OCD Update

Hi everyone.

I haven’t posted on this forum for a while. I figured I’d give an update on my OCD and potentially help others who are going through something similar to what I went through. You could probably check my old posts to get an idea of some of the intrusive thoughts I suffered from but the “tl;dr” is I was diagnosed with severe OCD and generalized anxiety disorder and the obsession that my brain had fixated on was regarding my sexual attractions.

Since my last post, I changed therapists. I’m lucky to live in a big enough city that I found an OCD specialist who has treated patients with sexually intrusive thoughts. I was still seeing my psychiatrist for meds and simultaneously seeing an OCD therapist for ERP and mindfulness therapy, which I’ll get to.

I was put on Prozac early on in my treatment and it took nearly a month to reach therapeutic dose. The medications worked miraculously. My OCD was there, but it became something I could mostly ignore. For those with this theme of OCD, imagine you are walking down the street and you see an attractive guy. Before medication, I would get that ping of anxiety and start imagining myself having sex with him to see if I was aroused. I would then check to see if I was aroused by the thought of having sex with a girl. I would monitor my penis for groinal responses or any other tingling. If I wasn’t satisfied with results, I would wait until I got home and then start testing to porn. You can read my old posts to get a better understanding of the rituals I would go through to get certainty. With meds, there was no ping of anxiety. I simply saw the attractive guy, acknowledged he was attractive and moved on with my day.

Now meds are fantastic when they work, but both my therapists stressed that they are not always going to be the solution long-term.
My OCD therapist, ironically, was a gay man (something he revealed to me towards the end of my therapy) and someone I owe a great deal of my well being to. I practiced ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention) and mindfulness therapy with him for the better part of four months. I will preface by saying that this is one of the most challenging things I have done, but knowing the high success rate as well as my therapist’s encouragement kept me motivated.

I’m not a licensed professional so all that I’m sharing is merely anecdotal and info from my therapists.

For those suffering with OCD, the constant checking, rumination, and reassurance seeking actually makes OCD worse and is one of the biggest reasons why I suffered for as long as I did. Even posting on here was a form of reassurance-seeking that I should have avoided. I was attempting to gain relief from the anxiety I was feeling and the posts from the members of the forum gave me that relief. The problem with OCD is that anxiety relief is the enemy, because our brains simply don’t register reality the same way others do. With ERP, I purposefully exposed myself to what I feared and then avoided anything that would “lower” the anxiety. My therapist and I worked on a list of things from least anxiety provoking to most anxiety provoking and I made my way down the list week by week. My list was as follows:

1) walking on the street and rating the men i see (1-10) based on attractiveness
2) watching movies with gay themes
3) listening to gay podcasts (where guys talking about there dating/sex lives)
4) reading gay erotic literature
5) looking at sexually suggestive images
6) watching gay porn
7) watching gay porn and masturbating to completion

With ERP, the stress is on response prevention. This can get tricky because sometimes when I was reading erotic literature or watching porn, I would monitor myself on whether I was finding it sexually arousing or not. To prevent this trap, I would actually get aroused beforehand with physical stimulation so that I wouldn’t be able to monitor that. The last exposure I did was the absolute hardest, but if you read my old posts you’ll realize it was something that I feared more than anything. Masturbating to gay porn to completion was extremely anxiety provoking for me so it was my last exposure. I would do the exposure and then I’d sit with the anxiety. When I first started the last 2 exposures on my list, I felt anxiety for the rest of the day. My OCD therapist said to lean into that anxiety and embrace it. That’s where mindfulness comes into play. I would acknowledge the thoughts and focus on my breathing without really “entertaining” them. I let the thoughts be there and didn’t try to tone them down or ignore them or get relief from the anxiety they were causing me. I let all my emotions just sit with me.

It was a hard journey, but I feel so much better. I am no longer on medications, and I can see more clearly the irrational thinking I had fallen prey to. For those with OCD, you have to be okay with the uncertainty. I realized early on in my therapy that my OCD didn’t fixate on what my sexual orientation was. Calling myself a gay or bisexual man did not disturb me. Even the idea of being in a romantic relationship with a man wasn’t disturbing to me. Unappealing, probably, but disturbing, no. It was the sexual thoughts of men that really caused me anxiety. I feared that I wanted to have sex with a man and that it was my true nature. This is important for you to figure out early in therapy so you can gear your ERP around what you truly fear. After therapy, I feel as though I could care less about what I’m attracted to. Tomorrow, if I had the desire to have sex with a man, I would embrace that thought without any anxiety. If that thought scares you, good, let it.

I really appreciate the members on this forum for guiding me towards therapy and helping me help myself. This is one of those mental illnesses that can be treated with great success, but the longer you wait, the harder the treatment will be. It’s scary but its 100% worth it and you will feel so much better when its done.

 

I have confidence in who I am and what I’m attracted to, yes. More importantly, I’m not anxious about it. When the anxiety goes, you’ll realize what’s important to you and you’ll learn to live with the uncertainty that ALL human beings, whether the most straight or most gay, must live with. I hope that helps.

 

What is still leading you to test? Is it anxiety? If you are still testing then it’s hard for me to believe that you are feeling better. It’s the anxiety of OCD that drives us to test. The need to know an answer when no answer will truly satisfy us. You have to avoid this trap. When I did ERP, I wasn’t testing. I was purposefully putting myself in a situation that provoked my anxiety to the max and allowing the anxiety to be there and eventually habituating to it. There’s a massive difference.

I’m also gonna say that you really need to lighten up on yourself. Let the groinal responses happen and pay them no attention. I promise you you’re doing it to yourself. Erections happen when we think of sex. This past year I masturbated to a video of someone sticking a kitchen utensil inside the hole of a watermelon, trying to prove to my OCD brain that what we masturbate to in porn is BS. You know what my brain did? It told me that because I did that, all the times I masturbated to girl porn was also BS. It told me that I was imagining myself as the watermelon and the kitchen utensil was actually some dudes penis. Testing doesn’t work. That’s why you’re in this loop.