I would have obsessed over other shit, but it would have saved me a half-decade of sleepless nights where I laid awake thinking, “What am I?” as if I were this AI robot who just gained sentience. Still, even if my psychiatrist had told me I could be bi, and encouraged me to explore my attraction to men, it wouldn't have cured my OCD. I just want to know which one it is, so I know who I should fuck and date." I remember being in my room one night, crying, and thinking to myself, “I don’t even care if I’m gay or straight. But then I’d love having sex with her, which seemed pretty fucking straight! I’d tell myself I was actually gay and simply deluding myself into thinking I liked this woman. So I figured, nope, not gay! But then I’d start to second guess myself. So I’d tell myself I was gay, and immediately, I’d get a crush on and start dating a woman. I’d also get blacked out and hook up with men, and that seemed very gay.
The thing is, I would get boners looking at hot dudes, and that seemed pretty gay. Throughout college, I constantly questioned my sexual orientation. Your brain can't rest until you've landed on a definitive answer. That kind of cognitive dissonance is a nightmare for people with OCD. I think I knew, somewhere deep, deep down, that I liked men and women, but my psychiatrist insisted I was straight. It consumed my every thought."Īfter my psych session, I was a wreck.
"Throughout college, I constantly questioned my sexual orientation. "They constantly are trying to prove their true sexuality or reduce their obsession with their perceived sexual orientation and their thoughts can spiral out of control to the point their OCD condition can become disabling." "They begin feeling internal pressure to choose a sexual orientation, and the more they worry about it, the worse the situation becomes," Kort says. That's the challenge of treating bi patients with OCD. People with SO-OCD "spend far too much time questioning their sexuality to the point where it can ruin their life and their family’s life," says Joe Kort, Ph.D., certified sex therapist and co-director of Modern Sex Therapy Institutes.īut in dismissing me the way he did, my psychiatrist not only made my OCD worse, but cut off the self-exploration that could have led to me to embrace my bisexuality way sooner. He must have thought I was experiencing sexual orientation OCD (SO-OCD), a subtype of OCD that is characterized by intrusive thoughts and compulsive behaviors around a person's sexual orientation. Looking back now, I see he was trying to prevent a spike in my obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which I was diagnosed with when I was about nine years old and had been treating with 200 mg of Zoloft daily, the max dose for children. "Bisexuality really doesn’t exist in men, and I don’t want you obsessing over this.” So I wanted to hear what the mental health expert had to say. I knew what bisexuality was for as long as I could remember-and thought it really did describe my attractions-but I had never met a single person who openly identified as bi. I took a deep breath and uttered the words: “I think I might be gay.” I was 16 years old and had been seeing him for nearly half my life. I had never said the words out loud, but I felt I could trust my psychiatrist. To read more about how bisexual people are disproportionately affected by mental illness compared to lesbians and gay men, visit the Human Rights Campaign. This story is part of our 2021 Bisexual Awareness Week coverage, which explores the intersection of bisexuality and mental health.