HOCD, POCD and other sexual oriented ocd feels very real now

I was diagnosed with ocd in 2016,i obsessed about whether or not I was attracted to women. It faded into the background more and I had other themes instead, which then faded and I continued cycling through themes on and off until now. Now I am convinced I have sexual feelings towards myself, animals, children, women especially and the feelings feel so real its like I've flipped a switch and everything is real. I use to watch a lot of inappropriate porn and I even did recently and felt attracted to it and now I'm more freaked out because its like I'm acting on the feelings by looking at women because 'I want to'. I know I feel much clearer and more like myself without these feelings but they're there and I don't know what the heck to do. Is this even ocd anymore? It feels like I might like the feelings and I don't want to i hope.

Hello, and welcome to the forums!

As someone who's bisexual (and OCD), I'd say that if those feelings were really part of your core sexuality, you'd be fighting them if you didn't want them- which isn't the same thing as thinking you might like those thoughts. They wouldn't even be intrusive thoughts. It's very hard to put the difference into words, but I think we innately know when something is outside of our core being- ego dystonic, I think they call it. I have harm OCD and my brain can scream at me all day long that I'm going to, or want to cause intentional harm to someone, but that doesn't make it so, and deep down I know I don't want to.

On the other hand, I spent a lot of years coming up with excuses for my sexual likes, but that's not the same thing.

quicksand98 wrote: I know I feel much clearer and more like myself without these feelings

You know what you are, and what you aren't, at the end of the day- but OCD is real good at making you doubt yourself.

The thing is I think I really like not feeling attracted to women. I've fought this for years and recently I'm having inappropriate feelings for pretty much everything. I don't know what to do I feel like ill end up very suicidal because I really think I need help and it feels like no one can help me because they don't know what's going on. I do hope it's ocd but ive not read much about intrusive feelings that go with obsessions.. Like I watched TV and saw a child and had feelings of attraction and that's just not right. I feel like a monster.

Intrusive thoughts are ones that aren't really 'you', they're frightening and/or repulsive, but they pop in your head, anyway. The more you fight them... the harder it is to fight them. I have intrusive harm thoughts, and I had to learn to ignore them, not try to not think them, contradict them one time "I'm not going to do that", and then leave it alone. They'll get bored and go away.

If you're obsessed that you're going to have inappropriate attractions... then you're going to have inappropriate attraction thoughts. Doesn't mean you really do have those attractions, no matter how much your brain screams them at you.

If it's a distressing thought, and you feel as if you must do something to prevent it- especially if you have the idea you have to do some kind of ritual. Such as I had to drive to work in just the right way, to keep from having a bad day- then that's a very OCD thing to do. We obsess; we act on compulsions to try and counter the obsession.

quicksand98 wrote:I don't know what to do I feel like ill end up very suicidal because I really think I need help and it feels like no one can help me because they don't know what's going on.

A decent therapist or shrink will know OCD when they see it, and if that's a specialization, I bet there's not much they haven't heard from their patients. Even though it feels like to you, that you're confessing something monstrous, it's really not- if you were that monster, you wouldn't be so upset.

If I had a nickle for every time someone in the OCD forum talked about suicide.... I'd have a lot of nickles. I include myself in that- pwOCD suicide ideate a lot- but I doubt any of us are serious about it- even though it certainly feels like it. I think it's that we want to run away from our anxiety. We really don't want to die- I've never heard of anyone with OCD actually doing it from just having OCD. But we can think it an awful lot- the object of your OCD anxiety, is The Worst Thing In The World. I can't begin to estimate how many times I would leave work, anxious that I was going to be in trouble for something, and go home and just think okay I have to kill myself. Too many times to count. It's kinda what we do. I finally decided it's just noise, just noise. I'm afraid of dying- I'm absolutely not going to do that, but my brain still screams it at me, just as it does to a lot of folks in this forum, because it's just what we do.

In.. and this isn't meant to be flippant, or dismissive- remember, I'm jostling for First Place in this, I'm included- in a way, we're like ultimate drama queens but we mostly hold it in, except maybe places like this forum. When you have OCD, everything that touches on your particular anxiety trigger is blown impossibly out of proportion. And that's where I think the talk of suicide comes in. It's just the worst thing ever, and I think our brains just go to ideating suicide because we can't imagine anything past 'the worst thing'.