163. Overcoming Shameful Sexual Themes (HOCD/POCD)

We are smack dab in the middle of a themes and treatment series for OCD, and today is all about those themes that you don’t want to tell anyone, that you don’t want to talk about out loud, especially as a Christian. We’re talking about sexual themes. homosexual OCD, pedophilia OCD, which we may refer to in this episode as H OCD and P OCD, just because it makes it a little bit easier.

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you.

With practical tools for developing greater peace, we’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you.

So let’s dive right into today’s episode. Every once in a while when I’m talking with a potential new client, someone will ask me a question similar to, Is there any theme that you haven’t dealt with at this point? And I will be sure to list the various themes that I’ve worked with, including pedophilia OCD, because this is one that people don’t want to share right away.

It can be really embarrassing. They feel like they have a lot of stigma or shame surrounding it. And so I hope that this episode can help dispel some of that shame or stigma that you might be feeling if you’re dealing with a sexual OCD theme. We know that OCD hijacks things that you care about and gets really fixated on them.

If you really care about children or you have a desire to have children in the future, often pedophilia OCD can come on for women who are like desiring children in those childbearing years, or it can happen as women are pregnant. I’ve seen both of those situations. Of course, this theme is obviously not just limited to women. And the biggest thing here is being able to separate having these thoughts from yourself, who you are as a person, and from your true, actual desires and intentions. That’s so huge. What we see with POCD specifically is that it’s a distrust of internal sense data. You’re distrusting what you actually want, intend, and desire. The same is true for homosexual OCD. OCD doesn’t care that you might be married and fully attracted to your husband. It doesn’t care if you’ve only dated members of the opposite sex. It does not care if you have no intentions of following through any homosexual thoughts that you might have.

It is going to try to convince you that you have some secret inner desire for someone of the same sex, and this causes a high level of distress internally for you, a lot of anxiety. That’s why we call these thoughts ego dystonic, meaning They go against who you actually are as a person. We also know that OCD is highly selective.

There are many things that you probably really do trust your internal desires on. I was just working on some updated slides for our Christians Learning ICBT training, and I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to play a little bit of Would You Rather? Now, in the traditional sense, would you rather picks two different crazy things?

Usually you’d want neither of them, but somehow you have to choose. And it’s just a fun little game that people play, but let’s not play the wild and crazy version and just think about, would you rather have, like, if someone said you won an all expenses paid vacation and you can either go to the beach or the mountains. Which one would you choose? And how do you know that? There’s something inside of you that has a pull in one direction or another. If I told you, would you rather have a piece of pie or chocolate cake? My husband would choose the pie all day long, and I would choose the chocolate cake all day long. It’s an internal preference that we have.

Do you prefer summer or winter? Outside of the OCD, you’re in a logical reasoning process where you can take the sensory information externally and internally and put it together to know what you truly want and desire. What gets really confusing in sexual OCD themes is something called arousal non concordance.

Feel free to look it up, but it’s essentially where your body responds sexually to a situation that you don’t want it to respond sexually to, such as potentially when you’re looking at a child or when you’re looking at homosexual porn. Self testing some of these things is a compulsion. People get into a pattern with these themes of saying, okay, well, let me test this out and see if I really am homosexual, then I’ll get turned on by homosexual porn.

You may get aroused by a variety of different things, and that does not prove that you actually want or desire that sexual material. Sometimes just, Thinking about sex may cause you to have a physiological response, especially if you’re in a period of heightened anxiety. So you think about that. If you’re anxious because of the OCD, you’re already in a more aroused state.

I don’t mean sexually, I mean from a nervous system, blood flow response. Your heart may be beating a little bit faster. You’re maybe breathing a little bit more shallowly. It’s complicated because our bodies don’t always respond in the way that we want it to. There tends to be a lot of internal self checking as a compulsion that happens with these types of themes.

A lot of rumination, a lot of research, a lot of Google searches, and remember every time you engage in any of those compulsions, it just feeds back that obsessional loop to say, Oh, this is something that we need to act on. This is something we need to do something about. You might have other intrusive sexual images that come into your mind from past experiences with porn.

That’s something that I’ve seen many times, and it’s not just, like, I was seeking out pornography, it could have been something that you stumbled upon or were exposed to as a child or adolescent that got all of this internal stuff really triggered or fired up in some way. There can be immense amount of shame surrounding that, or if pornography addiction was a part of your past, there can be some shame around that as well.

Sometimes people will do certain internal compulsions, like say a certain prayer, try to shake their head a certain way to get rid of the thought. Try to think something positive, like a positive neutralization to the thought. Just know that all of those things are compulsions if that’s something that you’re going through internally.

We’re really trying to not do those things in response to those obsessions. And I know that that can be extremely difficult for you. If clients come to me and they’re using language like the bad thoughts, I really encourage them to reframe that. This is OCD, so we need to call it what it is. I know some people feel like, because of maybe past sexual history, or exposure to pornography, or just Something else in their past, they may feel like somehow they have caused this OCD to happen to them.

I don’t find that thought to be true or particularly helpful in these situations. What we do want to figure out is what’s the reasoning process, what’s the story, what are the reasons for the obsessional doubt, what’s the fuel? Something has gotten really stuck, and when we can figure out what OCD’s reasoning process is surrounding this, We can find cracks and holes in that reasoning process, finding the selectivity of that doubt, doubting the internal sense data, the desires.

And then you can feed your brain an alternative story, getting in touch with who you really are as a person and what you really want. I’ll just throw this out here that POCD does not disqualify you from being able to be a great mom or a great dad. Don’t allow OCD to tell you that these thoughts mean that you’re never going to be able to get married or find someone who will understand these obsessions that you’ve had.

You do not have to be disqualified from living the life that God has called you to live. He completely understands how your brain is working at this moment in time, and he loves you regardless, unconditionally. These themes are highly treatable with ICBT, though it is so important for you to know that there is hope out there.

As hard as it is to talk about these things, I really encourage you to find a therapist that you can trust. who can walk you through this process. And if you want to join us for the next round of Christians Learning ICBT, I hope that you’ll sign up for our waiting list at cariboc. com slash training. To receive weekly encouragement, find out about our monthly meet the podcast host zoom meetings, and receive information on exclusive sales, become an email insider today.

All you have to do is go to carriebock.com and scroll towards the bottom of the page. You’ll find a spot to put in your email and receive a free download in your inbox from us. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling.

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.