OCD
An unwanted sexual thought arrives about someone you'd never have those thoughts about and you don't trust your own mind anymore.
You’re with your child, your sibling, your friend. A sexual thought arrives that has no place there. You’re horrified. You try to push it out. It comes back. It comes back when you don’t want it to and you don’t know if you somehow want it. You’ve started avoiding being alone with the person the thought attached to. You’ve stopped trusting your own mind. You’ve considered telling someone and then realized that telling someone would mean they’d think you’re a danger.
The fact that the thought horrifies you is evidence about who you are. People who act on these thoughts don’t have the horror response.
The thoughts keep coming.
Educational, not diagnostic. Not a substitute for clinical assessment.
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You very likely came up in a household, a religion, or a culture where any sexual thought that fell outside a narrow line was treated as a moral catastrophe. You may have grown up with a parent who policed your thinking and you absorbed that thoughts and actions are equally damning. You may have lived through a stretch of your life where you were genuinely vulnerable to being misunderstood and you started monitoring your own mind to make sure you’d never give anyone reason to question you. You may have absorbed the lesson that being a good person required scrubbing your interior, and the scrubbing produced the very thoughts you were trying to avoid.
When you try not to think about something, you have to think about it to know what not to think about. The trying-not-to is the thinking-about. You learned that this category of thought requires suppression, which means flagging it, which means producing it.
This is sexual OCD, sometimes called POCD when the unwanted thoughts involve children. It is not the same as having those desires. The mechanism is the same as every other OCD subtype: an intolerable thought, a behavior you do to neutralize it, relief that trains the next thought.
The thoughts are not your character. The OCD has hijacked the most upsetting category of thought it could find.
If your intrusive thoughts are about violence rather than sex, see I have intrusive violent thoughts . If your worry is that you might be a bad person in general, see I have intrusive thoughts I’m a bad person .
Strategic therapy treats this as the OCD subtype it is, with the precision the content requires. The thought arrives and you don’t suppress it, don’t analyze it, and don’t avoid the person it attached to. The suppression has been the training. Without it the thought arrives less often and lands with less charge, and you stop being a stranger in your own mind.
The thoughts pass through. You go back to being in the room with the people the OCD tried to take from you.
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