Feel much better with a good night's sleep after last night's late mobile phone entry (hence the 'charming' *cough* lack of paragraphs and shiny '+' signs').

 

I guess some of that is also to do with having left the entry. Occasionally tend to lose focus on one of the main purposes of this place - that being total honesty in order to help myself and help other people going through the same thing. Already, reading back over it in a better frame of mind, the reasons behind the 'testing' thing and the odd fx caused by it kinda make sense now - writing about it helps it running around in my head sometimes.

 

Not just that but, let's face it, it is a damn difficult and embarassing thing to write about. All us guys like to think we're the epitome of machismo on some level - we're far less comfortable when we have slightly odd, off-kilter sexual reactions or thoughts or ideas then most women are as we automatically tend to jump to the 'that's a bit gay - suppress' (or people might think it is) conclusion. We tend to not like admitting if a guy is good-looking or handsome or has a good body etc, even though the acts of observation and admiration are a million miles away from having a sexual connotation.

 

When you have a form of OCD that targets such areas - H-OCD - all that comes into play and it takes those socially-instilled taboos and explodes them into self-doubt and twisted meanings. Eventually you get to the 'testing' process I talked about yesterday and just enforce the confusion, often eventually kicking off some kind of reaction to whatever you're testing yourself against - whether it's imagined gay imagery, imagined underage imagery (for P-OCD sufferers)...knowing how twisted this disorder can be, pull in any weird sexual fantasy about soemthing and no doubt someone will have had an OCD-inspired testing reaction to it.

 

The thing is, any reaction you do get is kinda meaningless. You always tend to start the process from a point of mentally & physically cringing at something - the same as anyone. The difference with obsessives is that, rather then mentally 'walking away' from said imagery, we'll want to bombard ourselves with it, ultimately making us some damn anxious that your brain goes completely off the scale, gets very mixed up, and puts you into sensory overload. You then read too much into whatever happens as a result - whether it's a positive or negative reaction. The thing you tend to forget is that, in all likelihood and regardless of whether a person has OCD or doesn't, is gay, straight, bi, animal, mineral, vegetable, ANYONE who decides to focus intensely on bombarding them with images they find upsetting or sick or stressful for any length of time is liable to react in exactly the same way. The difference isn't in the reaction - the difference is that they wouldn't mentally 'stick' on such an area to begin with. That's a pure OCD thing.

 

As I said - is the most difficult thing (from what i've read) for sexual OCD sufferers to talk about, often because they've actually had some kind of sexual reaction to the very thing they hate and get upset about. But you need to talk about it to realise that any reactions they may have had (which, due to the nature of the beast, is often interpreted and remembered very differently - and often as far worse - then it actually was) have zero to do with sexual orientation, and are far more simply a result of how anyones human sexuality reacts under extreme and acute stress.

 

Make sense?