Comments: The following posts come from this thread on Yourbrainrebalanced – HOCD, Yes, Another HOCD Post. Advice/Feedback Needed… PLEASE HELP!
TheFighter
This seems a much more common occurence than I ever thought it would be. Many people suffering from these anxieties all seem to follow the same path.
As is stated on YBOP, porn rewires the neurons in your brain to follow a new kick. If you were to continue to act upon these curiosities, you’ll eventually find it boring and find yourself a new, even more extreme stimulant.
As a man who has experienced and recovered from HOCD I’d like to offer some advice:
1) NEVER talk to a gay person about these curiosities – they will only make you doubt yourself. A lot of gay people won’t understand what you mean, because to them sex with another man comes as naturally as sex with a woman did to you before you became addicted to porn. It feels right to them. They haven’t experienced the unnatural disgust over this that you have.
2) Understand that porn can influence you – one thing I find with porn is the impact it has on your normal life. Porn has become a lot more focused on story lines and fetishes. A lot of the time, you stumble across it without knowing. I found that porn made me think every girl that touched my leg wanted to have sex with me, and I felt intimidated by black people because of the racist messages porn sends out. Porn makes out that all black men rob your wife or girlfriend. Porn also teaches very fixe gender roles, aka the male dominates the sex and the woman just gets what she’s given. I found this was what triggered my curiosity as I wondered what it must be like for the female in the porn.
3) To get past this you need to manage yourself. Try triggering memories. What helped me was a memory I had from my first year of watching porn. I remember masturbating to this gorgeous girl and as I climaxed the males penis appeared on the screen in a handjob. It disgusted me and sent me straight to flaccid. I remember thinking ‘ewwww, nobody wants to see that’. By using this memory I was able to identify the difference in my neurons, and the change in stimulus.
Another tip would be to limit porn usage. To begin, use your current mastubration rate (daily, weekly etc) but only use porn for 2 in every 7 of those. For example, I used to masturbate daily, which I continued to do, but cut down porn usage to twice a week. Replace it with your imagination. After a while, cut it down to 1 in every 7. You’ll find your true sex drive recovering and will appreciate solo videos a lot more.
The thing that made me notice was when I took a weeks break whilst on holiday. I came back and made up for my break with porn and all of sudden it clicked. I assessed my porn viewings over the past year. I found that last summer I had started viewing real hardcore shit, which then moved in early stages to gay stuff which I’d previously found disgusting, because it was a new stimulus. It would only happen if I had particularly bad phases of porn viewing. However, as soon as I touched myself I let go and be all shook up becuase I was grossed out, so I ignored it because I thought ‘well I clearly not gay then’. However, all of a sudden I realised, why is this happening? Two years ago if I saw a penis in a video it would make me go soft and feel sick, now I was able to touch myself, however brief it may be?
That’s when I realised I was in the very early stages of neuron rewiring. Lucky I knew early, really. I thought back to what I’d done over the past year. I remember being most turned on when I joined a cam site full of naked girls. Now I was using it normally and didn’t get the same buzz since the first few times. I applied it to the gay stuff (there was very little of this compared to straight stuff, btw). I realised I was trying to get a kick off something new, which if I would have followed through with, would be boring right now.
I followed the plan mentioned earlier, but it was hard. I developed HOCD, waking up every day feelin sick with fear of being gay, I couldn’t go out and lost touch from the world with severe depression an sometimes temptations of suicide. I constantly checked myself. I constantly checked my actions to see if they were ‘gay’.
Then it all clicked one night at a party. I got a little drunk so my mind was acting on its natural instincts. I kept getting extremely aroused when I got close to girls. I remember getting squeamish with disgust when someone mentioned something gay. I realised all this stuff was doubts in my head.
Over the next two weeks I recovered myself. I triggered memories of my true sexual nature. I dipped in and out of my HOCD. Some days I went back to my good old self but other days I would sit in bed all day depressed because I couldn’t explain why I’d had those previous urges, however minor they were. Bare in mind I didn’t know about rewiring of neurons at this point. Then I found YBOP which gave me comfort because I knew I wasn’t alone. My sex drive was regathered and when I came back to watching porn I tested myself and was back to the old me.
My main tip is that, when you get over this anxiety, the hardest thing is forgetting the homosexual things you had watched becuase you can’t explain why it gave you groin activity. It’s also hard because when you get over it you’re scared that one day you’ll watch too much porn and be back to it. Don’t worry about those things. They won’t happen.
Porn isn’t as black and white as people think. But we’re all born gay, bi or straight. You know what you are from when you’re about 5 years old. But very very few of us are 100% one way or the other. When you’re overexposed to porn, there’s the possibility of becoming perverted and mutating sexual interests.
Don’t let it hold you back. You know that isn’t you who wants that. Keep that in mind an it will make the whole process easier.
Blue Sky Mind
To the Fighter: You have shared some really compelling personal experience here that will be helpful to lots of guys. Thank you for that. But I’d push back on one part of your advice…..
