I'll preface my incoming ramble with I am an ocd sufferer and as someone who suffers from ocd, I am posting this to explain the intricacies between a person with fears of being gay and a person who is in denial. A lot of the time sexual orientation OCD, or HOCD as it is commonly called on OCD message boards, is misinterpreted as a form of bigotry or reparative therapy being pushed by fundamentalist groups. This is an outline for what I plan on writing an article about...any questions or comments would be greatly appreciated. I am not here to offend anyone but more so to inform and help allow the identification between the two cases. The first thing I will say is that by having OCD and having false fears of being gay does not mean you are not in fact gay. Cases have existed where the person in distress has suffered from genuine ocd about this fear to the point that it has prevented them from accepting their true orientation. Being treated for ocd will not guarantee you are not of homosexual orientation and the treatment for ocd (CBT with ERP) will, in the end, result in the acceptance of your homosexuality if you are in fact homosexual. Second of all, it is very unlikely for the OCD sufferer to experience arousal to homosexual stimulus and erotica. Typically, the OCD sufferer will be aroused by erotica of the orientation they identify with and not be aroused by erotica of the orientation they fear being but still remain uncertain of their orientation. This uncertainty can drive an ocd sufferer to the ends of their sanity to try and find an answer. Thirdly, people with fears of being gay are not necessarily homophobic. In reality, the fear of being gay is actually more so a fear of not being straight. They rarely consider the societal implications of being gay and more so are panicked that they will suddenly lose their happy attractions they have experienced their whole life. The person with ocd fears that they will lose all that matters to them (their significant other amongst other things) when they suddenly "turn" gay. The fact of the matter is sexual orientation isn't something that suddenly changes and more so is just something that is. Despite this, the ocd sufferer exists in a cognitively distorted reality where logic will not work. Telling an ocd sufferer that they are not gay will make them feel better for a short time but any attempts at re-assurance will ultimately fail as the mind finds a way to trick the sufferer out of their re-assurance. This comes to another point I feel is paramount to the understanding of the differences between an actual ocd sufferer and a person in denial. A person in denial of their sexual orientation will very quickly accept their attractions as ocd related and will likely not doubt that they have ocd. Sexual Orientation OCD becomes a powerful tool for denial in this case and it is for this reason that a concrete difference be shown between the two. The defining characteristic of an ocd sufferer is that they will doubt that they even have ocd. Ocd sufferers will constantly analyze and ruminate looking for exceptions to prove that they are what they fear. Even after being diagnosed with ocd the ocd sufferer will constantly doubt that they even have ocd. Another point is that sexual orientation ocd can afflict a sufferer of any sexual orientation. Ocd clinics have treated gay sufferers with fears of being straight, asexual sufferers with fears of being sexual and even bisexual sufferers with fears of being homosexual or heterosexual. Regardless of your orientation, ocd has the power to distort your reality and ultimately make the sufferer's life a living hell. This reinforces the second point that it's not about a genuine fear of being gay but more so a fear of not being able to love what you are oriented towards loving. The sexual orientation OCD sufferer will become fixated upon words such as attraction and fixated upon sexual arousal responses. The sufferer will monitor attraction to the sex they fear being attracted to. This compulsive behavior will usually relieve the sufferer of anxiety when they can deem the person "unattractive" but lead to further panic when they find the person attractive. When they identify a person as attractive they will then proceed to attempt and analyze what the attraction means. In the end, the term attraction is a fairly ambiguous term... usually the ocd sufferer is confusing attraction with sexual attraction and analyzing of attraction ultimately just leads the sufferer to a worsened mental condition. Ocd sufferers will view explicit material of the feared sex and will monitor arousal responses to this material. Incredible fixation on arousal will likely result in a sensation that feels like arousal but likely isn't accompanied by arousal. These psychosomatic sensations, often called groinal responses, cause the sufferer great distress and further confuse the sufferer. In addition, heightened anxiety will make usually pleasurable sexual experiences less then gratifying further constructing the sufferer's distorted reality. This uncertainty can drive the ocd sufferer to more and more extreme levels of checking. At first checking arousal to people with clothes on will be enough to re-assure themselves they are not what they fear. In time, this re-assurance will fail completely and the uncertainty will drive the sufferer to further and further extremes. Extreme cases of ocd have resulted in physical experimentation with the same sex to try and determine an answer once and for all. This experimentation often results in two possible outcomes: 1. They find the experience abhorrent and their mind proceeds to use it is as evidence of them actually being what they fear. 2. They find the experience less gratifying then their actual orientation's sexual experiences but they are left with the uncertainty they cannot tolerate. The ocd sufferer will mentally review their history for any signs of what they fear and will likely find ambiguous examples that further complicate the matter. False memories are also common amongst ocd sufferers and will feel real making it harder to discern fiction from reality. The sufferer will analyze these memories until they find conclusion about what the memory means but conclusion will eventually be undone by the mind and ruminating will resume. In the end, sexual orientation ocd is not about the feared orientation but about a fear of uncertainty. This uncertainty drives the compulsions which fuels the obsessions making it even more difficult to discern the real from the imagined. The irony is the more answers the sufferer finds the more questions they feel compelled to ask and the further they get from the answer they desperately desire.
