What is real, do i have hocd?

Hello,
I'm very new to this forum thing and i'm also very new to my current mental breakdown. Let start out giving some information about myself, I'm a 19 year old male, I've always been pretty shy around other people, I have always had a few very close male friends and not very many close female friends. I have always identified as straight and have always had crushes on girls, i only masturbate to straight porn. I started college almost a year ago and i just got my first girlfriend about seven months ago. Recently I have been having crazy thoughts that I might be gay, its driving me crazy. I don't know exactly when these thoughts first started coming up but they got really intense about two weeks ago. I'm terrified of these thoughts. The extent of my gay thoughts are as follows: "Am I gay?", "Do i really love my girlfriend?", "am i really attracted to my girlfriend?", "am i attracted to men?". I don't know why i keep asking myself these things until a couple of weeks ago i've never had a gay thought in my life. I know I'm straight, I know i love my girlfriend and i know i'm attracted to her. I've never been attracted to men and have never had any fantasies about men. So i don't know why I'm having these thoughts.

I've been really depressed lately and i'm losing sleep, i can't focus, i don't have an appetite and worst of all i feel guilty for having these thoughts because i love my girlfriend with all of my heart. Somedays are worst then others but it is always bad in the morning right when i wake up. As the day goes on i feel spacey and jaded, i feel distant from my girlfriend because i'm so caught up in finding answers.
All of this stress has been so depressing, sometimes i just want to give up and i start having thoughts about dying and how my girlfriend deserves a better guy, I've talked to her about this and she is very understanding, I told her that i know i'm not gay and she believes me and believe me. its just sometimes when these thoughts come in it gets harder and harder to say that i'm not gay with confidence, Iv'e always have had confidence issues growing up, when my girlfriend and i first started dating i couldn't get an erection the first three times we tried having sex, I blamed it on anxiety because she was the first girl I've ever seen fully naked, after the third time i thought that there might be something wrong with me medically so i went and saw a doctor who said i'm perfectly healthy i explained my situation to him and he agreed with me that it was just anxiety. So determined to get it up the next time we tried i purchased some horny goat weed from the local vitamin shop and sure enough we successfully had sex and i loved it, granted i only lasted about a minute but it was still great, a few days after we had sex i had a panic attack, i have never experienced a panic attack and till this day that has been my only one. I've had tons of sex with her but i would say that about 50% of the time i took horny goat weed, and sometimes i still couldn't get it up, i blamed it on stress, which i believe because I'm in a very stressful program at school.
Sorry that this is so long but i guess what I'm trying to say is lately its been really hard for me to tell what is real and what is fake, I have never had ocd but i would say that I've always have had low self esteem, these gay thoughts and thoughts of dying won't leave me alone, my only relief is coming on forums like this and reading that there is others like me out there. I love my girlfriend and I want to spend the rest of my life with her, i just get scared that these thoughts will be here for the rest of my life and that it will ultimately split us apart.
I just don't know what to do, i feel like if things between me and my girlfriend end i will become a hermit, I have always considered myself a strong willed person until now and i'm embarrassed that she has seen me in my weakest state. I told my mom that i want to see a therapist but i have to wait until the end of the semester. that is in about a month, what do i do until then to help relieve my anxiety?

I thought i might add that I live with her and her parents, they make us sleep in separate rooms and i've almost been kicked out twice because we were having sex, I'm going to school in chicago and I'm from a small town in colorado, which is where my parents and all my friends are. Out here my girlfriend is the only person i hang out with i have no other friends out here to see, i don't know if the lack of male bonding sparked this or if it was me over thinking having sex with my girlfriend, everything has gotten so bad that i have no sexual desire anymore, my girlfriend wants it but i don't because I'm so stressed out i can't even masturbate, this whole thing is just so stupid, I know you guys can't say that i have ocd and sometimes i don't think i do, i've tried rolling with these thoughts but it just feels like I'm lying to myself, after reading multiple things about hocd and ocd in general i think i might be suffering from it. along with gay thoughts i can't get the thought of me dying out of my head, i find myself often thinking of how i would kill myself and how i feel like its the only answer, but i know i don't want to die and it just scares me that these thoughts are there, i realize now that i should've posted this in the ocd section but it revolves around sex so i thought here would be appropriate.

