- Date posted
- 5y
- Date posted
- 5y
Absolutely not! I think everyone on this app thinks the way you do! You are not your thoughts or your feelings, and you are definitely not alone. Keep your head up!
- Date posted
- 5y
I keep worrying that too because I get groinal feelings and intrusive images of legs and butts but it's not what I want
- Date posted
- 5y
I thought this when I had zoophilia theme, before I found out I had OCD. I was still able to recover despite not even having any knowledge that it's common and that my thinking patterns around it were disordered. I very fortunately found a method in a self help book which is basically ERP. So I promise you can STILL get better even if you often or always believe it's real attraction. Real event OCDs are an example of getting OCD about true or real fact or memory which makes you feel uncomfortable and worried and shameful- and people still recover from it. I recovered by accepting that I wasn't going to solve it by thinking about it, that I was making myself miserable by obsessing about it, and deciding to not worry about or investigate the images and brain-suggestions and worries whenever they popped up. I figured, well, if there's nothing I can do about this, I still want to live and have a happy life so I need to stop revolving my life and thinking time all around this one thing. I often felt like if it's true then maybe I don't deserve a happy life but I treated that worry the exact same way. I didn't want to be miserable. It was either suicide, or fill my life with other things and have a not perfect and not perfectly moral life and personality, but a life with happy and nice things in it. Even if my theme WAS true, I didn't want to die, I wanted to be ok. I figured "one step at a time". Which worked out surprisingly well. So I stopped trying to get the fear to go away via overthinking, and gave up my addiction of trying to get a final answer. If I can do it while not knowing I had OCD and usually believing it was true, then you can do it too. These days, since I left the theme and the compulsions in the past and consequently almost never get intrusive thoughts of it, I'm confident I'm not into animals, because they're not what I feel a drive to think about when I want to masturbate etc. And I don't overthink that. My sexual fantasising about stuff I actually enjoy doesn't come with any anxiety or analysis or neurotic fears about my personality or my future, and my zoophilia thoughts did. But I don't know for sure. I no longer feel I need to know for sure. When I do (rarely) feel tempted to do analysis about it and check how I feel about it or to confess it when I'm feeling guilty for any reason, I don't act on that temptation. And so the issue is no longer on my mind. It doesn't affect my relationships like I feared it could, because my relationships are full of other, more relevant things. I talk about it here and don't fear people knowing that I had the theme, or even them thinking that I really am actually a zoophile, because other people's opinions simply can't hurt me unless I dwell on them. My value system is that I only care about the opinions of close friends and family. It has less than 1% impact on my life in any way now. It was distance from doing the mental compulsions (rumination, analysis etc) which put me in a mental space where I can accept that I can't fully know and don't need to either. You can get there too.
- Date posted
- 5y
This is really helpful. Thank you so much.
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