok, thank you so much. Sorry for asking so many!

@Lina Also by feelings it isn't just feelings of guilt and shame it is feelings of liking it. But like you said anxiety and excitement are similar.

@Lina Physiologically yes. That's why it's so easy for people with OCD to get obsessed with working out which one it is. Do the exercises.

@Scoggy What are some tips that help you sit with the anxiety and not perform compulsions?

@Lina The only thing which has worked for me to not do compulsions is the method in the book :) I'm not a shill but it would take me a very long time to write out and wouldn't be as effective as the book, which has a lot of examples and answers a lot of questions. Best £18 I ever spent.

@Lina I think it's available as an electronic version from Amazon

Hang in there, you can do this. ❤️

Yes, agreed! It may feel like it’s helping but it’s a compulsion to do that to try to figure out if you’re attracted or not. The only way this would be helpful is if it was in ERP and you accepted that maybe it means you’re attracted and the anxiety that comes along with that.