Comment on a forum:
I’m not pretending to be an expert or anything, but I’ve been dealing with this for quite a while and I’m making decent progress with it.
After a bad sexual experience (my first since my porn addiction) I didn’t feel a lot of arousal with a woman as well (she was a lot older than me, like your experience) and I started thinking: “Maybe I am gay?” This was foolish, as I’m not sexually excited by men, nor do I have an intense urge to love or have sex with them, but the whole point of HOCD is to make you worry and obsess.
I developed a sort of “vagina arousal fear” if that makes sense? I was worried I didn’t like Vaginas anymore because of this encounter, I remember the first time I had sex with my girlfriend, I was terrified and worried, thinking “If I don’t like this, thats it, I’m gay.. Oh no!” this was brought on by HOCD and vanished very quickly with exposure to proper, loving sexual intercourse with her and looking back I can’t believe I even thought crazy things like that. Porn and weird anxeity can do backflips with your brain and make you believe all sorts of rubbish. Anxiety with a porn addiction will bounce from one thing to another to keep you self medicating, one day I might have HOCD, another social anxiety, another anxiety about whether my money got put into the bank properly, etc. The only real “fix” is to first quit porn for good and second to stop worrying about it.
I think-Personally, what happened to you was similar to me, you were nervous, anxious, technically forced into it and you just weren’t ready for it, so your brain registered the situation as “bad” because you were so nervous. But things do and will get better.
In the film “40 year old virgin” the main character tries numerous times to have sex throughout his life, but he’s always expecting it to go wrong and it does, it isn’t until he meets the films love interest-Who he can relax and be comfortable with when he’s actually finally able to have sex successfully, this is no different really, if you expect things to go wrong, they will, but if you keep positive and relax, you’ll be fine.
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