how do i separate all of these concepts they seem all too common and easy to misinterpret. and i'm closer to the HOCD scale because i tend to overthink quite often, you can tell by my threads, and is it possible to have all three together? i hope not
Hello Hope4love, That's because HOCD, as far as I know, is made up by people who want to make us believe that being gay is a mental illness. My advice is to just not think about it too much or obsess over it. When I was questioning, I found it helpful to sit back and listen to music to get my mind off of it. I was getting stressed out and eventually I found my label after 3 months! You'd be repressing your feelings if you had negative feelings towards being gay/bi, not by over thinking.. And denial is more.. If you didn't want to be gay because you may be internally homophobic (because of society) or holding resentment or something of the sort.
it's kind of true, i don't want to be gay because i fear that if i accepted homosexuality as a normal thing then i might become one, because i can't help but to associate homosexuality with other things like bestiality and pedophilia, and it's harder when i see straight people who always cringe or detach from any LGBT topics, so i fear that if i accepted it as a normal thing i would be trapped and i will forever be gay, and i still feel attraction towards the opposite sex but it gets weaker and weaker as i tried to accept homosexuality as a normal thing, i don't know what to do
People can and do obsess about their sexuality and some people have intrusive thoughts. What you need to accept is that you COULD be gay, bi, lesbian, transexual and that's okay. What helped me was removing these words that I associated with negative emotions and thought about what it would be like to actually be in a relationship with someone of the same sex and being intimate with them. Yes it is normal for people to get anxious due to homophobia but in reality you like these thoughts and that's the difference. Intrusive thoughts are ones that we don't enjoy. If you are female, I hate to complicate matters even more but female sexuality can sometimes be somewhat fluid. Just live your life, observe who you are attracted to and who you fall in love with...no labels or judgement.
OK. I can understand how this might be difficult for you. Let's help dispel one distorted perception right now: You don't become gay. You either are, or you aren't. Now... you can be gay and in denial (which may well be the case here) but not accepting that you're gay if in fact you are isn't a workable solution in the long run. So... again, accepting it or not accepting it doesn't change the reality. If you are gay, you are forever gay. It's not a choice. It is also quite common for people who are gay that as they go through the process of self-acceptance, and the walls of denial begin to fall, whatever attraction they had for the opposite sex diminishes further and further. It's not that the orientation is changing; it is that one is getting closer to one's true feelings. I know this is super hard, especially in your environment. And the difficulty is... if, in fact, you are gay, then trying to suppress or deny it will just make you miserable. At least if you authentically accept who you are, then you can begin to deal with that and work through the feelings associated with it. When we process any loss (in this case, loss of perception that you're straight, there are stages we go through: denial-anger-bargaining-grief-acceptance. They aren't necessarily sequential... one can go back and forth... and it can take anywhere from a few minutes to years to work through them. But the more we understand them, the easier it is for us to work through what we are experiencing. I can't tell you if you're gay, straight, or somewhere in between... only you can know that. I can tell you that what you are describing does not sound like OCD (there's no such thing as HOCD, but there are lots of people with OCD that have obsessions about sexual orientation.) And denial and repression are almost identical, so you can really treat them as one and the same. I think if you look back at your posts, and think in your heart, you might already know the answer. It's just a matter of working to get comfortable with that idea. And that may take time... which is fine.
Bayslap, if you are here long enough, you will see what he is going through is actually quite common. A lot of the hostility he has right now in his mind regarding LGBT and relating it to negative behaviors such as bestiality and pedophilia occurs when your mind desperately tries to throw the notion that you might be interested in the same sex. Your mind can put it in the same negative categories as truly immoral actions as a coping mechanism to try to "hang on" to his heterosexual identity that he is now questioning. OP, I completely agree with Chip on this. It sounds like you are in the anger/denial stages right now, but have made the first steps in realizing that you are not completely straight. If you have not done so, I recommend looking at the Kinsey scale. While this model definitely has some flaws, it will give you a good base understanding of sexuality as a spectrum rather than a couple sets of sexuality that people clearly fall into. So many people have been where you are at, and it is clear that repression does not work. As stupid and cliche as this sounds, figuring out who you truly are is a amazing experience. It will make you realize that that "HOCD" does not exist, and "HOCD" is your mind telling you that you cannot repress a core part of who you are or it will continue to surface until you accept it.
