HOCD- My journey with endless questions!

Hi. I am new here. I used I look at this all the time, but haven’t been back for years. Feel I am going through a big relapse at the moment. Not looking for loads of reassurances as I know this won’t help. Just looking to air how I am feeling, and seeing what people have done to help rationalise things better.

This for me all started when I was 18. It was a funny time for me as I had over the course of my mid-teens started to get into worrying patterns about certain things. I thought I had trod on a needle on a beach which then led to me thinking I had caught AIDS. I ruminated for a long time over this, and kept checking my feet for needle marks as an obsession. I then thought I had testicular cancer. Even after being sure it wasn’t, I would check, but still not be certain. Ironically this is what led on, once this was semi satisfied that I might be gay. All through my teens I would look at a lot of porn. I would be recording it off TV channels and have a million copies of lads mags. It would only be this that I would get off too. There was no doubt this was my orientation. I never had thought that I would want to look at men in this way. The thought of being gay then began to escalate, and I felt this low level anxiety and doubt. This was then when if I was around a good looking man, I would feel quite uneasy and anxious. In my mind I would equate this to liking them. This seemed to intensify the feeling, thus making it worse.
Later through the months and years I would occasionally look at gay porn to see if I got aroused by it. I didn’t. I tried to think of images of men but never got aroused by doing this. I would get some feeling which I accounted for anxiety when thinking this, but it wasn’t outward pleasure of if I would think about having sex with a woman.
I have some good looking male friends who when I first me them, I felt uneasy around and would hate being around them. I couldn’t be in the same room as it made me feel anxious. If they had girlfriends I wouldn’t be jealous of them thinking, which is a logical world should be telling me that it's isn’t a real attraction feeling. If it was a girl I liked then I would be jealous! With my friends, interestingly that feeling went over time, which again in logical world should be easy for me to think that it was never actual attraction, and more anxiety led.
Over the course of the years I have had spells where I have had my anxieties around it under control. During these times I have been on dating apps and gone on dates with girls and had sex with them. In that moment I was crystal clear that I am straight. There was no doubt. However there have been times where if a man was good looking on TV or in real life was there, I would get a feeling in me which escalates to question what this means?! When I am in a good place I let these feelings pass, and then I can move on and feel normal. However a few months ago I got stuck in questioning it, which has led to me feeling super anxious as well as then doubting everything. I have then got trapped in the old rituals of is this even OCD and am I in denial, checking to see if get aroused by certain things, I still get vey aroused by looking or thinking about woman, and nothing when it comes to the same with men, however my HOCD then tricks me into thinking that that would change if I just accepted being gay, and it would all be different. In this current mindset, girls I have previously found attractive I feel less for, which then makes me think I never did in the first place.
The struggles I find hard to quantify in this state are why I get this overwhelming uncomfortable feeling when certain good looking men. I think because of how many years I have had this, my brain is so wired to get this feeling, it is difficult to stop. When I have been myself, I have been able to pass these feelings, which obviously now looking back I remunerate that this has just been me in denial the whole time. Even as I am writing this I feel like am I just doing this to convince myself that I am not gay and I really am. Did all those nice feelings around girls be just a myth and they never really happened!! Was I trying to convince myself?!!
My logic brain is missing at the moment. How can I not just accept that girls arouse me, men don't. It should be quite that simple. It's all the other thoughts and feelings over time which skew my OCD brain. It has annoyed me that I have fell back into these thinking patterns and now I feel trapped back in them, which throws out all the doubt and conjuncture and makes me question am I just covering up who I really am. The thing I do hold onto is that I have had years of feeling myself and confident with my straight sexuality. I am trying to get back to that pattern, and accept that even then, there will be doubts and feelings that creep in, but these are just my brain playing tricks.

Hello and welcome!

Upsetman wrote:what people have done to help rationalise things better

Logic alone isn't enough. OCD is pretty irrational, and I think part of the answer is in being stubborn. I have intrusive harm thoughts; I can tell myself all the evidence is that I'm not going to kill anyone- but I have to back that up with stubbornly refusing to worry about it when all the excuses as to why I'll do it, come up in my brain.

I happen to be Bi (and notice how your OCD, nearly everyone's who has homosexual fears, quickly make the leap from Bisexual to Homosexual because OCD is a 'worst case scenario' anxiety disorder) and while I've never had HOCD in the usual form, OCD is like salt- it flavors everything. I would agonise over whether I'm Gay or Straight, until I made my mind up- based on logic, that I was Bisexual; and stick to that story over and over.

Eventually it tames the OCD- never makes it go completely away, but it makes it manageable. You use your personal history and reason to decide dispassionately what you are; then outstubborn the OCD by sticking to that story. I'll worry about being a murderer when I've done it, not before, because I'm not a murderer. If I were straight, well, I'd worry about being gay only when I am in the act with other guys, not before.