Relationship OCD regarding sexual intrusive thoughts
18 (M)
I used to watch porn a lot when I was a teenager. I’ve since stopped watching it, but it haunts me a lot. I’m in a relationship and I keep on having intrusive sexual thoughts about other people to the point it makes my anxiety spike throughout the whole day. I can’t concentrate on anything because I’m so anxious and worried. It contradicts everything I stand for, and these bad habits of sexualizing everything probably comes from watching porn a lot.
I can manage thoughts because I know I’d never cheat on my gf, but when my body has a reaction it’s hard to ignore and I’d spend hours and hours without sleep thinking it over and over again. Am I a bad person? Am I a bad boyfriend? A good boyfriend who loves their girlfriend wouldn’t do this. Is my love disingenuous?
I don’t know what to do. I want help. I need help. I hate it. Sometimes it gets so damn hard to deal with it I wish I could just disappear.
What do I do to stop sexualizing everything. It’s not what I stand for. How do I stop getting reactions. Do I secretly like it?
@Kimbpoho
Hey there,
As a fellow OCD suffered, I wanted to offer some (hopefully) supportive words.
It seems to me that porn use and sexualisation / objectification of others is absolutely rife in many of our societies. You're not alone in struggling with these things, that's for sure. It also strikes me that more and more men are becoming aware of their social conditioning around objectifying women, and wanting to be different. And that seems like a commendable thing.
I can definitely see how repeated porn use can condition our brains to automatically objectify people IRL, before our 'better' nature kicks in and we want to see the whole person.
OCD can latch onto anything we value - whether that's our self-worth, our feelings for others, our social status. It's an awful, torturing condition, and I relate to what you're saying about the constant preoccupation, fears, doubts and inability to rest. It's exhausting.
It's the compulsions which keep our OCD spinning. Apologies if you know all this and it sounds condescending - but reacting to those moments of sexualising by instantly judging them as terrible and then trying to neutralise them with excessive rumination, checking, internal arguing etc - that's the thing that teaches our brains that these intrusive moments are worth coming back to over and over.
Developing a more detached response, like "oh, that just happened for a second, oh well, let that flutter of anxiety be there and just carry on with my day", can help us short that circuit of worry. It's difficult, because it means sitting with real discomfort and stepping out of automatic thought patterns. And it takes patience and practice. But it's so worthwhile for longer-term quietening of those fears.
Other key ingredients for OCD recovery might be therapy, medication, and general better self-care including re-learning how to rest and activate your parasympathetic nervous system. It's hard to dig yourself out of an OCD hole when you're already exhausted and stressed, so learning to find some moments of serenity is really helpful.
Whatever approaches you choose to take, I wish you nothing but the best. Take care.
First of all, thank you for replying to me 🥹.
See I’ve been trying to better myself, to create new habits that will replace my old ones. It’s really hard though when these thoughts are wired in like reflexes and my overthinking and ruminating isn’t helping with anything. Like you said, reacting to the thoughts without judging, expanding on it, using it to define myself has really helped me, but these thoughts usually come back and haunt me right after. This especially happens when I’m enjoying my time with my girlfriend, and my brain whispers to me “You don’t truly love her, if you did then you wouldn’t be thinking these things.” I know they’re not real, but they’re scary.
I hope I’m not asking too much, but I’ve been having difficulties dealing with these thoughts and having difficulties ignoring them. Something in my brain just has to understand it like it’s a threat towards me. It’s taxing, and it’s taking a toll on both my health and my academics.
Anyways, thank you again for replying ^^
@Kimbpoho
Hi again. Thanks for sharing all of that. I really appreciate what you're saying about the difficulty of practising non-compulsion and the way the intrusive doubts and judgments find ways of popping back into your mind. OCD is a really hard condition to live with and manage, I know from my own experience. And it's really cruel how those intrusive thoughts jump in at moments when we're feeling most tender, close or vulnerable with loved ones :(
I hope you can bear in mind that you're early on in the process of learning non-compulsion and non-judgment. For many of us, we compulsively ruminated, checked or confessed things for many years, building up habits that we didn't even realise were harming us. So recovery won't happen overnight.
I try to hold in mind the four stages of competence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence
We start off not even realising we're doing compulsions; then we start to practise disengaging from them, and it feels very clunky and effortful. Gradually we move to conscious competence, and eventually non-engagement with intrusive fears can become second nature. It's a process - not an easy or linear one - but if you keep sticking to the principle of non-compulsion, the intrusive thoughts will lessen in frequency and severity over time.
Sending best wishes :)