Looks pretty good so far. There are a few points I want to add. First, I think one way to put what the OCD sufferer is afraid vs what an LBGT person of denial is this. (I do want to note that I write this myself as a heterosexual OCD sufferer who also had this theme, so forgive me if I make some invalid assumptions.) An LGBT person fears being gay, they fear a label and identity, not their sexual attractions. They may be afraid of being rejected or that they will have to live a certain "lifestyle" as portrayed by the right. The attractions themselves are not by themselves a source of fear, and this is evidenced by the fact that many LGBT people in denial will have gay fantasies without a problem. With sexual orientation sufferers, the real fear is of losing their natural feelings. As I said in other posts, I actually came out at one point as gay to my family. As a geek, I grew up dealing with social ostracism and with trying to fit in and not being able to, so it was hardly unfamiliar territory that I feared. My one issue, however, was that women were beautiful and men weren't. Women were sexually arousing, and men weren't. I began to think it was just some sort of repression mechanism. By the end of it all, I just wanted to be free of the paralyzing fear. While rationally I knew that if I were to "turn" gay or "release" some hidden attraction that would overwrite my attraction to women that I would have the same feelings as before, what I feared was losing the ability to feel romantic love, sexual attraction, and the awe I felt of female beauty, both physical and emotional beauty. Second, I agree that the term attraction is ambiguous. In the case of attraction as you mentioned above, it could be anything that would trigger an OCD sufferer. Finding someone funny, simply thinking they are good looking, or even having someone come into your general direction can be a trigger. When this theme started for me, anyone male could trigger. I was triggered by old men, children, and even South Park characters. After a while, however, I was able to realize the stupidity of that, and my brain did adjust. (However, I did however become afraid that I was attracted to member of my own family, and I did have graphic images about them in my head.) The last thing I wanted to add was a bit about the "groinal response." It is a tingling sensation, and it is not limited to the groin though it usually manifests their. I've had it not just in my genitals but also in my hands and lips. If I had an image of touching a naked man pop into my head, for instance, it almost felt like I could literally feel something in my hand. Apparently, it is the result of hyper-focusing on a body part. The brain sends priming signals to prepare for movement as it does with normal movement, but no movement occurs. Combine this with the fact that your mind is looking for signals, you literally end up feeling the nerve excitation generated by your own body. I suppose these sensations could thus occur for everyone during normal movement, but the brain filters them out because our brains naturally filter out extraneous information. As an aside, I would also suggest that this is part of how denial works, or perhaps you could even call this the pre-denial stage. Before a person realizes that he or she is not straight (such as Meredith Baxter), I believe that any information that suggests otherwise may just be ignored as unimportant. The person does not necessarily deny at this point that their feelings mean anything. They just don't process them as important so it doesn't affect their sense of self.
Those are some really good points and much appreciated. I'll make sure to include them in the article itself. As a side note, I feel like I can relate to everything you have said there in reference to yourself minus the part about coming out. I have no physical desire for the same sex... I'm just at that point now where I just feel sick of feeling like this. I feared that I'd end up in some awkward middle ground where the feelings I felt for women would be gone and replaced by these strange feelings I felt for men. That's a very interesting point about denial. I also suppose its how most people respond to strange thoughts when they do not have ocd. The sensations and thoughts are just fleeting and deemed as meaningless.
Interesting insights. I have no doubt that I suffer from OCD and much of this rings true to me, however, I do question at least one of the assumptions contained above. If you'll indulge me with a response, I would appreciate it - I think you both are very genuine in your posts, and I find the discussoin interesting. You mention that people who are gay/bi in denial don't fear their attractions. Instead, they fear how society will perceive them, etc. I have to say, based on my personal experience, this is not always the case. I feared the "feelings" because they were unwanted. These feelings were what might keep me from the life I want to and have been encouraged to live. I never enjoyed the feelings because there very existence called into question the life I wanted to live. One thought I had for both the OCD and non-OCD - how specific are your feelings of same sex attraction? During most of the times that I have felt same sex attraction, my feelings have been very general. I've never really had a type per se. I was talking to a guy online the other night who asked me that, and I could not, for the life of me come up with a response. I imagine this probably has to do with me being at the infancy of my questioning - your tastes refine and narrow as you figure out what you like/don't like. Nonetheless, just curious.