Aye, I'm just gonna type how I usually talk so you get the feel of who I am...

dude...i am pretty much you in regards to what youre saying here. im 19 yrs old, grew up shy and didnt really make a personal friend until my first day of middle school. but since middle school i've always had close male friends and few female friends (all the females i friended either i wasnt physically attracted to or i ended up sleeping with cause i couldnt help myself, and obviously that ruins the friendship.... so yeah) AND my obsession began during my first relationship with a girl whom i still care for deeply but respect her choices (she has another boyfriend, whatever, what am i gonna do) so you ARE NOT ALONE, or rather you are one with a looooot of other dudes your age who question themselves for no apparent reason other than "what if" "what if this? what if that?"

it started after i lost a physical fight with another kid but i didnt fight back because i knew i was wrong...so the next day or week (cant remember, was when i was 16 or 17) when i was talking to my girlfriend (first girlfriend, like you) about "deep dark secrets." after she told me hers, she asked me what mine was and it took like 5 minutes to even remember that i experimented when i was younger with my closest guy friend at the time and pretty much hated myself for it (i was 14 or 15 years old , pumped with alcohol and raging hormones with absolutely no girls around, plus i was a greedy and selfish ###$ around that time, i stole from my own friends, if that tells you my character around then).

so as explained, hocd for my began after losing a physical fight, and not even after the experience. what that tells me is that external stresses brings out latent ocd in kids like us. growing up my dad told me wisdom his dad told him (learned from his father, then his father etc...) that the word "if" is how "the devil" (im not a religious fanatic or anything just bear with me) comes into the mind of men (or women, but in our case men) so basically what i am saying is all these questions stem from WHAT IF, which is completely made up in our own heads from curiosity (curiosity killed the cat...lol sorry) and not necessarily being curious of of men but possibly what it would mean IF (see what im doing here) we were gay...

the ocd will probably die but from my own experiences it will come back during stressful situations, cause thats what happened to me. ill go for months without a care and even hearing stuff and thinking "man i wish i heard this when i was all ocd, woulda cleared things up" without realizing that that way of thinking probably brought it back cause i was implying theres still something wrong.

im not even gonna bother editing this. no point, cause as far as i see this doesnt deserve that much attention. i am gonna be honest, im learning to let go of these questions myself...i typed in google "is hocd real" and found this and felt compelled to reply cause you sound JUST LIKE ME.

so again, to give you any kind of relief, i'll leave you with this....we are 19 and idk if youre a late "bloomer" like i am (started growing facial hair at 18) but we ARE gonna get hormones that will trigger sexual thoughts, and there is nothing unnatural about it. you obviously feel compelled to be with your girlfriend so that should tell you one thing...that you love her! and you should always be thankful that she is sticking around, i suggest showing your appreciation to her and possibly remind yourself from time to time that she loves YOU for you, and not who you THINK you MAY be (which will boost your confidence, i don't even have a girlfriend!)

sorry gotta run friends here. STAY STRONG! btw i have suicidal thoughts as well...but had a dream last night where i pretty much shot myself because someone put a gun to my face but i pulled the trigger for him and as i was bleeding out (in my dream) i SERIOUSLY regretted that move. all i could think about was the people that love me and in my dream i thought about calling the ambulance as a last chance to live....lol whacky. anyway, ONE LOVE!

Thanks man for the advice, it helps a lot, I've noticed that i've had bad days and better days with this hocd thing, the gay thoughts have died down some, now my mind is just exhausted and the most random things pop into my head and bug the crap out of me, i find myself easily irritated by meaningless things and i feel bad that i'm getting all worked up about this stuff, anyways thanks for the reply and i know things will get better even though sometimes it doesn't feel that way. Best of luck to you my friend.

sorry to hear about your problem. here's a good link, though it's related to porn but still has a lot of good information on HOCD and people that have suffered from it.

I'm straight, but attracted to transexual or gay porn. What's up?

http://www.yourbrainonporn.com/ask-us-i ... ranssexual

"While you may not be absolutely confident about your underlying orientation until your brain returns to normal sensitivity (and the new tastes you've wired in due to excessive stimulation deteriorate from disuse), there's one test that might answer the question right now: When it comes to deep kissing, which gender do you prefer?

OCD of any kind is a sneaky disorder. It can turn any test into a reason for anxiety because the test can cause you to start obsessively examining your reactions to the test--no matter how obvious the answer was when you first asked yourself! In other words, however certain you were at first that you didn't want to kiss a guy...the more you worry and ask yourself the question the more you link the resulting anxiety to intense feelings that feel like sexual arousal. (Fear releases dopamine and adrenaline, which feel like horniness to a desensitized brain.)
If you fall into a pattern where each new "test" just makes you worry more, your brain is using your fear as a sexual cue. In this case, you may find the Schwartz method of overcoming OCD the most useful technique.


Doctor Describes Desensitization Process for HOCD
http://www.yourbrainonporn.com/doctor-d ... s-for-hocd

Schwartz Technique for Rewiring Compulsions
http://www.yourbrainonporn.com/schwartz ... ompulsions