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Can you explain to me the mechanism behind this effect of OCD?


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Hello.
It's going to be a little long, I'm sorry.

In October 2016, an OCD was triggered in me with the theme of sexual orientation, the fear of being gay without knowing it or of becoming gay, to be more precise. For about a year, I was subjected to constant anxiety and several symptoms (intrusive thoughts/images, constant rumination, impression of finding all men beautiful, fear of being in denial, searching for similar stories on the Internet...). After these twelve months, I had a click and I realized that I was not in denial to be gay and that I would never become gay (after all, I have always loved women in every sense of the word, I have never found a handsome man (except in this damn OCD), I have always wanted a relationship with a woman...). So I decided to sit down and suffer the anxiety, after about two months, everything had dropped sharply. The anxiety was very low, the intrusive thoughts had almost disappeared, I was no longer ruminating...
That's shortly after my problem started. Overnight, I began to lose attraction in beautiful women, to notice defects on their faces. First women I thought were beautiful, then a large part of the female population. I first thought about OCD, after all that would be the most logical thing, but seeing after a few days that it wasn't coming back, the anxiety came back, a lot less strong than before but it was there. I started testing myself again by looking at pictures of women I thought were pretty, I cried about my attraction (when I say attraction, I mean my ability to find pretty women), wondering why she didn't come back, I started looking for stories similar to mine on the Internet. Anxiety gradually subsided but my attraction never returned. Since January I no longer have any anxiety (I think. I mean, I no longer have that knot in my stomach that I had before) but nothing has come back. I still look for stories similar to mine, I always hope that my attraction returns, I think every day about my attraction to missing girls... I guess they are compulsions and like all compulsions, I guess it doesn't help.
This post has been a little long and I'm sorry,I'm in a situation where I can't consult and I'm afraid. Fear that it is no longer OCD, fear that my attraction will never return, or never as it was before, after more than a year in this state, I am afraid of having sequelae (I don't know if it is possible).

- Can my attraction return entirely?
- Can I have any aftereffects like a permanent diminution/loss of aesthetic attraction to opposite sex?
- Can someone explain to me the mechanism behind this loss of aesthetic attraction ? 

 

I was diagnosed with OCD a short while ago, but the psychologist I consulted, although a CBT practitioner, gave me explanations that seem pretty smoky to me: my loss of attraction according to him would come from the fact that I don't take enough care of myself, so I have no girlfriend, so my brain would have cut off all attraction. 
 

Unfortunately, I can't consult another psychologist for a while (a session costs about 50 euros, it's beyond my means).
Can you help me, please?

AlphaChipster

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Often when we are dealing with problems, our minds and our bodies prioritizes some things over others.  If you are starving you don't have much time to focus on deeper concerns.  I recommend reading up on Maslow's heirarchy of need for a good model of this type of thinking.  So if you are struggling with something, your brain/body might just not have as much time/energy to devote to a more "superfluous" task such as attraction. 

Further, your particular situation revolves around worries about attraction, you are testing, analyzing, worrying about that topic.  It means your perception is going to be affected, your natural inclinations are going to be derailed.  You are focused so much on this one problem that you can't think straight about it, you can't react naturally to it because you have mis-trained your brain to respond to any thoughts about it with anxiety and doubt.  Just consider the behavior you describe:
 

4 hours ago, AlphaChipster said:

first thought about OCD, after all that would be the most logical thing, but seeing after a few days that it wasn't coming back, the anxiety came back, a lot less strong than before but it was there. I started testing myself again by looking at pictures of women I thought were pretty, I cried about my attraction (when I say attraction, I mean my ability to find pretty women), wondering why she didn't come back, I started looking for stories similar to mine on the Internet. Anxiety gradually subsided but my attraction never returned. Since January I no longer have any anxiety (I think. I mean, I no longer have that knot in my stomach that I had before) but nothing has come back. I still look for stories similar to mine, I always hope that my attraction returns, I think every day about my attraction to missing girls... I guess they are compulsions and like all compulsions, I guess it doesn't help.


