Hello, This is my first time in the discussion board. And I was wondering if anyone has insight into what makes a “groinal response” happen? For me, that’s my main trigger and I’m trying to understand what happens (physically in your body and mentally) to make that happen. Thank you very much to any insight!

Every time I go to bed late and I’m falling asleep, I suddenly get an intrusive thought of a child’s face and my groinal area always responds to it. It’s such an uncomfortable experience. I am way too tired to try and freak out so I end up falling asleep. The next morning I’m always trying to figure out whether I had the groinal response first or after the thought. I start giving OCD power but it feels like If I let it go, then I’m in denial or whatever. I don’t want to ever do anything sexual with a child. I don’t even feel comfortable talking platonically with people who are 17, much less a child. My therapist says that I have a deep rooted fear that I’m this horrible person and that OCD loves to feed off of it. When you get a groinal response, it makes the thought that much more real. I never want these things to happen. I want to only be into adults. It’s so discomforting and stressful. Especially since I’m hyper checking how anxious I am, and if I find I didn’t really have much anxiety, then I’m like “well if I didn’t have anxiety, what does this mean?” And more questions occur til I end up in a rabbit hole

I’m on my period and o think my ocd feels a little worse today… I feel anxious and like something bad is about to happen, like I can’t move or talk cause I’ll freak out or snap and do something. Also I had a gronial response about an SA topic and I feel horrible, I’ve noticed that I do have these gronials as if I’m actually into that but idk if it can happen that you have the gronial and think “oh I’m horny, not about this but I am” is that possible? Idk how to say it… also I think I just want reassurance but I’m also scared…

I keep getting these groinal responses when I think about kids or see one and it's really distressing, I only just learned that OCD can make you feel that and it's not actually attraction but it's so hard to remember that and I've seen people talking about accepting uncertainty but I'm so scared to think "maybe it's attraction maybe it's not" instead of "no it's not attraction that's disgusting" and idk what to do