Well, to be more specific, the "feelings of attraction" in OCD are fear. That's pretty much what OCD is, a random thought that triggers intense fear. With the sexual orientation theme, the shear presence of strong emotion, namely fear, gets mistaken for attraction simply because any emotion present. (There are certain cognitive distortions that occur in OCD. In this case, it's an example of black and white thinking. If I'm not attracted to a man, I should feel nothing. If I feel anything, then I must be romantically or sexually attracted to him.) There is no desire. Another thing I should mention is that something doesn't feel right about the "attraction." It's not simply that it isn't wanted, and it's hard to explain what it is. I knew, however, when it started, that it didn't feel right. It didn't feel the way my feelings of attraction to women felt. Each time, I felt a sense of fear equivalent to being attacked. I do think it's fair to say that LGBT people do fear that their attractions can stop them from living the life that they want. This fear, though, more about goals and an ideal life. For me, I didn't care about the white picket fence, the family, two cars, or any of that. I was, however, afraid that I would never get to cuddle with a woman again or emotionally connect with one again. That's a tough question to answer, because for me, it wasn't must limited to sexual attraction. Any positive feelings for men would make me scared as well. Like I've said elsewhere, I'm on medication which makes my OCD much less intense and much easier to manage, but it's still there. Last week, I became worried that I had a crush on George Takei simply because I think he's funny. As for the fears over being sexually attracted to men, as I said it was initially any man. After a while, it was just any man that could be considered conventionally attractive, or any man who wasn't fully dressed who wasn't a disgusting. The thing, however, you need to ask yourself is this. Do you feel sexual or romantic desire for other men? I could be wrong, but from what I understand, on some instinctual level, we all know what we like. We might not understand intellectually or consciously what it is. Like I said, with OCD, something felt wrong in a way that is difficult to explain. It didn't feel shameful or immoral. It just felt like something disturbing that shouldn't be there. Then again, however, that is what OCD is, the flight or flight system that alerts us to danger having run amok, so I suppose that is what the feeling of being "wrong" was.
Also, I know this is a bit off-topic (though OCD related), but have either of you felt like you were having "psychic glimpses" or intuition with your OCD. With this theme, I've at times had thoughts or images that I felt were "predicting" when I would come out and the circumstances, and at other times I'd have "deja vu" feelings in which I'd remember a dream or thought that I had some time back and feel like that thought or dream had been predicting the moment I was currently in, and that this prediction signified that soon I would accept myself as gay. I also had this when I was afraid of getting lymphoma. I remember having a few incidents that I felt were predicting that I'd be dead or dying by the same time next years, and had similar incidents with the dreams. (This was 7 years ago, so needless to say the prognostic ability of these thoughts was bull.) I've been looking over one of my OCD books because it mentions OCD thought patterns, and "magical thinking" was one of them. It hasn't been one of my primary problems, but it has popped up on occasion.
I think an important and defining characteristic of the ocd sufferer is that they recognize on some fundamental level that their fears are unwarranted. Basically, if at some point in time you can say to yourself I know that my fears don't make any sense and there is no logical ground for them to stand on then it's ocd. I know on an instinctual level that I am not gay and am in all likelihood a Kinsey 0 (maybe a Kinsey 1 who really knows). Something I would like to ask you Stilllovelyafte is did you find any compulsive behaviors in regards to your questioning and did they relieve anxiety when you did them? I believe an ocd therapist said that people in denial performs compulsive behaviors but they do not feel that moment of insight the ocd sufferer gets when they perform a compulsion that successfully relieves anxiety. Basically, when I'd perform a compulsion, I'd see clearly that my fears were unwarranted for a short time until I managed to poke holes in what I had just done again. It's also important to recognize that ocd can manifest in many forms and having ocd about where you lie on the sexuality spectrum is more common then you'd imagine. Ocdla has an article on hocd and part 3 talks briefly about this fear. What if this is a case of spectrum hocd for you where you can't place yourself anywhere in terms of your sexuality because of the fact that you are so determined to know with 100% certainty where you lie on the spectrum. I'm not saying your questioning is legitimate (from what I've seen it appears to be so) but what I'm saying is if for all these years you conned it off as ocd worries was because the worries were about where you were on the spectrum but you mistook them as false feelings of attraction. Basically, you misunderstood the ocd theme at hand and due to it was unable to get anywhere in your questioning until you realized that it wasn't the case. I know there was a gay man who had ocd and had a theme that if he was gay he'd be sodomized by men. This misled him to believe his gay attractions were ocd and that he was actually straight. Onto your questions, ImNuts covered how I felt in regards to my "attractions" very well. Men of any kind would set me off and I would feel like I needed to look. I remember purposely staring at a guy in