Dear Joel:

A short summary of what you shared: you are a 24 . You have a history of “quite serious anxiety and depression”, and a “compulsive relationship with masturbation, porn and sex”, as well as a four year on and off overall unhealthy relationship with a woman. You are attending psychotherapy and making progress.

About five weeks ago, this woman, your ex girlfriend of four years,  called you and told you that she still loved you, and she  expressed regret for  “how terribly she’d treated (you)”. Since then the two of you had “very open and honest talks about what’s been wrong” with the relationship in the last four years, “really encouraging and productive” talks.

When your “excitement about what was happening between (you) and my ex had hit its peak”, you started “having thoughts about men”, “intrusive thoughts”, and you were “plagued by an anxiety”. Following the elevated anxiety, you have “fallen back into very compulsive masturbation habits, sometimes to gay porn, sometimes to  straight porn”, and you started chatting with some guys “in an effort to explore my sexuality”.

You now struggle between really wanting to be with your ex, a woman, and your desire to explore your sexuality.

My input: as I see it, and I will state it in a simplified way- The Problem is not your sexual orientation. Your sexual orientation is a side issue that is far from being a main issue. Your issue is severe anxiety. When your anxiety is elevated, for whatever reason, obsessions/intrusive thoughts plague you, and compulsive behaviors aimed at lowering the anxiety follow.

OCD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is about elevated/overwhelming anxiety, and the brain side stepping thoughts about the original fear,  distracting itself with irrelevant thoughts/ Obsessions,  and then performing compulsions aimed at relieving the anxiety attached to those thoughts.

Let’s look at what happened recently: there has been excellent, open, honest and promising communication between you and a woman you feel strongly about. You got scared and your anxiety was up. The original fear that was activated here is probably the young boy that you were having been abandoned or betrayed by a parent, maybe your mother. That boy loved his mother so much and the hurt of her betraying that innocent, intense love of a boy for  his mother, was overwhelming.

But it is too scary to be aware of that original fear, so what the brain does is it sides step the real issue, and it picks a side issue: sexual orientation. If the main issue was your sexual orientation, it wouldn’t have come up in such a big way right after the meeting of the minds and hearts with your ex girlfriend.

When we get very scared as young children, we can’t hold that fear for long in our awareness. We instinctively repress it. But fear repressed is not fear gone. It gets activated again and again, attaching itself to many thoughts at different times, thoughts that are not about that early, scary childhood experience. So the original fear never reaches our awareness adequately, and it gets forever recycled as OCD, until we look at what scared us then, bring it back to  our awareness, process it over time, make changes in our lives that fit our new awareness (ex., to not avail oneself again to an abusive parent).

Let me know what you think about what I wrote, and if you want we can communicate further.

anita