Dear Lluvia:

First I will retell your story, then I will give you my input. The retelling:

When you were two or three, your mother abandoned you and you didn’t have a relationship with her for four or five years, not before you were seven or eight when she regained custody of you. At some point after regaining custody, she shared with you openly about her sexual life, including a lesbian relationship that she had (“I was aware that my mom had been with a woman at one point in her life, she was very open with me about her life”).

Your biological father was “never in the picture. When you were four, you were sexually abused by an uncle, an older teenage boy at the time. You knew then that “what was happening was ‘wrong'”. At seven- eight years old, you began masturbating and “humping anything I could get my hands on”, including a your favorite stuffed animal. In second grade you had crushes on boys in school and considered yourself in love with a boy when you were in fourth grade.

When you were about ten, your baby sister came along and you were “so excited to have a little baby in the family”, but soon found out that she took attention away from you. When you were about 13, your mother and stepfather were getting divorced,  you “felt so alone, isolated, misunderstood and in need of some love and connection”, “spent a lot of my day just looking at porn” and “masturbating constantly”. About that time  you sexually abused your sister who was a toddler. You “knew instantly that what I had done was absolutely wrong and I felt ashamed”. You also felt “self hate and disgust”, depressed and anxious.

Two years later, at about fifteen you told your stepfather about it, he was understanding and forgiving, and you felt relieved, “the shame and pain of that experience fell away to the back of my mind”.

At certain times you exhibited “self harmed or restricted my diet/binged/purged”.

When you were in high school one of your peers was a lesbian who showed you interest, you “liked the attention she was giving me” and you experimented sexually with her and then resumed your interest in boys, “wanting boys and dating boys”. You had sex for the first time with one of your high school boyfriends. Later in college you reconnected with your lesbian high school friend and experimented again with her for a week. Shortly after you pursued a relationship with a young man you knew since high school.

During your relationship with your most recent boyfriend you experienced “fear about whether the relationship would work out… always looking for reasons why it wouldn’t work out”. 1.5 years into that relationship you started experiencing fear regarding your sexual orientation (HOCD), a fear that is still ongoing following the ending of the relationship and “consumes me on a daily basis… every single day these thoughts are on repeat and cause me so much turmoil inside that it makes me just want to die”.

You can’t afford psychotherapy and you believe that you can “find the strength somewhere within me to heal this HOCD on my own”.

And now, my input:

1. In some contexts, a mother being open with her daughter about her sexuality may be appropriate. Doesn’t read it me that it was in the context you experienced: your mother was out of your life for years and reads like a closeness was not established since her return to your life, you were very lonely and alone much of the time, and chose to tell your stepfather, not your mother, about the abuse of your little sister. In the context of lack of closeness with your mother, her telling you about her sexual experience (worse the younger you were when she told you and if she told you repeatedly) established a sort of closeness with your own mother based on sex, and that harmed you.

2. Your experience with your teenage uncle abusing you harmed you as well.

3. Abusing your own sister harmed you too, being at this point on both sides of the abuse, having been abused sexually by your uncle and abusing your sister.

4. Having been separated from your mother and never experiencing closeness with her, feeling lonely at home, being alone much of the time was harmful for you.

Your focus on sexual stimulation was a way for you to feel good within the context of a lonely childhood that didn’t feel good.

5. I believe it is possible for you to heal from HOCD while not attending therapy. If you did attend therapy, most of the healing would have been done by you on your own, away from the office. I have suffered from OCD since early childhood and have a lot of experience with it, including with much healing from it. But it will be far from easy. It will take you many months before you experience significant and consistent improvement, I think. There is no way to .. just get rid of it, to feel good from now on. You will have to accept feeling the distress you have been feeling for a long time to come and be extremely patient with the process.

It is similar to a child fearing high places. Let’s say you hold her hand and talk  logic to her, then talk to her about climbing a mountain. Once she is scared, no amount of logic will do. Holding her hand, you will need to allow her to relax, then later, attempt climbing a very small hill, then relax, then the same hill, and only when she is comfortable with that reduced challenge, attempt a bigger hill. Fear is the most powerful emotion there is, so you deal with it gradually, gently and with lots and lots of patience.

You have a good, logical and educational understanding of your HOCD, of that mental loop. You will have to deal with your HOCD anxiety gradually, that is, when it happens, when you notice the thoughts and attached fear, you will need to relax, distract perhaps (ex, a walk, relaxing music), then later, when the thoughts/ distress resume, to observe the thoughts and imagine them coming in through one window and exiting from another window. And again. And again.

I mentioned the holding of the hand. You will need social support. Maybe attending a free support group can help you, a place where you will share the childhood experiences you shared about here.

There is much more I can write about this, but enough for now. If you would like, let me know your th0ughts and feelings about what I wrote here and we can continue to communicate.

anita