My therapist believes my porn addiction influenced the development of my OCD

So I’ve been dealing with porn addiction since I was around 18. It became really problematic over the last 18 months. I began experience strange intrusive thoughts after masturbating and would have brain fog for a while afterwards. It even led me to masturbate to things that were at odds with my morals (nothing illegal) which I was more or less able to stop on my own during my addiction.

However, eventually I began masturbating for 2-3 hours at a time and even when I moved in to a new place with my girlfriend I couldn’t help it, waiting for her to go to work so I could get stoned and masturbate for hours on end. Eventually it all came to a head when my brain literally broke. All the shit I’d stopped masturbating to that I didn’t agree with was ringing in my head demanding my guilt.

I finally got somewhat of a confirmation from my therapist. I never believed I had an addiction, but after I relapsed a handful of times and experienced how much worse that made the thoughts, yet I still fell back into the trend of escalating my tastes, I finally accepted that this wasn’t me just being a lad who liked porn and who deserved to be able to do things he likes in life. During my last relapse it took me three days to go from watching vanilla porn, to joining one of those weird discord chat things where you masturbate with other people, and I was masturbating with other people to trans porn. A gender I’d never even vaguely considered part of my sexual orientation 3 days prior.

It took me falling down this deep to realise just how much my addiction had damaged me. I guess the reason I’m writing this is for anyone else experiencing minor intrusive thoughts and wondering whether it’s a big deal or not. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Acknowledge the problem as soon as you can.

[Question from another forum member]

Damn man what clicked in your mind one day to switch to trans?

[Reply]

Honestly no idea. Just needed something more shocking to the system to get me off I suppose.

LINK – My therapist believes my porn addiction had a significant influence on my development of OCD.

By neukoln4243