Quote from: TheFighter
1) NEVER talk to a gay person about these curiosities – they will only make you doubt yourself. A lot of gay people won’t understand what you mean, because to them sex with another man comes as naturally as sex with a woman did to you before you became addicted to porn. It feels right to them. They haven’t experienced the unnatural disgust over this that you have.
As the gay guy whose contributions to this forum on this topic have elicited the appreciation of many guys dealing with HOCD, I think this — particularly the focus on “disgust” that you mention here and elsewhere — is more likely to hurt than to help guys dealing with HOCD.
People fearing, hating, distrusting, and being disgusted by gay guys — that’s part of what fuels HOCD. HOCD thrives on homophobia. Your own account illustrates this vividly: “I awoke every morning sick with fear of being gay.” HOCD was thriving on that fear of being gay … which is the very definition of homophobia. In other words, you were a victim of homophobia.
I think you’re right that many, even most gay men will find it hard to sympathize with someone facing HOCD. But framing that insight in a homophobic way only strengthens the beast. A better way to express this practical fact about gay men might be to say: “Understand that a gay person is likely to have a somewhat difficult time getting where you’re coming from. Based on his own experience, he’s likely to think that he’s being most supportive if he encourages you to accept your same-sex attractions. Keep this in mind if you talk to someone who is gay about your HOCD.” That’s similar to your point, but without making it sound like gay people are part of the problem, when in fact homophobia is a part of the problem. Given that treating gay people like they’re a problem is homophobia, you can see the circular logic to that approach. And, once you look at it this way, I would guess that this advice hardly merits being the #1 Rule of overcoming HOCD.
Secondly, I think it’s unhelpful to focus on feelings of disgust as a way of overcoming HOCD. Sexual orientation is fundamentally about what attracts, rather than what repels a person. HOCD and porn actually stoke and eroticize a guy’s feeling of repulsion for what he thinks of as behavior discordant with his sexuality. Gary Wilson’s advice seems really sound to me: set aside purely sexual imagery, and just imagine yourself on a date: holding hands and smooching. What’s the gender of the person you imagine doing that with? Imagining comfort and arousal with intimacy is a good clue to your core sexual orientation.
Before you say: well, you’re gay, you have no idea what you’re talking about, see Rule #1! … I myself had HOCD, in the sense that I feared myself to actually be heterosexual, since I eventually was exclusively turned on by straight and “lesbian” porn. Yes, “feared,” because my entire social identity was as a gay man and I am married to a man. If I went “back to straight” — a move that nobody would ever believe and is more taboo nowadays than coming out as gay — I would be a social outcast. But I took a big step toward overcoming this when I realized that I had eroticized the fear itself
TheFighter
Ah, I see what you mean about coming off as homophobic. I am so sorry! I worded that really badly! Though I will be honest enough to say that, to my shame, at the time I suffered from this experience I was homophobic. In fact, this very experience was what taught me a life lesson about how irrational and stupid homophobia is. I also agree that homophobia is a fuelling force of HOCD. This may sound selfish but, looking back, I don’t blame myself for homophobia. I was raised in that sort of environment. My parents had high expectations of me having a beautiful wife and grandchildren. I spent a lot of time with grandparents who had very traditional views, particularly my fathers side who were extremely religious.
The reason I felt sick with fear wasn’t necessarily to do with that though. It made me sick because I was questioning something that all my life I could have confidently surpassed. To suddenly realise that my love for women all my life was being questioned disturbed my peace of mind. Though the reason this dread continued was largely down to a heavily religious family and my pals. Being a teen makes the HOCD worse.
The ‘disgust’ comment – I hope I don’t offend anyone I didn’t mean to! Perhaps I should have rephrased it. I’ll try and put what I mean into perspective. Imagine if you weren’t a fan of apples and you were forcing them down your throat. Wouldn’t be nice. The problem with my turn of phrase was that disgusting can have a lot stronger connotations than I meant – again, apologies for that.
I suppose we all have our different was of dealing with this issue. I found that it made the re-boot easier for me to laugh off my previous experiences as ‘the porn doing that to you’ and remembering the unnatural, uninterested feeling I had before my porn addiction. Though for some people that makes it worse and as you say, Gary’s tips would be better. Whichever makes the reboot more comfortable is best. Just bare in mind how unnatural you find the thought and how much you love the intimacy and pleasure you had for girls.
Remembering back, another reassurance I can give you that you may/may not relate to is to take into account how long you’re looking at pornographic content. I found that if I didn’t get hard over lesbian porn in an instant I’d think I was gay, whereas I spent a lot of time focusing on the gay porn with anxiety of getting an erection in mind. Now, if I look at it in passing with a calm, non-homophobic mind frame, I have no groin reactions.
Blue Sky Mind
Hi Fighter,
I wasn’t offended at all, and I don’t blame you for homophobia in the least. I think we’re on the same page that homophobia harms everyone. I think that a lot of guys with HOCD don’t really realize that they are in part victims of it.
Thanks for your reply though, we’ll let’s keep up the good fight of helping each other and everybody move past all the bad things caused by porn.
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