class one day trying to determine once and for all if I was attracted to him. I imagined myself with him and felt nothing then imagined myself with women and felt something. I felt relieved for a few moments but then I feel I was repressing these feelings. I continuously tried to be aroused and did so until I felt flushed. The flushed feeling (due to anxiety) made me feel like I was attracted to him and sent me into a panic. At first my feelings of same sex "attraction" were incredibly general. Anything male attractive or unattractive would set me off and even positive characteristics about men in general set me off. I couldn't talk to anyone out of fear I would develop feelings for them. Over time I began to focus my attractions... I would convince myself I wasn't attracted to a certain type of man but that maybe there was a type I was. In response to this I would compulsively look through gay porn videos to find my "type" so that I would know once and for all. A few weeks ago I also discovered I had never pictured myself as a bottom before so I told myself that maybe I should be a bottom.... that opened up a whole new world of questioning for me. I also developed transgendered fears over the last three or so weeks in addition to my gay fears. When I'm not fearing being a gay man, I sometimes fear being a lesbian or a straight woman. I have had that happen yes and I suffer from a lot of magical thinking. I remember lieing on my couch having glimpses that I would conquer my ocd only to fall in love with my therapist (or what have you). I also had the same thing happen when I had a fear of developing leukemia when I was 8 or so. I also had the same thing with my natural disaster fears where I would continuously predict a severe disaster was coming my way. Needless to say, I was supposed to be washed away a month ago in my predictions so my prognostic abilities are also bull. The thing I find the hardest is the deja vu feelings where you "remember" something "pivotal" coupled with severe anxiety. My mind tells me I am realizing something that is paramount to my fear becoming a reality and I suddenly feel a really strong urge (a confession compulsion) to tell everyone about this pivotal realization. In my head everyone will leave me once I tell them this fear and hate me for it... but everyone always seem to think the weirdest thing about my realization is the amount of significance I am attaching to it.
I know this thread hasn't been written on in a while, but I wanted to share my thoughts and see if anyone has comments. I was diagnosed with OCD in 6th grade and it took the form mostly of obsessive thoughts. I got it under control, and have been taking medication for it and have not really been affected by it ever since. However, I do always have something to worry about! When I was in high school, I started watching gay porn. I never thought about being gay other than the gay porn. I really liked it though and just let it be. I dated girls and lived my life. I prayed that my gay feelings would go away. Recently, I had a long term girlfriend that I really loved, but I had problems sexually and wasn't always interested in having sex and didn't always enjoy it. I blamed too much masturbation so tried to stop looking at all types of porn. At this time, I stumbled upon the idea of HOCD and it stuck. Now.. I have asked myself numerous of the questions that it is said are signs of HOCD..such as analyzing attractions and past experiences, will I ever know if im gay or straight, Ill be ok with being gay, I just need to know, what if I make the wrong decision, etc. I did do things with a guy once, but I didn't really enjoy it (but that could be due to denial, guilt, shame,etc.) I have never felt an emotional attraction to a guy, but that is probably because I havent let myself or thought about it. I have signs of HOCD, but I am attracted to men much more than I am attracted to women. Any ideas??? Do you think I have HOCD? or is it just my OCD symptoms acting up cuz I'm in an anxious state?
Because it is completely subjective, there is a fundamental uncertainty to sexual identity that makes it very easy to obsess over. There is never a definitive answer. If your OCD is acting up, it would be a good idea to see your doctor about it. A trained professional could help you to sort through what your real feelings are, and what feelings are manifestations of OCD.
extremely late reply but "The defining characteristic of an ocd sufferer is that they will doubt that they even have ocd. Ocd sufferers will constantly analyze and ruminate looking for exceptions to prove that they are what they fear. Even after being diagnosed with ocd the ocd sufferer will constantly doubt that they even have ocd." this isn't entirely true, people who have OCD can find out that they have an obsession centred around their orientation and distinguish between OCD "attractions" and genuine attractions . its the relationship you have with OCD and your awareness...I can tell when im OCD'ing and when im not
Probably annoying *a lot* of people by doing this, but I'll just post an issue I'm having. I look at gay porn constantly to see if I'm aroused, but I never get aroused. This one image, or gif specifically, is confusing me. It was a guy getting a boner through his pants. I looked at it once, and wasn't aroused, but my mind kept on saying I was suppressing my feelings, I looked at it over and over. The more I looked, the more anxiety I started to feel, and because of said anxiety, my face began to flush. I'm feeling the same anxiety when writing this. My mind or ocd is telling me, that this means I'm turned on by men, even though this gif didn't give me an erection, just a small groinal response and anxiety. Or at least, this is what I hope. I'm posting this so people can see, since the people here know what same sex attraction is. I am sorry if this was annoying.
