The Cutprice Guignol

When it comes to sexuality-related OCD, how do the social and cultural messages we send about people’s self-identification serve to reinforce the obsessions and compulsions that define their mental illness?

Sexual orientation OCD is pretty much what it sounds like – the obsessions and compulsions of the disorder centre on the notion that your understanding of your sexuality is in someway flawed, and you must find some way to address that to put your mind at ease. Like any form obsessive-compulsive disorder takes, it’s a distinctly horrible, exhausting, and destabilizing mess that leaves you doing everything you can to try and make certain that what you believe about yourself is true, often in the most illogical and even downright harmful ways.

And it’s something that I dealt with for several years in my teens and early twenties, though I didn’t recognise it as OCD at the time (I was diagnosed a few years later, and it wasn’t until that point that I began to piece together exactly what had been going on with me during that period). While I’m not going to get into the specifics of what my intrusive thoughts and compulsions were during that time (for reasons I’ve chatted about a bit before), I can say that it was an awful period for my mental health and my sense of self alike. And, since I’ve been diagnosed and can understand what I went through during that time through the lens of mental illness, it’s struck me that sexuality is such fertile ground for the OCD-afflicted brain to latch on to for so many reasons – and that bisexual people are vulnerable to sexuality-focused OCD due to the cultural messaging that surrounds bisexuality.

Because, let’s be honest, sexuality is still one of those things that people have all sorts of opinions on, especially as it relates to morality – the absurd belief that a person’s sexuality serves as some sort of reflection of their decency as a human being persists and, despite cultural messaging surrounding those issues improving somewhat in the last decade or so, it’s still an all-too-easy target for OCD compulsions to latch on to. OCD often thrives on shame, and, when that shame is encouraged by the culture around you, it’s ripe ground for obsessions and compulsions around sexuality to thrive.

But what I really struggled with during the time that I dealt with sexual orientation OCD was the fact that so much of what I had grown up hearing about my sexuality as a bisexual woman was an almost direct reflection of the nonsense that OCD shoved into my brain to torment me with. I found myself consumed with worry that I was somehow wrong about being bisexual, performing endless compulsions, mental and physical, to try and make sense of my sexuality once and for all, to solve myself in a way I so desperately felt the need to. Bisexuality, for so long, has been seen as an identity for the indecisive – a veil people drape over their true intentions, whether those are to conceal a less “desirable” sexuality, to gain attention, to earn validation, to lie to partners or social groups, whatever it might be. I can’t count the number of times that I was told by people with a straight face that my bisexuality was a phase, a choice (and a wrong one at that), a confusion that I’d grow out of when I met a partner who would finally grant me the relief of knowing whether I was gay or straight.

And it was those doubts that echoed in my mind in the form of obsessive thoughts and the compulsions I used to try and block them out. It’s bad enough to have the inside of your head demanding constant proof that you are really the person you say you are. To then hear that constantly reinforced by both cultural messaging and the socially-sanctioned doubt people openly place on your sexuality was downright painful – if so many of the people I met seemed to think that I was hiding something, and even I seemed to think it, too, weren’t the chances on both of us being right?

While my physical reactions to partners of various genders gave me unequivocal proof of what I knew to be true, it wasn’t until I entered therapy for other reasons that I began to really understand the constant doubts I had as a symptom of this illness, not a reflection of some nefarious true self I was, for some reason, concealing beneath a veneer of bisexuality. My OCD has attached itself to various aspects of my life over the years – my health, my relationships, the safety of myself and people around me – but this was the only time that my anxieties were consistently reflected by the people around me as some kind of truth.

While I was eventually able to work through my issues with sexuality OCD via therapy and medication, it still galls me that it’s so normal to cast doubt on bisexual people’s self-identification. I know that the crossover between bisexuality (or any other non-mono-sexuality) and people with OCD or other compulsive disorders is likely pretty slim, but I would love to hear about your experiences with it if you fall into that overlap and feel comfortable sharing – hop into the comments below and let’s talk.

If you would like to read more about my experiences with OCD, you can check out my OCDiaries series here; if you’d like to support my blog, please consider supporting me on Patreon or dropping me a tip via my Support page.