OCD is often anxiety, but its not limited to anxiety, the actual word used is distress.  Its clear this issue is causing you distress.  Just because you don't feel acute (knot in your stomach) anxiety over it does not mean that its not OCD, anxiety is not generally constant when it comes to OCD, it waxes and wanes, and our distress is felt in a variety of ways.  You are continuing to engage in compulsions, you are continuing to train your brain to teach that this topic is something to worry about, something to feel unnatural about.  The best way, perhaps the only way to get back to "normal" is to treat this as OCD, to accept that you don't feel how you want on attraction right NOW, but to go ahead and live your life anyway, to not focus on it.  Will your attraction ever come back and be normal?  Based on my experience, the answer is probably.  I have been in situations where I felt certain I would never get over my intrusive thought, where I'd never get back to feeling "normal" about something, but honestly I look back and I can't even recall what some of those worries even were now (I've been dealing with OCD for 25 years, a lot has happened in that time in my life after all!) 

So right now, the situation is you haven't been feeling attraction like you would in the past.  Maybe its temporary, maybe its permanent, there's really no way to know except wait and see.  Yeah that sucks, you'd like to be back to normal tomorrow, but you can live without feeling attraction, especially in the short term.  Like I said it will probably come back once you unlearn these bad OCD habits and ditch the compulsions.  But the harder you fight this, the harder you analyze/check/ruminate, the stronger the problem becomes.    Ideally you could wake up tomorrow and feel 100% better, never have another OCD worry again, that would be great for all of us.  Sadly the odds are that that won't happen.  So you have to do the next best thing, deal with the OCD as OCD and give yourself some time to recover.  The more you treat this as a temporary, not worth focusing on, problem, the better off you will be.

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Hello.

Thank you for your answer. That said, I don't understand how Maslow's pyramid of needs comes into play at the bottom. The attraction would have been "deactivated" if I had been subjected to strong anxiety. Anxiety would have caused all this, but here it's the other way around, the loss of attraction caused the anxiety.

11 hours ago, dksea said:

So right now, the situation is you haven't been feeling attraction like you would in the past.  Maybe its temporary, maybe its permanent, there's really no way to know except wait and see.  

It's been a long time since something made me spike. 
I hope it will come back, otherwise, I don't think I can survive, honestly. 
This is far too important to me. 

 

AlphaChipster

Edited by AlphaChipster
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14 hours ago, AlphaChipster said:

The attraction would have been "deactivated" if I had been subjected to strong anxiety. Anxiety would have caused all this, but here it's the other way around, the loss of attraction caused the anxiety.

I can see where you are coming from, but I think it still applies, the issue is not that the anxiety caused the loss of attraction so much as that it has caused it to persist.  You had an initial experience/thought/etc. where you perceived a loss of attraction.  That might have been temporary.  Its not at all abnormal for a person to experience differing levels of libido over time for example.  Perhaps you were at an ebb hormonally and as a result weren't feeling as interested sexually in women and the OCD caused you to overreact to that.  As a result you fell in to an OCD cycle that has kept your distress high and distorted your thinking in this area such that the effect is persisting.  What started out as a temporary chemical problem has developed into a deeper psychological one.  Had you not had the OCD event things would have naturally trended back towards the normal and you wouldn't have noticed.  Now, take this all with the caveat that its armchair psychology at best, I am by no means an expert on it, just floating a reasonable possibility for you to consider rather than focus on it being always like this and never changeable.
 

14 hours ago, AlphaChipster said:

It's been a long time since something made me spike. 
I hope it will come back, otherwise, I don't think I can survive, honestly. 
This is far too important to me. 

See, the reaction you are having the "I don't think I can survive" thoughts are what makes me think you are still experiencing significant anxiety/distress over this thats (sadly ironic) in keeping you from recovering.  You are stuck in a feedback loop of sorts, you feel distress because you don't feel attraction, and the distress in turn makes it harder for you to experience attraction, and the cycle continues.  Its a self fulfilling prophecy.  The way out is hard, you have to accept that you don't know whether this will change or not, but you also have to decide that unless/until it does you are going to stop obsessing over it.  Its like one of those Chinese finger traps, the harder you fight it the more stuck you become.  

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On 09/10/2019 at 05:05, dksea said:

See, the reaction you are having the "I don't think I can survive" thoughts are what makes me think you are still experiencing significant anxiety/distress over this thats (sadly ironic) in keeping you from recovering.  

If thinking about it everyday, wondering if it will come back everyday, hoping it will come back everyday and crying regularly because it didn't come back is anxiety, then I still have to be anxious, yeah.
 

I hope your right and it's a just a loop. I do not want want to live without this attraction.

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